I had a few extra minutes last night and today and added a few things to this script including Direct download links (with :hover for easy selection)

Embedded mp3 player displayed in a ThickBox.

As well as an embedded flv player displayed in a ThickBox.

Images are also displayed in a ThickBox overlay, while mov. mpg and mpeg videos are also played in a ThickBox.

Both jQuery and ThickBox have been embedded into PHPDL v2 and a PHPDL lite version has been released that has no files embedded in it at all. I have also commented the majority of the file using phpdoc syntax.

Please go to the PHPDL Project Page for demos and download links

This is a small post made in hopes it reaches a JavaScriptdeveloper, who in turn passes it along to another, then another, so-on-and-so-forth…

I use jQuery with nearly every project. While I find it easier and easier to roll my own JavaScript, I’m not one for reinventing the wheel. If a plug-in exists that does what I want, I’ll use it. The first thing I do is check if they have a packed version (size matters). If not, I pack my own. My problems start when developers don’t have a packed version already available. Chances are, if they don’t have a packed version available, it’s because the JavaScript packer breaks their code. Not because it’s bad code, and not because there is something wrong with Dean Edwards packer, but because when code is packed certain operations are changed if the code isn’t written perfectly.

Enter JSLint. Think of JSLint as the W3C Validator for JavaScript. If your code passes inspection (you can essentially ignore repeatedly assigned vars), it will pack.

Tonight I’ve had to fix not one, but two jQuery plug-ins to make them available for packing. The first is the preloadCssImages plug-in from the filament group (amazing developers I might add) and the second is FancyBox by some guy called KAC. I’m not calling anyone out, rather hoping to make people aware of JSLint. It only takes a few moments to go through your code, and the result is a much lighter footprint in most cases.

I’ve contacted the creators of their respective plug-ins, but if they don’t post the fixed, here they are:
preloadCssImages
FancyBox

I’ll have another post in the next 24 hours releasing a free wordpress theme, so stay tuned!

I’m tired of using the word “awesome” to describe things that are awesome so I went with majestic instead. Awesome, huh?

Rather than get techy about Google’s new AJAX Feed API I’ll focus on their much easier to understand wizard for creating a very simple AJAX Feed widget. To do that though, I need to cover the AJAX Feed API so much to say that it’s a way for you display snippets of an RSS Feed - or multiple RSS Feeds - on your website without doing anything more than click a button.

You can find the Dynamic Feed Control Wizard Here.

Type the name of your blog in the textbox and click preview. As long as you’re indexed by Google Blog Search, your feed will show up. Don’t worry if it doesn’t though, it’s easy to change the title and feed(s) you want to display.

For instance, if I wanted to get rid of the Twitter flash widget to the right here and replace it with the vertical feed widget from Google I would simply look in the code for this (assuming I had just generated one for my blog of course):

title: 'Greg-J',
url: 'http://feeds.feedburner.com/Greg-jcom?format=xml'

and change it to

title: 'Twitter',
url: 'http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/14853318.atom'

And it would display a nice little feed of my most recent tweets in the right column of this site. Doing so however, I would also find that the style of my theme makes it look ulgy and I would have to go back to the flash widget until I had time to style it nicely…

Note:
I just realized that by typing twitter grilla it pulled up my twitter feed, so I’m assuming it’ll find your twitter feed by simply typing in twitter username too.

I kid you not, it wasn’t more than a week ago I was thinking to myself “I need to make a service that creates cool ajax feed widgets for people to display” - so when I saw this today I had to share it. I’ll definitely be integrating these into the new profiles on MySpace Pros.

This is the second time I’ve written this article so it’ll be much shorter now. Damn you back button!

I’ve been using vBulletin to create a webmaster social network at MySpacePros.com for the past month now and while it has all the features I need, I can’t imagine using vB for a social network that wasn’t aimed towards webmasters. As awesome as it is, it’s a beast to work with. What would I use then? WordPress. Or more specifically, BuddyPress. Take that last sentence with a grain of salt though, because I’ve never actually seen it in action. This is all just speculation.

Given automattic’s track record with offshoot products, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that while well-implemented, these new features are going to be light. Let’s take a quick look at those features. Again…

Extended Profiles
This should be “Extensible Profiles” as you need to do all the leg work. It works much like the Custom Fields option in wordpress. Well, exactly like it actually.

Personal Blog
Opening the door to use WordPress as a competitor to wordpress.com, users will get their own blog at either “/membername/blog/” or “/membername.domain.com/blog”. Finally!

Private Messaging
An internal mail system between users is pretty mandatory.

Friends
The friends aspect is tied into the Extended Profiles so you can match make based on those fields. Very Cool.

Groups
The most notable part of the Groups feature is the (option?) ability to tie it into bbpress and give each group their own discussion forum. Keep something in mind though: When you do this, it will kill a lot of forum activity - which is why I haven’t and probably won’t do it on MySpacePros.

The Wire
Apparently The Wire is the name for the bastard child of a 3-way between twitter, myspace’s profile comments and facebook’s The Wall…

Albums
One of the best ways to get traffic from Google.

Status Updates
I.e: Mood. Not important enough to make a bullet in my opinion.

It may seem like I’m being hard on BuddyPress, but I’m not. They’re just a couple years late to the party and they didn’t dress for the occasion. I’m sure it’ll provide a good foundation for the community to improve on, but at least it’s something.

This is an update to a post made earlier today.

Last week I posted a Cushy CMS review that received quite a bit of attention. A few people expressed interest in the flat file CMS that I mentioned I use internally, so I wanted to post it. From this point on I’ll refer to it ask Skeleton.

You can grab it here: Skeleton: flat file CMS

I’ll make this short since I’m no font creator, but this is too cool not to talk about.

Fontstruct is a flash based font creation tool that allows you to point, click and create fonts using a number of preset shapes and tools. It’s crazy easy to use and I felt right at home the moment it loaded. It’s as powerful as many other full blown font creators and as simple to use as MS Paint.

When you’re done, save and download. As if that wasn’t cool enough you can share your creations with other people and download theirs. If you fancy yourself a pretty decent font designer (like I know some of you are) you can sell your fonts in the FontShop for cold hard cash.

I don’t imagine I’ll ever have time to complete an alphabet, but if any of you do - please share!

Know of a similar service? Tell me about it here and share it with others.

When the myeeos project began, the lead programmer was given the chore to find the best social networking platform out there and build the back end for the future social network on it. After a few days of deliberation the recommendation to use phpizabi. For good or worse, that’s what we began developing myeeos with. There are some things about phpizabi I really like a lot, but some things I don’t like so much at all. The platform that myeeos now runs on in great in its own right and does have phpizabi roots, but that’s about it. I’m not interested in re-reviewing the few products I think are worthy of testing in search for the perfect social networking script.

In my own quest to find the perfect social networking script I have narrowed down the search to 4 candidates. Most of which probably seem like odd choices, but as this process goes on we’ll discover why I chose these particular pieces of software.

Drupal:
I’ve been a big fan of Drupal for a lot of years now. Their introduction of the now widely used PHPTemplate system was one of the first to incorporate a logical integration of markup and functionality without using an arbitrary and proprietary templating structure. Drupal is also credited with with introducing myself and many others to the method of taxonomy. Think of Drupal as being the ones who brought tagging to the mainstream developer. These aren’t really good reasons for considering it as a base for a social network, but it was good enough to reason to do some searching and find that Drupal.org has an entire group dedicated to creating social networking sites out of Drupal. To learn more about creating a social network using Drupal, I suggest you start by visiting this Drupal Social Network site Q&A.

HandShakes:
This is the only script on this list made specifically for setting up a social network. I looked at and passed over buddyzone, phpfox and a half dozen other solutions for this one because it’s the only one I have found mostly positive reviews about and their service so far has been superb. It’s a complete and well-rounded solution with a feature-set that is well thought out. They don’t nickel and dime you for modules and they offer built-in integrates with popular forum software, which to me is a huge bonus.

Joomla:
I don’t have much to say about Joomla other than there is quite a bit of support for the Joomla Community Builder extension and considering the near wordpress-like adoption rate and support for Joomla, it would be silly for me not to give it a once over. My experience with Mambo (what Joomla was once called before the creator got greedy and the community took matters into their own hands) wasn’t great and eventually led me to Drupal several years back, but that was then and Joomla is a different beast. I’m probably most excited about trying Joomla because it’s the one I have the least (read: none) experience with.

vBulletin:
I love vBulletin. Over the years I’ve become what most would consider a vBulletin master and I am absolutely convinced that there is nothing you can’t do with vBulletin and some patience. The number of quality and supported modifications is staggering and the community is more active than the community of the previously mentioned options combined. The thing that makes vBulletin an absolute must to consider though, is the fact that version 3.7 is within a week of release and sports a plethora of new features based around social networking. The tough decision with using vBulletin is whether or not to use 3.6 with its huge library of prove modifications or 3.7 with its new and improved feature-set and wait for the modifications to be ported. Of all the options I believe vBulletin has the most going for it. The only drawback for me personally is that the templates are stored in the database and they use a proprietary templating language that makes prototyping new features more of a task than some of the others here.

The reason for this post is to find out what features and aspects of creating a social network are most important to you so I can spend some time with each one and answer questions for you. What is important to me may not be important for you and the point of this investigative review is to be informative, not self-serving.