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DevBits is a collection of web development articles, tutorials, code, templates & resources. If you want to know more, there's a little background on the about page.
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Selecting A Web Host
Posted In : Articles, May 14th 2012
It doesn't matter how much time you might spend writing decent content for your website, optimising your code or dedicating hours to producing quality services or information, if you can't find a stable platform to host your site then most of that time is wasted.
It's a sad but true fact that the web hosting industry is one of the few that has almost no regulation. Unlike applying for an account with a new bank, hiring a lawyer or gas fitter, there's very little protection for the consumer in the hosting industry and as a result, people finding their website and data have vanished without any guaranteed process for being compensated is pretty much a daily occurrence. The points I'll cover in this article are not meant as a complete and foolproof guide to prevent you from being left stranded, but they hopefully give you a fighting chance.
I may at some point expand on this article. For now we'll talk about resources, location, finding a real company, domain registration and special requirements.
Embracing Social Media
Posted In : Home | News, April 14th 2012
I've never been a fan of the social media craze. I don't use Facebook, Myspace etc. I only have a twitter account because the BlackBerry app forced me to register in order to view others feeds, annoyingly. I've never posted anything to it.
One part of the madness I've decided I should embrace as a minimum, is letting you submit pages from this site to the likes of Reddit, Digg and Delicious. So here they are, just those three for the moment - over on the right of the page under the W3C buttons.
I edited the underlying code for each a little, as I don't want a huge amount of JavaScript in my pages, but I tested and they should work ok. I'll not go on about the fact I had to sign up to each just to do that, more accounts I don't want, oh well.
Time For Some Updates
Posted In : Home | News, April 12th 2012
As some will be aware, this site hasn't really had any decent updates for a while. Recently, I've slowly started to fix some of the bugs and plan out a general idea of how I see things going forward. I've made my changelog visible for anybody that wants to keep-up, and outside of the bits in that list, the main focus will be:
1. Complete and upload the collection of half-finished articles and tutorials that I have lying around.
2. Either update or remove anything that's outdated. For example, I think there's even some tutorials using PHP functions that are now depreciated! Bear in mind I wrote much of this stuff around 2002-2003!
As point two stretches right across the tutorials, articles, code examples and files, it should keep me busy for a while. I might even get round to enabling comments again to gather some feedback.
New Downloads
Posted In : Files | Tools & Utilities, September 12th 2011
Well, not exactly new but some useful files that were available on the site previously. Updated and available again: Wget, wGETGUI, Gimp and Wireshark
Also, the HTML Manual is available again under Resources.
PHP Basics
Posted In : Tutorials | PHP & MySQL, June 3rd 2011
This is one of the very first tutorials I posted. Recently, it's made it into the top five requested pages on the site so for now, makes the home page also.
This is a brief introduction into PHP. It's not complex or bursting with detail and examples, just a quick look at a few of the basics.
- What is PHP?
- What can I do with it?
- How do I use it?
- Using PHP on your pages
- Variables
Colour Blend Tool
Posted In : Resources, April 13th 2011
I've used this tool countless times over the years. It's a great little script for finding a point between two colours or simply looking at two colours side by side to see if they 'work'
Simply pick a colour value format, input two valid CSS colour values in the format you chose, and pick the number of midpoints you'd like to see. The palette will show the colours you input as well as the requested number of midpoint colours, and the values of those colours.