Nicholas Zakas, Principal Front End Engineer at Yahoo!, posted an interesting read about Extreme JavaScript Compression with YUI Compressor on Slideshare.

Thanks to Josi for pointing my interest to it.

The 2009 CWE/SANS Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors is a list of the most significant programming errors that can lead to serious software vulnerabilities. They occur frequently, are often easy to find, and easy to exploit. They are dangerous because they will frequently allow attackers to completely take over the software, steal data, or prevent the software from working at all.

25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors

The incredible unwesen wrote a ‘simple’ guideline for writing/providing Service/Web APIs that’s well worth reading for getting some basic ideas how to write a good application programming interface.

Jon from TVI Design assembled a pretty good list with tips, tricks and techniques about how to improve your jQuery code:

improve your jQuery – 25 excellent tips

Antonio Lupetti‘s Blog keeps a pretty good list with tips and practical suggestions about database design.

10 Useful Articles About Database Design.

Interesting read about 10 PHP principles by Rasmus Lerdorf, Josh Sharp, Matt Mullenweg, Dave Child, Ben Balbo, Chad Kieffer, Joey Sochacki, Jack D. Herrington and David Cummings.

So fucking true:

It is often heard that only Perl can parse Perl. This is not true. Perl cannot be parsed at all, it can only be executed.

Found here: gettext manual: General Problems Parsing Perl Code

Jan Odvarko, a member of the Firebug Working Group, has kicked out a set of tutorials on extending Firebug.

• Part 1: Hello World!
• Part 2: Toolbar
• Part 3: Options
• Part 4: Localization
• Part 5: Domplate
• Part 6: Yahoo! Search

Some of you might have been noticed that the Geo Track page did not came up with the Google Map anymore. My Firebug commented this with the following message:

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a is null
function Ih(a){var b;while(b=a.firstChild){Hh(b);a.removeChild(b)}}

First of all I have been thinking that this might be some kind of bug in the Geo Track plugin. I can negate this now. The cause for the issue is the parallel used xLanguage plugin, which is used for translating the list titles like ‘Besucher’ to ‘Vistors’. The Geo Track page has been structured like:

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[wp-geotrack-googlemap]
[lang_de]Besucher[/lang_de][lang_en]Visitors[/lang_en]
[wp-geotrack-list]
[lang_de]Top Seiten[/lang_de][lang_en]Top Sites[/lang_en]
[wp-geotrack-topsites]
[lang_de]Top Referrer[/lang_de][lang_en]Top Referrers[/lang_en]
[wp-geotrack-topreferrers]

The ‘lang_’ tags marks the several languages — or actually the parsing of them — and have been the cause why the map exploded (xLanguage manipulates several functions like the_content() on runtime).

A solution has been found quickly. The Geo Track page consists only of a title and has got its’ own page template now, which includes the following snippet:

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echo wp_geotrack_googlemap();
 
if ( $language == 'de' ) : echo 'Besucher'  else: echo 'Visitors' endif;
echo wp_geotrack_display();
 
if ( $language == 'de' ) : echo 'Top Seiten'  else: echo 'Top Pages' endif;
echo wp_geotrack_topsites();
 
if ( $language == 'de' ) : echo 'Top Referrer'  else: echo 'Top Referrers' endif;
echo wp_geotrack_topreferrers();

At the moment I’m evaluating different PHP frameworks that are providing a built-in AJAX support. In that context I came across with symfony — and without any doubt it looks best to me. While browsing trough the so called “The Book“, I found the following interesting anecdote about the naming process of the project:

Why “symfony” and not “FooBarFramework”? Because Fabien wanted a short name containing an s, as in Sensio, and an f, as in framework–easy to remember and not associated with another development tool. Also, he doesn’t like capital letters. symfony was close enough, even if not completely English, and it was also available as a project name. The other alternative was “baguette”.