Richard Parnaby-King

Web Developer – PHP, Zend Framework and Actionscript 3

CSS External Link Images

Posted on | December 20, 2012 | 1 Comment

Some websites with external links have a small image or icon to indicate that the link will lead them to an external webpage. Here is a simple CSS trick to show an html entity indicating an external link:

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Faux-Overlay

Posted on | October 10, 2012 | No Comments

In a previous post I demonstrated a CSS Only Image Zoom. In this post I will explain how to do a CSS only overlay using the CSS3 box-shadow effect to focus the users’ attention onto the element being hovered on.
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Speed up your website with these htaccess rules

Posted on | July 23, 2012 | 1 Comment

As a web developer we should all know that Google now takes site load time into consideration when determining the position of a website in their results pages.

There are plenty of things to do during development to speed up a website (front-end caching, database caching, css sprite sheets, minifying javascript and css files, the list goes on), but the easiest optimisation is to include the following lines into your .htaccess file.

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Zend Framework Custom View Helper to add Default Meta Content

Posted on | July 17, 2012 | 2 Comments

Meta keywords and description used to be used by search engines to help work out what your website is about. Nowadays they are used to web applications to work out how to describe a specific page (for example, paste a link into Google+ and the meta description of the page will be fetched and shown). If you are writing a CMS that allows the user to populate the meta keywords and description of a page, but the user does not fill these fields, then it is nice to have a default value.

This post will share a custom View Helper that will check for your application adding empty meta details, and if there are, populating the values with default values from the application config.ini file.
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CSS Only Image Zoom

Posted on | July 12, 2012 | No Comments

This is a nice simple effect that is used on a damned lot of websites: The image zoom!


Screenshot

Basically, move your mouse over the image to see a larger image.

There are two approaches to this:

  • Have two images – one small, one large – and hide the large image the user hovers over it
  • Have one large image, use CSS to make it appear smaller, and show the full size image when the user hovers over it

In this post, we will investigate the first method.
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Pseudo classes :before and :after in IE6-7

Posted on | July 5, 2012 | 3 Comments

The pseudo classes :before and :after are CSS selectors that allow developers to prepend and append content and/or extra styling to elements. Unfortunately, these selectors are not available in Internet Explorer versions 6 and 7. There are a number of javascript fixes that will force IE6 and IE7 to enable the pseudo classes (such as https://code.google.com/p/ie7-js/), however these can be slow to download and, with the crappy JavaScript engines these browsers have, be slow to implement the fixes required to make them compliant browsers.

Fortunately, there is an alternative.
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HTML Nandos

Posted on | June 5, 2012 | No Comments

Have just spent 3 weeks in Cyprus as a belated honeymoon with my wife (who else do you go on honeymoon with, d’uh) and driving around we saw this:

Track pages that do not exist with Google Analytics

Posted on | May 3, 2012 | No Comments

Using Google Analytics it is possible to track pages as though a user had visited it, even if the page does not exist. This is useful for, for example, ajax form submissions – instead of redirecting to a thank-you page, you can leave the user on the same page and track a custom page (that does not exist) in Google Analytics.
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What is the Zend Framework?

Posted on | April 27, 2012 | 2 Comments

It is fairly common for me to read or hear of developers referring to the Zend Framework as ‘Zend’. Such as ‘what is zend?’, ‘why is zend doing x?’ and ‘how do I make zend do y?’. This post will hopefully explain the difference between Zend and the Zend Framework.
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Create an AS3 Flash “Click the Balloons” Game

Posted on | April 25, 2012 | 10 Comments

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to create a simple point and click game. The objective is simple: Do not let any balloons go over the top of the screen!
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  • ABOUT

    Having fifteen years of programming experience in PHP, Zend Framework and ActionScript3, I have a very strong working knowledge of object orientated programming.

    I am a PC Gamer! Playing FPS, RTS, RPG and the occasional MMO since 1996 I have a huge number of a variety of fast-paced games.

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