Spun

Developer Alex King’s released a PHP/MySQL app that imports your iTunes library and displays reports like your top rated artists based on number of songs.

The code imports iTunes’ Library.xml into 3 MySQL tables using PHP 5’s XML libraries, like this:

Even Alex says that’s “an ugly hack.” What’s the better way to handle it without the output buffering?

Either way, I’ve posted my iTunes library reports using Alex’s app.

CSS guru Eric Meyer’s Color Blender tool takes two colors and a number of midpoints and returns all the shades in between. I used the Color Blender to calculate the blues in this site’s design. Neat, helpful Javascript widget for the color-dumb.

Designer Kevin Hale publishes the set of templates he uses to start coding up XHTML and CSS documents. Being a non-WYSIWYG editor user myself (go plain text!) these will help. (Not to mention there are CSS properties listed there I don’t recognize, so using these will be a good learning experience, too.)

Tim Taylor’s drag and drop sortable lists with Javascript and CSS could be a useful dynamic control on a web page. I use it in the not-yet released Scribblish for authors to reorder custom fields on the article edit page. It would also work well to reorder photos in a gallery app. Here’s a few examples of the drag and drop lists in action.

PHP’s highlight_string function formats and colorcodes PHP source in HTML, which will come in very handy for publishing code snippets on this site.

For example, a simple class called Greeter echoes “Hello, $x” to the screen. It’s source code is formatted with colors and indentation for HTML like this using highlight_string:

Here’s Greeter’s output, and here’s the source view.

Welcome to Spun, one web developer’s notebook.

I’m Gina Trapani and I’ve been building web sites since my home page in 1994. My graduate degree is in Comp Sci and I’m a certified Sun Microsystems Java programmer. Not that either of those pieces of paper mean anything.

After blogging profusely both personally and professionally since 2001, I’ve broken down and done what every other web developer on the planet has done in the last 4 years: start a blog on web development. It’s all so meta and unoriginal I can hardly stand it.

However, I’m doing this more for me than you. Writing things down helps me remember them. My goal with this site is to create a searchable archive of web dev items for my own reference and yours, and to solicit helpful commentary from readers along the way. Feel free to peer in, watch the site grow and use it for yourself.

Here you’ll find links and info about all things web dev: scripting languages like PHP and Python; HTML and CSS markup; client-side programming including Ajax techniques as well as best usability practices; database and object design; optimization and coding tips and tricks. After several years of ASP development on IIS, I now prefer to develop web sites on LAMP, the open source web platform. The majority of posts here will reflect that.

Also, I’m much less of a web designer and more of a web programmer. This means I’ll post “gee whiz” CSS items that will be old news to real designers, and a few incomprehensible rants about MVC frameworks and third normal form. I’m good at modifying others’ code for my own needs and I do that often. Occasionally I’ll write a Firefox extension, Greasemonkey user script or PHP app and post it for download here.

Go ahead and leave a comment or contact me at ginatrapani at gmail dot com with questions, tips or thoughts about the site. I’d love to hear from you.

Thanks for visiting.