CSS-Tricks

The Magic of PHP + MySQL

It’s safe to say that nearly every website that’s up-to-date these days is using some form of content management system (CMS). While there are a ton of great free options that provide us with a CMS to power a website (Wordpress, Drupal, etc.), it doesn’t hurt to peek under the hood and get a feel for how these systems work.

To get our feet wet as back-end developers, we’ll be creating a simple PHP class that will:

• Create a database
• Connect to a database
• Display a form with two fields
• Save the form data in the database
• Display the saved data from the database

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Hey folks! Me and Richard have just launched a new site I think many of you will find useful. It’s called Are My Sites Up? - I bet you can guess what it does =)

Monitor ALL your sites

The idea is that many of us are responsible for maintaining a number of websites. Business, personal, or otherwise. We simply don’t have the time to go visiting every one of them every day, let alone every few minutes. So what if one of them goes down? There are all kinds of reasons it could happen, and you’d never know! That is, until you get a phone call from an angry customer or client. Wouldn’t you rather say “Yep! I saw that, I’m working to resolve the issue now” rather than “Oh, really?”

It’s FREE

There are a couple of other services out there that do website monitoring. In my experience they are either complicated, cost money, or both. In one other case, it is simple and free, but it is too simple, and would make managing a number of sites kind of a pain. Are My Sites Up? is totally free and easy to use.

It WORKS

We’ve been using the system for a little while now and it’s been working like a charm. We let in some early testers (thanks guys!) earlier this week and it’s been working well for them too. There is an about page with some information as to how it works.

There are three ways you can keep tabs on your site. First of all you can log in and check. The home screen shows all of your sites and an obvious green or red icon to show if they are up or down. Next, you will be notified by email immediately if one of your sites goes down (you can turn this off if you want). Lastly, you can opt to receive SMS text messages to your cell phone if one of your sites goes down.

If any of you are Twitter folks, Twitter integration is also coming VERY soon =)

I think you owe it to your websites to keep and eye on them with this. For freelancers and agencies, this is a value-add to your services. You can confidently tell customers that you will watch their websites for them so you can react quickly to any downtime. Makes everyone just feel a little safer.

Sign Up!

If anyone wants to be awesome and help support this, you could pick up an advertising spot on the cheap. Both Richard and me spent a lot of our own time building this and I even had to buy some new special hosting just for it that wasn’t exactly cheap.

Creating a completely custom theme for the popular forums software phpBB would be a monster job. Fortunately, to get up and running quickly, we can simply wrap a default installation of phpBB into the skin of an existing site pretty easily. We do just that in this screencast, and work out the kinks that pop up.

Happy New Years Eve everyone! Just taking the opportunity to say thanks to everyone (again) for visiting and being a part of CSS-Tricks. This site has came a long way in one short year, and now is a great time to reflect.

Milestones

Screencast Launched

I moved to Portland, OR at basically the very first days of 2008. This site alone had me motivated to get my office set up as quickly as I could. I was already armed with the idea that I wanted to start doing a screencast, so I picked up some gear and recorded my first ever screencast on January 31st. It turned out to be a series of three on Converting a Photoshop Mockup, and they are still some of the most popular videos today.

Since the launch of the screencasts, much has changed. I originally just embedded them on a static page with Quicktime. Now I have moved the video pages inside WordPress so that they can have comments like regular posts, and the player is now a Flash player to accommodate more people. The Quicktime version is still available for the iTunes people and is now accompanied by an iPhone/iPod version. The videos now also feature a much more professional introduction.

Feed Subscribers

One of the statistics us blog nerds like to watch is our Feedburner subscriber count. As far as the success of a site goes, stuff like pageviews is far more important, but the subscriber count is a much more personal and meaningful number to me. It’s the number of people that enjoy the site so much they are willing to literally subscribe to it so they can see every article. I never dreamed (in fact, I literally thought the cap) would be well under 10,000, but the site has now broken that amazing number and is getting on closer to 15,000 some days. Crazy. And awesome.

Redesign

In early November I released a redesign of the site. It was mostly well received and I still like it to this day.

Launched Other Sites

While CSS-Tricks dominates most of my free time, I did manage to launch of a number of other narrower focused sites in 2008, all of which I am quite proud of.

• Script & Style
• Status
• Quotes on Design
• HTML-Ipsum

Work

We did some pretty cool stuff at my “real job” this year and I’m very thankful for that. A large chunk of the ideas for this site come from my work there, as well as much my personal advancement as a designer and coder.

Statistics

I though it might be neat to list some statistics from the year, for posterity.

• 1220 people have submitted the contact form, and I’ve done my best to respond to each of them. Definitely not 100%, but I bet better than 90%.
• 269 posts have been published.
• There are 7,859 approved comments (includes ½ of 2007).
• Akismet has caught 42,488 spam comments.
• There are 998 members of the forums and a total of 5,671 posts.
• I have recorded and published 48 screencasts.
• The highest single traffic day ever was August 4th, 2008 with a total of 69,253 pageviews. The entire year saw 5,816,851 pageviews.
• The single most popular post was the one on CSS sprites.
• 43.76% of traffic comes from referring sites, 33.03% from search engines, and 22.74% from direct traffic.

What’s To Come in 2009

I’m afraid I don’t have a lot of specifics for you, but rest assured 2009 will be loaded with as much stuff and more as 2008. I have a TON of drafts of articles I have started and need to finish and I have a TON of ideas for videos I want to shoot. I’m excited to just keep plugging along with that stuff.

A Book

That’s right! I have commenced work on a book. I’m am not ready to announce anything at all about it yet, but I can tell you that it is going to be awesome and that I’ll share more about that soon.

Another New Site

Just another tease! I have another new site to launch VERY soon that I think many of you will find very useful. No details yet (sorry), but it’s another of my typical narrow-focused sites, this one a web app.

Who Knows!

Part of the fun is that I never really know what the future will bring. I’m sure when 2009 is coming to a close, I’ll look back on this post and laugh as to how little my past-self knew.

Redesign

I mentioned earlier I still like the design, but a year is a long time and I’ve already started to make little notes on things I would change. I’m sure 2009 will have at least one evolutionary redesign to the site.

Creative Advent Series…

…was pretty cool on Positive Space this year. Twenty-four creatives share their best career advice.

Merb and Rails Merging

David Heinemeier Hansson writes:

It’s christmas, baby, and do we have a present for you. We’re ending the bickering between Merb and Rails with a this bombshell: Merb is being merged into Rails 3!

We all realized that working together for a common good would be much more productive than duplicating things on each side of the fence. Merb and Rails already share so much in terms of design and sensibility that joining forces seemed like the obvious way to go. All we needed was to sit down for a chat and hash it out, so we did just that.

Fly Off The Page

Quick and fun little jQuery plugin that makes it really easy to make page elements fly off the page.

$(elem).flyOffPage({ duration: 400 });

Shorten URLs with APIs

David has a useful series of posts on making short URL’s with a couple of different services: Is.gd, TinyURL, and TinyURL + MooTools. I still like Bit.ly.