RD2 wanted to add something special with our 3rd iteration of building the World Traveler Internship website. We created a very unique feature within the application process...
PHP Weather widget using Google’s weather API
May 17 2012
UPDATE 08/28/2012
Google has abandoned their weather API and are now using wunderground.com Weather API. I will be creating a new tutorial showing the API in action very soon. Check back to the RD2 blog for updates. Please disregard the below code.
With the recent launch of the Elbowz Racing team website, we decided to add something a little bit fun, but still applicable, into the project: a self-maintaining weather widget using Google’s weather API and PHP...
Detecting the Kindle Fire with PHP
Mar 8 2012
There are many reasons to detect the type of platform your user is viewing your website on. There are articles all over the internet about detecting iphones, ipads, android devices, etc. But when it comes to detecting the Kindle Fire, things can get a bit strange. To get the user’s platform, you will want to use the PHP method, $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] (see below).
This will return: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_3; en-us; Silk/1.1.0-80) AppleWebKit/533.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0 Safari/533.16 Silk-Accelerated=true
As you can see, there are mentions of Mozilla, Apple, WebKit, Safari, etc...
I promise, I’m not a robot.
May 1 2008
In attempting to reset a password in Google Analytics yesterday, I came across the following CAPTCHA images (those images of warped letters you have to make out to prove you’re not a computer, spider, or robot of some kind).
All I can say is… WTF?
I ended up forgoing the task and using the audio option (for the visually impaired)...
Developing Content for iPhone’s Mobile Safari
Jul 8 2007
Analysts are estimating that Apple has sold 700,000 iPhones in the U.S. According to Nielsen//NetRatings, there were about 209 million U.S. Internet users as of March/07, 69.2% of the nation’s population. Making the reasonable assumption that the 700,000 iPhones sold were to people who already regularly use the Internet, that means 0.25% of Internet users in the U.S. will occasionally be using the Mobile Safari browser on their iPhones to visit your web presence, and that’s after the first four days of sales...
Blake, You Are So Money!
Aug 28 2006
Atta Boy, Blake. You have attracted the attention of WaSP and they posted a nice interview with you. LOVE IT!
“As a student of Interactive Media Design at the Art Institute of Dallas, Texas, Blake Elshire learned CSS as part of his course, then discovered that not all students were quite as charmed by the technology as he was. He shares his thoughts and insights with WaSP EduTF.
At the time of year where many schools are starting a new term, some teachers are still demanding archaic Web practices as part of their syllabi. Whether Web standards is taught at educational institutions is an issue that is no longer new. And yet, it is not uncommon for a student to be penalized for using modern Web techniques...
The Eolas Wars
May 24 2006
Recently, Microsoft changed the way Flash and anything else that uses
I paid attention to this case closely...
Type is Beautiful Too
Apr 24 2006
Have you ever witnessed someone surfing the web with images turned off? There’s a setting to let you surf the web with images turned off, at least, last I checked (about five years ago). Even years ago, I would notice friends and acquaintances who would do just that. As if to create a more scannable and easy to understand web experience. From a design perspective, I was just shocked…
I was just totally perplexed! What if the entire world just started to surf the web like this? From a usability perspective, I had to analytically understand what must be going on in the mind of the user to go through the trouble to dig into the preferences to turn off those images...