The beauty of web designing comes with a bit of javascript and mainly css. I mean for me personally, I can’t think of a way to build a website without css. So how can you speed up the load time of your website but still use javascript libraries and css? The answer is quite simple. I found a script from Aciddrop, it can give you great results. All you do is add three lines of code and there you have it! A faster loading webpage.

So how does it do that? Well, say for example, if you have 6 javascript files it would be much quicker for you to join all the JavaScript together into one file and serve that instead. You can decrease the loading time further by minify your JavaScript, CSS and HTML. And also, by gzipping your page’s components and adding a far-future expires header can make your pages load faster as well.

Doing all these adjustments manually would take some time so using the script by AcidDrop might speed up things. On the test page the load time with the compressor turned on was generally below a second, and without the compressor between 3-5 seconds. The Yahoo Yslow rating went from F(45) to A(97) as well.

Programming Collective Intelligence Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications

Written by Toby Segaran

Want to tap the power behind search rankings, product recommendations, social bookmarking, and online matchmaking? This fascinating book demonstrates how you can build Web 2.0 applications to mine the enormous amount of data created by people on the Internet. With the sophisticated algorithms in this book, you can write smart programs to access interesting data sets from other web sites, collect data from users of your own applications, and analyze and understand the data once you’ve found it. Programming Collective Intelligence takes you into the world of machine learning and statistics, and explains how to draw conclusions about user experience, marketing, personal tastes, and human behavior in general.

I think this book may probably be the best for those of whom have read the theory part, but not entirely sure on how to turn that theory knowledge into something useful. Or those of you of that want to know how machine learning can be applied to the web.

In each of this books chapters, the author takes a type of capability to the book. Whether its for example: a “decision making program” or “filtering program”, and shows how a language can be used to build that feature. All his examples are in Python however, so it does help if you are indeed familiar with that language if you want to use the book examples. But I’m sure in other languages the same basic concepts apply. Even if you don’t know any Python, the examples used in this book are clear and detailed enough so that you can get a fair idea of whats happening throughout. As with many of these programming books it does help if you have a background in mathematics and statistics. In this book you can still use the code here without having a detailed understanding of maths but it does of course help.

If I had the time to read all of “Programming Intelligence” I would certainly do so. To some this book would look slightly boring and a little bit wordy, however to others it would be a book that can really get you on the right track for building smart Web 2.0 websites/applications. It is a very detailed book that includes a variety of interesting topics and ideas that any novice programmer would find interesting, I certainly would at least.

Have you heard/read of this book? Comment! and share your opinions/ideas~!

Buy the Book

I have seen that many people love wordpress theme so i am realeasing another minimal theme just like Web 2.0 Blue. It is simple, easy, flexible and has very attractive use of web 2.0 colors. You can edit the theme according to your need through css or some hard coding through theme files. It is a 2 column theme, supports widgets and is compatible with wordpress 2.2+. Tested on Wordpress 2.6 and it is working well. By this is an inspirational theme of Simpla.

Demo of the Theme!

Download the current version! (29kb)

If you have any trouble with anything, please leave your comment and i will do my best to help  you out. Please digg it if you can!

Versions:

0.1 - Initial Release

Enjoy!

Although i personally don’t use this plugin, i do know people who do. It is a great plugin for people who put advertisements on their wordpress blogs. This plugin allow you to choose on which users shouldn’t see the advertisment.

Features

• Don’t show adverts to your friends. They are the people who visit your blog and leave comments. They’re not going to click the ads anyway.
• Position matters. Right underneath the post title and above the content is the best place on a blog to put an advert.
• Go as wide as you can.
• Experiment with ad colours, borders and sizes. Don’t accept the Google defaults. Blend your ads or make them stick out. It all depends on your blog.

Since then I’ve developed my ad serving strategies further:

• I love when people comment, and I’m honoured when people subscribe to my blog. Therefore I won’t show my RSS or email readers adverts. If you like what I do enough to subscribe I won’t burden you with advertising. You’re my friend.
• Don’t show adverts on the homepage.
• Adsense Injection is great for putting adverts directly into posts.
• Monetize your archive. Any post older than a month gets adverts.
• Don’t show adverts to Digg, Delicious and Stumbleupon visitors.
• Identify where most of your “just passing through” traffic is coming from and show them adverts, except for social bookmarking websites of course.
• If my blog showed you adverts, I’ll tell you “Don’t like adverts? Leave a comment and they disappear.” below the comments form. At least one person has commented favourably about that.
• Fill the competitive ad filter with low paying URLs. If you’re still showing ads from helium.com then you’re missing out. If your daily eCPM isn’t at least $5 you’re not making the most of your advertising. Subscribe to notspam.org to see which MFA and low paying sites go into my competitive ad filter. I’ll talk about the competitive ad filter in more detail in a future post.
• Set an hour long cookie for users from search engines. Blogs have a notoriously low attention span for most visitors but if they click to the front page, show them a few more ads.
• I use Kontera too but the returns from that have been very disappointing. One of my posts has an AuctionAds unit in it. You’ll see that no matter what because I’m testing it for a few weeks and the post in question is almost always only hit by visitors from Google.

The No Adverts for Friends API:

• is_regular_user() - returns true if the visitor has left a comment or is logged into your blog.
• is_whitelisted_site( $url ) - returns true if $url is in a pre-defined list of friend sites like Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon.
• is_old_post() - returns true if the current post is over a month old.
• is_searchengine_user() - if a user comes from one of the listed search engines or this is an old post return true.

Each of the API calls depends on the one before it returning a favourable value. For example, is_old_post() won’t return true if is_regular_user() returned true, no matter how old the post is.

Example usage:
<?php if( is_searchengine_user() == false ) { echo "Google adsense code goes here"; }?>
Edit single.php in your current theme and add that code somewhere within the loop. Now either visit an old page on your blog or use a Google search query to bring you to your blog. Hopefully you’ll see the text “Google adsense code goes here”. Replace this text with the Google Adsense Javascript.

Download from the Official Site!

Part disturbing, part humour, this is a built-overnight, fun “Web 2.0 Awareness Test” based on a combination of CSS and Javascript which allows a site to programmatically determine if a link has been visited before.

I was inspired by an e-mail I got which mentioned the idea, and went to build an example that would be light and humorous.

General privacy disclaimer: Your link “history” is not being logged or saved here, but if you’re concerned about privacy in general on the web, I’d be worried about a lot more than just Javascript. ;)

Also, this only checks the root of each site (ie. example.com or www.example.com) - so it won’t be terribly accurate.

Technique

CSS’ visited: pseudo-class can assign a particular style attribute which can be detected by Javascript.

A random number of prominent Web 2.0 sites and services (read: bookmarks, and ones off the top of my head) were picked and thrown in a list - your score will be determined based on which ones you appear to have visited.

Isn’t this Evil?

Somewhat regrettably, technology can always be used for good or evil. It’s a wild world wide web - walk carefully and carry a well-configured .. firewall .. or something.

To be clear, this is not a new technique; it was probably first done in 2000, perhaps earlier.

You can view that website over here!

What was your score? 

Official Website

What is it?

Ajax IM (”asynchronous javascript and xml instant messenger”) is a browser-based instant messaging client. It uses AJAX to create a near real-time IM environment that can be used in conjunction with community, intranet, and social websites. No refreshing of the page is ever needed for this “web application” to work, as everything is updated in real-time via JavaScript.

You can see a demo here now!

How it Works?

The XMLHTTPRequest object allows HTTP requests to be sent to the server and get input back from the server. There are two parts to the client-server interaction through this object:

1. The client “pings” the server (a PHP script) for new messages. The server in turn queries a database for any messages for the client, and returns them as JSON. The XMLHTTPRequest object passes this JSON text be parsed by the rest of the JavaScript.
2. The client sends data to the server (a PHP script), such as a new message to another user. This data is then processed by the server (”cleaning” the data of any thing invalid) and put into the database, which is later “pinged” by another client.

Official Website

This highly intelligent robot will answer almost any question you throw at him. It is quite funny because when you ask him certain question, he answers them in a funny way.

Me: hi are you really god

God: Hi there .  Yes, I am God.. Really.

Me: you are joking

God: Yes.  Of course it was a joke.  Don’t mind me.

You can talk to him a lot more than i did. If you ever feel bored feel free to swear at this robot or just talk to him about random stuff.

What did you guys talk about, post it down here?

.htaccess files do a lovely job when it come to security. They do exactly what the name implies: control access to your files.

A great thing about .htaccess file is if you place them in a directory, the conditions and permissions you set up affect all subfolders of that folder. So, if you want to protect all your images, just drop a single .htaccess file in your main images directory, and all sub-folders are taken care of.

Here’s the code that I’m using for my .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://YOURSITE.COM/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://WWW.YOURSITE.COM/.*$ [NC]
ReWriteRule .*\.(gif|jpg)$ - [N,F,L]

It’s a good idea to do for both “yoursite.com” and “www.yoursite.com”. Also, if you know of any other sites that you want to allow to use your images, be sure to add them in this file.

If the http-referer doesn’t match one of the strings you’ve provided in those lines, the image request will result in a 403 error.

To use this code on your site:

Make sure you can see hidden files (files beginning with a “.”) with your FTP client. (It’s really hard to edit or delete files you can’t see.) Paste these lines into a blank text document, save it as .htaccess, and upload it to your images directory.

Have you done this? How did it go?