The misconception of “free internet”

Posted: 2nd April 2013 by admin in Ranting&Raving

Or: is Google really bad? Is Facebook? The successor of the medival ages´ witch hunt is up, make sure you don´t miss it! Information technology´s giants, like Google or Facebook, are about to be burned at the stake for gathering information about your preferences, analyzing your habits on the Net, and selling those profiles for [...]

I recently came across 4 very nice jQuery plugins for slide shows and galleries. Actually, I found a lot more, but those are my favorites: Nivo Slider (slideshow) jqFancyTransitions (slideshow) jQuery Cycle Plugin (slideshow) Fancybox (gallery zoom) I decided on Nivo Slider for a new project (www.gaastra-store-fehmarn.de), simply because it offers beautiful captions with links [...]

As my favorite Zend Framework guru Padraic Brady pointet out on his blog, most forms are just about an invitation for hackers and other subversive folks to (ab)use your forms, and PHPs “addslashes” or “striptags” just don´t get the job of protecting your site done. It is one thing to assume everybody is just nice, [...]

In the last artice, we have already set some basic decorators for Zend_Form. The next one is a decorator for the label, appending an asterisk (*) to labels of required fields, and display error messages below the label instead of the field. In your “Form” subfolder, create a folder “Decorator”, and in it, a file [...]

Managing Zend_Form in both MVC and no-MVC environments has a huge advantage, since Zend Framework comes with a load of decorators (HTML to display form fields), validators (functions to check user input) and filters (functions to filter user input). If you look for an easy way to handle all kinds of user input thru forms, [...]

When using maps on a website, Google is clearly the service to go with. If you are using JavaScript only, parsing a JSON response from Google shouldn´t be difficult, but how to use the response in PHP? In this article, I´ll describe how to use Zend Framework components, but with a link to How-To´s with [...]

I just spent about 2 days to convert my old MySQL database from latin1 / latin1_general_ci to UTF-8 character encoding. There are about a gazillion pitfalls, especially when you work on old PHP code mixed with ZF code, on a live site of a client. The first tip is… do NOT work on a live [...]

The jQuery JavaScript is up and running, but needs a PHP file to handle the Ajax data submitted by the rating script. This will be done with PHP in the receiver you defined in your JavaScript, named “rating.php” in the “public/includes” folder. It’s important to put this PHP file in your public folder, because if [...]

Now for the easy part: creating the page for our jQuery Star Rating plugin. It’s going to be just a bit of HTML, JavaScript with Ajax components, and PHP. If you want to integrate the Star Rating in an existing page, you can just copy the relevant parts into any HTML file. The JavaScript Before [...]

For this article, you should be familiar with at least the basics of Zend Framework, especially naming conventions. If not, check out the ZF site for beginners tutorials and/or Quickstart. If you don’t want to use ZF at all, but still need the Star Rating with PHP and Ajax, you can skip ahead to the [...]