Brian Cray | Dev Tips | Become a Better Developer, One Tip at a Time.

briancray

About this author:

Brian Cray is a marketing & Internet strategy consultant, web developer, and Apple fanatic living in Columbus, Ohio, USA. His work has been featured by Mashable, NETTUTS, Smashing Magazine, and many others. He's happy to share his knowledge with you on DevTips and his own blog at Brian Cray.com.

Contact:

bcrayzie@gmail.com

My Articles:

April 21st, 2009

4 Fantastic PHP Output Buffering Tricks for Web Developers

If you've read my Dev Tips article Output Buffering for Web Developers, a Beginner's Guide you know that PHP output buffering is useful and awesome at the same time.

To recap the article, output buffering puts your PHP script's output in a buffer instead of sending it directly to the browser in pieces, allowing you to manipulate your webpage as a whole before the user sees it. That awesomeness is what we'll take advantage of now.

January 30th, 2009

ID Your BODY: A Simple CSS Trick With a lot of ROI

One of the latest raves in Web design is to add an id attribute to the body tag, like <body id="coolpage">. It's a small thing, but it's a damn good idea!

Why? Let's say you have 15 pages total on your Geocities Star Wars fan site. You want the headlines (<h1>Headline!</h1>) to be 16 px in size with the exception of the home page. On the homepage you want the headlines to be 18px and bold!

Will you make a new separate CSS file just for the homepage that the user has to download in addition to the default CSS? NO! You're too good for that! You & C3PO hang out on the weekends.

January 26th, 2009

Redirect iPhone, Blackberry, & Palm Requests With .htaccess

So you wanna serve a separate page or sub domain for mobile phones? Add this bit of fun to your .htaccess and you're rockin'. All iPhone, Blackberry, & Palm requests will go to a mobile subdomain.

January 25th, 2009

Output Buffering for Web Developers, a Beginner’s Guide

If you're not using PHP's output buffering, you should be. And if you are, you may not be using it to its potential.

In this article written specifically for web developers, I'll make a case for output buffering and show you how to get started within seconds. This article is the beginning of a series in which I'll share with you the awesome potential of output buffering.

January 18th, 2009

Send Hassle Free and Dependable HTML Emails With PHP

No matter what people are telling you, I'll be the first to say it. Plain text e-mails are ugly. Most of your customers/readers/whatever can see HTML messages. So why aren't you sending them? Sexy & colorful HTML e-mails pop off the screen. Plain text e-mails make me fall asleep.

Outside of being sexier, they help with conversion. If you want to send an e-mail with a link back to your Website, how will you accomplish that with plain text? Please don't expect everyone to copy + paste. That's so last year. You're probably not sending HTML e-mails because, until today, the code has been presented in long, drawn out explanations that you have to piece together. Ouch.

So here I am to answer your dreams: A simple straightforward function that sends HTML e-mails with a plain text counterpart for those over 80 and still using AOL 2.5.

January 16th, 2009

PHP Tip: Add Custom Google Search Results to Your Site with PHP

Have you ever wanted to integrate a custom google search on your site, and style it to your liking? Today, one of our new Dev-Tips author Brian Cray will take you through adding custom google search results to your site with php.

Rockstar Wordpress Designer by Collis Ta'eed

The Ultimate Image Gallery Manager PHP Script!

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