Foodizu.com, new design online
Jul
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.
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:
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=$1.js [L]
This will load and compress any javascript file as well.
This method works well for reducing your bandwidth usage and cutting back on page load time, which are always nice bonuses.
I'm going to show you a small but useful function that is handy to keep in your toolbox today, it's called mysql_get_var.
This function lets you run a SQL query, and only return the variable you choose.
Here's the function:
function mysql_get_var($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.