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Here you’ll find articles about website development, WordPress, and other topics that I’m interested in. I hope you enjoy them and find them useful. Comments and feedback are always welcome!

Counting PHP Array Elements Using count()

6 May 2010 / Leave a Comment

Often it’s useful to know how many elements an array contains. Here are some common reasons for counting the number of elements in an array:

You can then use a for loop to move through the elements
You can display the total number of elements to the user (such as the number of search results returned)
You can calculate the average of the values in the array (in conjunction with array_sum())

PHP makes it easy to count array elements, thanks to its built-in count() function. In this tutorial you’ll learn how to use count() to count the elements in both regular and multidimensional arrays, and how to move through all the elements of an indexed array by using count() and a for loop.

10 Fantastic Free Web Page Editors

4 May 2010 / 9 Comments

Every Web designer and coder needs a Web page editor to create and edit HTML, CSS and JavaScript code. Notepad (Windows) and TextEdit (Mac) are fine when you’re starting out, but you’ll soon want to graduate to something a bit more substantial.

There are hundreds of excellent editors to choose from — many of them paid — but what if you’re a coder on a budget? In this article I’ll take a look at some great free options out there.

Manipulating Element Attributes with jQuery

19 April 2010 / Leave a Comment

In Accessing Element Content with jQuery, you learned how to use jQuery to read and change the contents of HTML elements. This tutorial concentrates on reading and changing element attributes.

Working with Smart Objects in Photoshop

14 April 2010 / Leave a Comment

Smart Objects are an often-overlooked, yet handy feature of Photoshop. Introduced in CS2, Smart Objects let you store all kinds of different image content within a single, layer-like object. A Smart Object can store:

Any number of Photoshop layers, including bitmap, type, shape, adjustment, and fill layers
Vector artwork created in Illustrator
An imported image file, including JPEGs, TIFFs, Illustrator files, and even PSD files

In effect, a Smart Object is like having a separate Photoshop or Illustrator document encapsulated in a layer.

Smart Objects sit in the Layers panel just like regular layers. In fact, you can treat a Smart Object much like a bitmap layer — for example, you can move it, resize it, apply layer effects to it, and so on.

When you want to edit the Smart Object’s original content, you just double-click the Smart Object’s thumbnail to open the embedded “document”, make your changes to the document in a separate window, and save. The Smart Object then updates to reflect your edits.

In this tutorial, you’ll look at:

The benefits of Smart Objects
Creating Smart Objects
Editing Smart Objects
Duplicating Smart Objects
Converting Smart Objects to regular layers

Extracting Elements from PHP Arrays with array_slice()

30 March 2010 / Leave a Comment

In Working With Array Elements in PHP, you saw how to read and change individual elements within a PHP array. However, sometimes it’s useful to work with a range of array elements. For example, you may want to work with a large array in chunks, or sort an array then retrieve just the “top 10” values from the start of the array.

In this tutorial you’ll explore PHP’s array_slice() function for extracting a range of elements from an array.

Accessing Element Content with jQuery

26 March 2010 / Leave a Comment

Now that you know how to select HTML page elements in jQuery, you can start to do useful things with those elements. In this tutorial you’ll look at how to work with the contents of an element.

jQuery lets you work with HTML elements and element content in many different ways. For example, you can add new elements inside, around, before, or after existing elements; you can replace an element with another element (or elements); and you can read or change an element’s contents. Often the line between working with elements and element content is blurred — for example, when you add new elements inside an existing element, you’re effectively adding to that element’s contents.

You’ll look at adding, removing and replacing elements in a later tutorial. In this tutorial you’ll learn about 3 jQuery methods designed for working directly with the contents of an element:

html() for reading and changing the HTML contents of an element
text() for reading and changing the text contents of an element
val() for reading and changing form field values

As you’ll see, these methods make it very easy to read or change the raw contents or value of any HTML element.

Adobe’s Jaw-Dropping Content-Aware Fill

24 March 2010 / 19 Comments

Just as Adobe gears up to launch version 5 of their Creative Suite, they drop this little bombshell on us — Content-Aware Fill:

Watch the video above to see what Content-Aware Fill can do. Removing the bits of trash and the tree is impressive enough, but wait till you see the road being removed at 3:53, and the extra sky and clouds appearing at 4:44! To paraphrase Arthur C Clarke, this technology is so advanced it’s almost like magic.

Okay, you’ve gotten over the initial “wow” factor and managed to close your mouth again. How does this tool work exactly?

Working With Array Elements in PHP

19 March 2010 / 2 Comments

In Creating Arrays in PHP, you learned how PHP arrays work, and saw how to create an array using PHP.

In this article you take things further, and look at how to access the individual elements inside a PHP array. You’ll see how to:

Read element values
Alter element values
Add and remove elements in an array
Output the entire contents of an array

Textile and Markdown: 2 Nice Alternatives to WYSIWYG Editors

16 March 2010 / Leave a Comment

These days, many websites allow you to enter your own content — whether it’s creating a Web page, writing a blog post, or posting in a forum. In order to allow people to enter richly-formatted text and images, many sites use WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML editors. Great though these editors are, they do have a few drawbacks.

In this article you’ll learn about 2 popular alternatives to WYSIWYG editors: Textile and Markdown. You’ll learn what they are, how to install them, and how to use them. You’ll also compare them to each other, and to using WYSIWYG editors. The article ends with lots of useful links to help you find out more about Textile and Markdown.

Creating Arrays in PHP

10 March 2010 / 3 Comments

Like most programming languages, PHP lets you create arrays. An array is a special type of variable that can hold many values at once, all accessible via a single variable name. Arrays are very useful whenever you need to work with large amounts of data — such as records from a database — or group related data together.

In this article, you’ll:

Learn how PHP arrays work, and why they’re useful
Look at the difference between indexed arrays and associative arrays, and
Learn how to create arrays within your PHP scripts.

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