Ziggaza's Blog

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The Farbtastic colour picker is really easy to implement. Its great if your building a customisable interface for an online product in the same way that you can manipulate the design of your Twitter profile. Farbtastic uses layered transparent PNGs to render a saturation/luminance gradient inside of a hue circle. more info on the colour picker can be found here You need to include jQuery, farbtastic.js, and style sheet all of which are in the download below. More

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There are some great JavaScript graph libraries out there and one that’s recently come to my attention is Highcharts.com which is compatible with both the jQuery and Mootools frameworks. To get started point your browser here where you can download all the files you need including examples. Highcharts features include slick tooltips to reference points on your charts, it’s compatible with all standard web browsers, the setup for a graph as demonstrated below is simple and uses the JSON data type, there are also multiple types of graph type, from line, spline, area, areaspline, column, bar, pie and scatter chart.

View Demo | Tutorial

View Demo | Download

Here’s how to use PHP CURL and the TinyURL api to generate tiny urls on the fly. This is a similar tutorial to the one I wrote a while back on using the Twitter API

I’ve set the variable $maketiny as the url that you want to shorten. This then gets passed into the function and processed with CURL. CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER returns the value of curl_exec($ch); as a string and doesn’t just display it on the screen allowing us to process the data further. More

When we write code we love to format it nicely adding tabs, line breaks and indentations, but the end user isn’t interested in how lovely the source code is, they just want the page content, so this script strips out all the line breaks and spaces in your code and puts it on one line, compressing your code and making it faster. More

What’s Memcached?

So your reading this wondering what I’m talking about. Memcache is basically is a generalpurpose distributed memory caching system, put that in English, it allows you to store any form of data in a ‘temporary cache’ so wherever you go to do a database query, instead of just connecting to the database and getting the data we want we first check the memcache to see if our data is already stored. If the memcache returns nothing, then go to the database, get what you’re looking for, then store it in the memcache for later:

There are five main functions that we use with Memcache and they are as follows:

• get() – gets the value for a specified key
• set() – sets a given key with a given value
• add() – adds to the cache, only if it doesn’t already exist
• replace() – sets in the cache only if the key already exists
• flush() – removes all keys and cached data

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