Blog

Creating an App from Scratch: Part 2

Part 2 of the Creating an App from Scratch series, in which Chris Coyier and Jason Lengstorf cover, in great detail, the planning, design, building, and testing of an AJAX-powered web application based on PHP/MySQL.

JSON: What It Is, How It Works, & How to Use It

This article will cover the following: What is JSON, why does it matter, and how do we use JSON in a project? We’ll also use our newfound skills with JSON at the end of this project to build a quick app that loads photos from Flickr without requiring a page refresh.

Easily Create External Links Without the Target Attribute

I’m a big fan of keeping sites valid in XHTML 1.0 Strict. When I first started paying attention to standards, one of the things that stumped me right off the bat was the use of external links. This tip shows you how to use jQuery to keep your code valid AND have links open externally.

Optimizing MySQL Queries with JOINs

This week, I wanted to share some of my recent experiments with MySQL queries in regard to lowering the number of requests sent to the database server and, hopefully, avoiding the bottleneck that can form on sites that rely heavily on database interaction.

Reading RSS with PHP

In this tutorial, we’ll use SimpleXML and a custom PHP class to load and parse a user’s Flickr RSS feed, isolate the pieces of information we need, and output the data as HTML.