You are currently browsing the DEVTRENCH: Web Development from the Front Lines weblog archives for January, 2008.
January 11th 2008
Now that it’s January 2008 some of my clients are noticing that the year in their copyright statements don’t reflect 2008. Now, I always set this to drop in a dynamic value, but that wasn’t the case before I was hired. This is such an easy thing to set up when you are developing a site so I suggest you do it right from the start. I use 3 main types of copyright year automation…
Continue Reading »
January 9th 2008
I’ve been doing a project lately that requires HTML2PDF generation and I was getting quite depressed at the 2 available options I’d found to do it with PHP: dompdf and html2fpdf. After trying to get them to work with the html template I set up I quickly realized that they just weren’t going to work (both had problems processing images). After doing another Google search I found HTML2PS and HTML2PDF and it is practically a miracle! It seems to work pretty much the same as the Adobe PDF print driver, which is exactly what I want. The output from this program looks the same as if you would have printed it out - awesome. It’s open source and doesn’t have any odd requirements.
Features: “Supports nested tables, advanced CSS properties, floating DHTML elements, non-Latin character sets, XHTML and non-XHTML tags and properties, and much more. Nearly any website, even very complex ones like Yahoo.com, can be accurately converted to PostScript or PDF.”
The only drawback I’ve found so far is that it chokes on images created from javascript apps (like mybloglog). That means I can’t render out a pdf of devtrench.com with images, but it works without images and looks good. This really doesn’t bother me because I’m rendering a static html page that is pretty basic, so it is kind of a non issue for me.
January 7th 2008
I used to use inventory.overture.com for all of my keyword research but lately the service always times out for me. It is either dead, unsupported, or just blasted by so many requests that it can’t handle it.
Today I found that WordTracker has a free keyword suggestion tool that works pretty similar to inventory.overture.com. I’ve been thinking for a while about signing up for WordTracker, but don’t have the extra $$ around to get it going. I do plan to sign up for their free trial though.
You can even add the free search to your search bar if you use IE 7 or FF 2. Get it here.
Here are just a few of the results for my favorite topic - web development…
Continue Reading »
