Archive for April, 2008

More performance tuning advice from Yahoo!

Stoyan Stefanov is continuing the work of Steve Souders on the performance front by publishing some new research from Yahoo! to extend the initial list of 14 performance rules with 20 new ones. He presented at the PHP Quebec Conference a few weeks ago.

Generating Graphs with PHP and Google Charts API

Ludwig Pettersson has a really good overview of the Google Charts API, and how you can integrate your PHP scripts with it. He created a PHP library that wraps around the API, and makes it really easy to generate graphs that way.

I’m not sure if I would move away from JpGraph to this new library, but it seems really cool no matter what. I guess it could be an option if you wanted to avoid doing all of the manual work associated with different types of graphs, and offload some graph generation to Google.

JavaScript event compatibility tests

Peter-Paul Koch expanded his set of event compatibility tests (not updated since 2005) to cover some of the newer versions of browsers available today. The results are very useful, and include dozens of bugs throughout the browsers, and lots of tips on things to avoid. Recommended.

Maximum length for BLOB columns in MySQL

Well, that was interesting. I was debugging a problem with a particular uploaded document on Insightory, and it looks like I made the wrong decision when choosing the datatype for a blob column in one of my tables.

Apparently MEDIUMBLOB stores up to 16 MB of data, and the uploaded document was larger than that. Not a big deal, I’ll go ahead and accept blame and fix the table schema and move on.

However, when trying to research on this and find the maximum length for BLOB fields in MySQL at the manual, I get this pretty data table with some formulas on how to calculate the maximum number of bytes myself. Isn’t that helpful?

How about the members of the documentation team pre-calculate this stuff for me, so I can just read and absorb the content without taking out my calculator? Mmkay thx bye.

Prototip: tooltips for Prototype

Prototip is a cool little project that works well with sites that already use Prototype. Lots of easy ways to implement tooltips in your pages, even while using AJAX.

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