Tonight, after many hours of long work, the new design for Foodizu.com is now online.

There are still some finishing touches to do, but it is coming along quite nicely so far.

Foodizu.com has been a work in progress of mine for the past 6 months or so, and I've seen it grow from a small cooking site to a site with nearly 200 members and over 4,000 recipes.

So to build on this work in progress, I am pleased to talk about some new changes in the works.

First of all, foodizu is getting a major facelift, and you will see that coming shortly. It's a design that I've been working on for several months and happy with the result.

Second, some new features include the ability to add blog posts so you can write about your cooking experiences as well as adding your recipes.

The next new feature is that all users will receive a profile page that will list their recipes they have added, and blog posts they have made.

I am also almost finished the mobile version of foodizu, where you can find recipes from anywhere.

There are some other features in the works as well, but this seems like enough news for today.

Ok,

I know I skipped a week for the list posts, wasn't on purpose, was just really busy.

Anyhow, without further adieu, here you go:

1. Turn-By-Turn Directions with The Google Maps API
2. How to Track Your Reputation or a Keyword in Multiple Resources via One Unified Feed
3. 10 awesome things to do with cURL
4. Forty-Three of The Best Free Windows Enhancements That You Should Know About | freewaregenius.com
5. 9 Tips For Staying Sane While Working at Home With Distractions – FreelanceSwitch – The Freelance Blog
6. Use Whatever Font You Please On WordPress
7. 130 Creative Photos by Markku Landesmaki » AcidCow.com – videos, pictures, celebs, flash games
8. Track Mouse Activities With JS And PHP: (smt)
9. 45 Incredibly Useful Web Design Checklists and Questionnaires | Developer's Toolbox | Smashing Magazine
10. 53 Jquery Tutorials, Resources, Tips And Tricks: Ultimate Collection | 1stwebdesigner – Love In Design
11. 15 Must Read Articles for CSS Beginners
12. 30+ Useful Resources for Improving Your Photoshop Efficiency – Psdtuts+
13. 45 Stylish and Creative Typographical Desktop Wallpapers : Speckyboy Design Magazine
14. 30 Custom 404 Designs | SherifAbdou – The Design Blog
15. An Event Apart: Boston – Retrospective | Gatorworks | Baton Rouge Web Design & Development
16. 50 Free Resources That Will Improve Your Writing Skills | Developer's Toolbox | Smashing Magazine
17. 30 Exceptional Web Designs – Nettuts+
18. 99 Amazing Widescreen Wallpapers To Spice Up Your Desktop | Showcases | instantShift
19. Print Design Articles, Tutorials and Resources June 2009 - Creattica Daily
20. The “Light” CMS Trend | CSS-Tricks
21. Free Vector Doodles – Women’s Clothing & Fashion
22. 7 Simple Tips for Effectively Marketing Your Blog on Twitter
23. Highlighter — A MooTools Search & Highlight Plugin
24. LBOI Design Blog » The Biggest Design Trend Predictions For 2010
25. How to Draw A Realistic Vector Light Bulb From Scratch – Vectortuts+
26. YouTube – Worlds Biggest Alarm Clock
27. 12 Essential Rules to Follow When Designing a Logo | Webdesigner Depot
28. 150+ killer SEO tips | Blog | Econsultancy
29. 13 Free Content Management Systems other than Wordpress | Coding Cow
30. CSS3 . Info – All you ever needed to know about CSS3
31. Kid Swaps iPod For Sony Walkman, Gets A Culture Shock
32. Interview with the Founder of Envato, Collis Ta’eed – Psdtuts+

Last week, ThemeForest introduced 2 new categories Javascript and PHP Scripts.

I thought about it and figured why not, so I added 4 scripts to the marketplace (3 to PHP, 1 to javascript).

So far, it's been working out well, feedNews has sold quite a few copies, and the Shorter URL site and googlecharts plugin for PHP are doing decent as well. The new javascript google chart library has been picking up in sales, so far themeforest is working well for script sales.

I'm in the process of redoing some aspects of my food site, foodizu.com, it's a slow process but one of the things I am addressing is speed. I looked into some CSS compression ideas, but I wanted one script that would read a CSS or a javascript file and automatically strip any white spaces out, and return a more compressed CSS file.

First, we create a file called csszip.php:

<?php
ob_start ("ob_gzhandler");
if( isset($_REQUEST['file']) ){
$file = $_REQUEST['file'];
if( goodfile($file) ){
$ext = end(explode(".", $file));
switch($ext){
case 'css':$contenttype = 'css';break;
case 'js':$contenttype = 'javascript';break;
default:die();break;
}
header('Content-type: text/'.$contenttype.'; charset: UTF-8');
header ("cache-control: must-revalidate");
$offset = 60 * 60;
$expire = "expires: " . gmdate ("D, d M Y H:i:s", time() + $offset) . " GMT";
header ($expire);
$data = file_get_contents($file);
$data = compress($data);
echo $data;
}
}
exit;
function goodfile($file){
$invalidChars=array("\\","\"",";",">","<",".php");
$file=str_replace($invalidChars,"",$file);
if( file_exists($file) ) return true;
return false;
}
function compress($buffer) {
$buffer = preg_replace('!/\*[^*]*\*+([^/][^*]*\*+)*/!', '', $buffer);
$buffer = str_replace(array("\r\n", "\r", "\n", "\t", '  ', '    ', '    '), '', $buffer);
return $buffer;
}

This file will take anything passed via the file argument and compress it.

Next, we want to make this process automatic, so we open up .htaccess and add this line:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*).css$ /csszip.php?file=$1.css [L]

Obviously, if you already have a RerwriteEngine On line, then you can leave it out and place the RewriteRule on the line directly below it.

This will tell the website to compress any css file you attempt to load.

You can also have this work on javascript files by adding:

RewriteRule ^(.*).js$ /csszip.php?file=$1.js [L]

This will load and compress any javascript file as well.

This method works well for reducing your bandwidth usage and cutting back on page load time, which are always nice bonuses.

1. Coda Slider and more with jquery tools - In the Woods (Useful tips for the recently released jquery tools library)
2. Mozilla Prism (prism is an interesting prototype application that lets users split web applications out of their browser and run them directly on their desktop.)
3. Compender: Dynamic Facebook Buttons and Links for Blogger Templates - Redux (Good post for blogger users, pre-formatted facebook 'share' links. the picky blogger formatting will accept these easily)
4. 15 benefits to working as a full time freelancer | Guerrilla Freelancing (Another excellent freelancing post for people thinking about freelancing, this one on a more positive note)
5. 32 online tools that can help your tech freelancing career | View from the Cubicle | TechRepublic.com(More great webtools for freelancers)
6. Tell Us Your WordPress Story and Win More Than $3000 Worth of Prizes | WPWebHost (Awesome Contest - Tell your WP story and win big!)
7. Dailytonic - Your daily Inspiration in Architecture and Design (Freaking awesome architecture and design stuff here)
8. Why Designers Should Learn How to Code (great read for designers.)
9. jQuery Inline Form Validation Engine | Web Resources | WebAppers (cool jquery form validator)
10. Secure Your Forms With Form Keys - Nettuts+ (excellent read for people who use forms a lot)
11. 4 Nice way to Convert HTML to PDF Online | TutorialFeed (quick and easy ways to convert html to pdf)
12. WordPress 2.8 Resources For Developers | W3Avenue (Awesome 2.8 Resources for Wordpress)
13. Symbols & Special Characters (Quick way to access a chart for special characters that can be used in Photoshop on Windows)
14. Top 100 Mac Apps | Chris Pirillo (Awesome list of Mac apps!)
15. Twitter Launches Verified Accounts (Cool! Get a verified account to ensure that you are the real YOU!)
16. Outlaw Design Blog » My Experience with Passive Income (Excellent video with advice about Designers and Passive Income)
17. 80 Creative Ways to Customize Your MacBook | Webdesigner Depot (Awesome Macbook Customizations!!)
18. 13 Most Important Things to do When Changing the Wordpress Theme  - Technically Personal! (Great reminder of things to do when changing wordpress themes)
19. 15 Creatively Cut Business Cards | Web Design Ledger (SWEET Business Cards - Creatively Cut)
20. High Resolution Photoshop Smoke Brush Set | Creative Nerds (Freaking awesome Smoke Brushes!!)
21. ProofHQ Review | Inspiredology (Cool Review of a Design Collaboration web app)

I'm going to show you a small but useful function that is handy to keep in your toolbox today, it's called mysql_get_var.

This function lets you run a SQL query, and only return the variable you choose.

Here's the function:

function mysql_get_var($query,$y=0){
	$res = mysql_query($query);
	$row = mysql_fetch_array($res);
	mysql_free_result($res);
	$rec = $row[$y];
	return $rec;
}

Now, let's talk about what it does.

When you call this function, like for example here:

$name = mysql_get_var("SELECT name from people where email = 'roger@freekrai.net'");

You will return the name field, so what gets returned will be "Roger" (if that was my name in the database).

Now, you may notice that this function had a second argument called $y, this is so that you can choose which variable to return when your query has multiple fields:

$city = mysql_get_var("SELECT name,address,city from people where email = 'roger@freekrai.net'",2);

In the example above, I told it to return the 2nd argument, which due to PHP starting off arrays with a 0, would actually be the 3rd argument, so it returns the city of the person selected.

This function is only for returning 1 field from 1 row to a time, so if there are more rows, this wouldn't be as useful, but it does work well for grabbing say a user's name everytime they log in, or some similar function.

Today I'm pleased to announce the release of FeedNews. FeedNews is a stand-alone pro version of newsPage.

I've added a backend so you can set up topics and feeds for each topic, and you can also choose to make a feed display as a wide feed, this allows the display of thumbnails on feeds that have thumbnails included.

You can specify feeds to display on the homepage, or let the script create an index of topics instead.

Topics are automatically handled as seperate pages, and you can also specify which topics will show feeds on the main page. Fully template driven, easy to maintain and change via the backend. Each topic also features it's own RSS feed, which takes the feeds for that topic and creates one unified feed to display on other sites.

Other features to come soon include an ad system, and the ability to use google blog search to locate feeds.

The script is for sale for $5.00, and includes updates and support.

View a Demo here View More info here