Continuous Learning

Below are the web clippings of the day. Enjoy.

• MagpieRSS - Using Responsibly
  
  Describing how to enable cache for MagpieRSS in a shared hosting environment. Also talks about how to expire the cache content via changing the $MAX_AGE variable in line 21 of rss_cache.inc.

• Size Matters
  
  Why size matters (smaller = better). It is difficult to create perfectly modular software because modularity is subjective, but there are definitely problems with non modularized code, which will have difficulty to deal with the need to change.

• Coding Horror: Code Smaller
  
  More code = more bugs, period. When you can break up code into smaller modules and slice a big project into multiple small ones, you will increase your ability to manage the complexity and the chance for success.

• God as Computer Programmer
  
  Humor - What does God do if he is is a computer programmer?

• Scott Hanselman’s Computer Zen - Exiting The Zone of Pain - Static Analysis with NDepend
  
  How to create modular code? While BDUF can help, refactoring is also critical. This article looks at utilizing NDEPEND (.NET centric) to help with driving the analysis.

• Date and Time Formats
  
  A specification on how W3C handle’s datetime formats. YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssTZD; TZD = Z (GMT) or ++hh:mm or –hh:mm

• Untold Mysteries of CSS > !Important or Not?
  
  For CSS newbies - what is !important and how to use it.

• Separate CSS files increase initial page load time by 40% to 70% | drupal.org
  
  A performance evaluation of CSS downloads, comparing download of one single CSS file against multiple files. I wonder how many browsers still don’t support @import.

• CSS Pitfalls
  
  Thoughts on CSS design issues (around the use of classes, reuse, etc), especially when looking from the perspective of a newly initiated.

• Dynamic CSS via PHP: avoiding hacks and filters in a style sheet
  
  Focuses on providing CSS support to browsers that do not handle CSS2 correctly.

• Static and dynamic CSS combined - Friendly Bit
  
  Describing how to utilize PHP to generate unique CSS for a given user. Article focuses on both the generation approach as well as the client-side caching technique.

• PHP Cache Control
  
  A tutorial/script describing controlling of browser cache (via HTTP 304/if-modified-since). Of course, this is different from the dynamic header (if-non-match) approach, and isn’t useful to cache dynamically generated content not written to disk.

• Scripts: Simple PHP Browser Detection :: Set CSS stylesheets by browser version
  
  Two browser detection scripts for PHP - one full, one simple. The full script can also detect spiders and other user agents.