My RSS

Unread items (184)

dealnews - 20 most recent deals.

Retro 15-LED Adjustable Camping Lantern for $8 + $5 s&h

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 1:08pm MDT

Today only, 13Deals.com offers this Retro 15-LED Adjustable Camping Lantern for $7.99 plus $4.99 for shipping. That ties last month's mention at the lowest total price we could find for such a lantern by $4. This lantern features adjustable brightness, 100,000 hour LED lifetime, and more. It requires two D batteries, not included.
Case Logic DCB-16 Compact Camera Case from $2 + $6 s&h

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 1:06pm MDT

Amazon.com offers the Case Logic DCB-16 Compact Camera Case in Blue (pictured) for $2.21. Shipping adds $5.58, or spend over $25 for free shipping. Even with shipping, it's the lowest total price we could find for this color by $2. It features a detachable shoulder strap, no-scratch nylon interior, hook-and-loop enclosure, and more.
It's also available in Red for $3.20 plus the above shipping options, another price low.
McAfee AntiVirus Plus 2010 3-User Pack for PC for $10 + free shipping

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 1:00pm MDT

Buy.com offers McAfee AntiVirus Plus 2010 3-User Pack for Windows, model no. MAV10EMB3RAA, for $9.99 with free shipping. That a $2 drop since our July mention and the lowest total price we've seen. It includes protection against spyware, viruses, and phishing, a 2-way firewall, and more.

GottaDeal.com - Why Pay Retail?

Dyson DC17 HEPA Bagless Upright Vacuum (Yellow/Titanium) - $197.99 - BestBuy.com

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 12:58pm MDT

HOT! BestBuy.com has the Dyson DC17 HEPA Bagless Upright Vacuum (Yellow/Titanium) for $197.99. Save on shipping by choosing free in-store pickup if available.
Sony Fontopia Stereo Earphones w/ Accessory Kit - $8.99 w/ Free Shipping - eBay.com

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 12:58pm MDT

Daily Deal! eBay.com (via eCost) has the Sony Fontopia Stereo Earphones w/ Accessory Kit for $8.99. Free shipping is also included. Includes 3 sizes of earbuds, case, extension cord and earbud holder.
Set of 3 Mini Aqua Globes for Decorative Plant Watering - $6.99 Shipped - eBay.com

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 12:58pm MDT

Daily Deal! eBay.com has the Set of 3 Mini Aqua Globes for Decorative Plant Watering for $6.99. Free shipping is also included.
Craftsman Professional 20-volt Cordless Circular Saw - $59.99 w/ Free Pickup - Sears.com

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 12:58pm MDT

Sears.com has the Craftsman Professional 20-volt Cordless Circular Saw for $59.99. Free in-store pickup available in some locations.
Emjoi AP-81 DentaPure Toothbrush Sanitizer - $9.99 with Free Shipping - eBay.com

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 12:58pm MDT

Daily Deal! eBay.com (via Buy.com) has the Emjoi AP-81 DentaPure Toothbrush Sanitizer for $9.99. Free shipping is also included.
OCZ Technology 16GB Diesel USB 2.0 Flash Drive - $29.99 w/ Free Shipping - eBay.com

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 12:57pm MDT

Daily Deal! eBay.com (via eCost) has the OCZ Technology 16GB Diesel USB 2.0 Flash Drive for $29.99. Free shipping is also included.

dealnews - 20 most recent deals.

ASUS 23" 1080p Widescreen LCD Display for $145 after rebate + free shipping

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 12:45pm MDT

For "M" Club members (it's free to join), mwave.com offers the ASUS 23" 1080p Widescreen LCD Monitor, model no. MS236H, for $164.99. This $20 mail-in rebate drops it to $144.99. With free shipping, that's $5 under last week's mention and the lowest total price we've seen. Features include a 1920x1080 (1080p) resolution, 50,000:1 contrast ratio, 250 cd/m² brightness, one HDMI input, and both VGA and DVI inputs. Rebate ends September 30.
OCZ 4GB PC3-10666 DDR3 Desktop RAM Kit for $60 after rebate + $6 s&h

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 12:43pm MDT

MicroCenter offers the OCZ 4GB PC3-10666 1333MHz DDR3-1333 Dual Channel Desktop Memory Kit with two 2GB DIMMs, model no. OCZ3G1333LV4GK, for $79.99. This $20 mail-in rebate cuts it to $59.99. Shipping adds $5.99, or choose free in-store pickup. Even with shipping, that's the lowest total price we could find by $22 and the best deal we've seen for 4GB PC3-10666 desktop RAM this year. Sales tax is added where applicable. Rebate ends September 5.
DieHard Portable Power 1150 Jump Starter w/ 12V Outlet, Light for $97 + $13 s&h

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 12:40pm MDT

Today only, Sears offers the DieHard Portable Power 1150 Jump Starter with 12-Volt Outlet and Light, model no. 71988, for $97.49. Shipping adds $12.50, or choose free in-store pickup. Even with shipping, that's the lowest total price we could find by $30. Sales tax is added where applicable. This portable power source allows you to jump start a car or supply power to a wide range of electronic devices. It features 1,150 peak amps, built-in light, two 12-volt DC power outlets, two AC outlets, a USB port, air inflator/deflator, and booster cables with spark-resistant clamps.
Sony Xperia X10 Android Phone for AT&T for free + free shipping

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 12:37pm MDT

With activation of a new line of service, LetsTalk.com offers the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Android Smartphone for AT&T Wireless for free with free shipping. That's $14 below our mention from three weeks ago and the lowest total price we could find by $30. It features 3G connectivity, a 4" 480x854 touchscreen, virtual QWERTY keyboard, 8.1-megapixel camera, 1GB internal memory, microSD card slot (2GB microSD card included), WiFi connectivity, Bluetooth, MP3 player, Android 1.6 OS, up to 8 hours of talk time, and more. Deal ends today.
A $36 activation fee applies.
ZyXEL 802.11n Gigabit Wireless Router for $55 after rebate + free shipping

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 12:30pm MDT

Amazon.com offers the ZyXEL X550N Draft 802.11n Gigabit Wireless Router for $79.68 with free shipping. This $25 mail-in rebate (paid via a Visa prepaid card) cuts it to $54.68. That's $3 below our mention from a month ago and the lowest total price we could find now by $8. It has five Gigabit Ethernet ports, VPN passthrough, two IPSec VPN tunnels, and more. Rebate ends September 30.
Refurbished Apple MacBook Air 13" Laptops from $1,249 + free shipping

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 12:17pm MDT
The Apple Store renewed its stock of several factory-refurbished 3-lb. MacBook Air laptops. With free shipping, that's up to 20% off and the lowest total prices we've seen for these models. Sales tax is added where applicable. Each carries a 1-year Apple warranty, the same as new units. Items are removed from The Apple Store when sold out. The refurbished MacBook Air laptops:
- Apple MC233LL/A MacBook Air Core 2 Duo 1.86GHz 13.3" for $1,249
- Apple MB940LL/A MacBook Air Core 2 Duo 1.86GHz 13.3" 128GB SSD for $1,349
- Apple MC234LL/A MacBook Air Core 2 Duo 2.13GHz 13.3" 128GB SSD for $1,549
Above All Co. Forearm Forklift Lifting Straps for $13 + $6 s&h

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 12:17pm MDT

Amazon.com offers the Above All Co. Forearm Forklift Lifting Straps, model no. L74995CN for an in-cart price of $12.70. Shipping adds $5.61, or get free shipping on orders over $25. Even with shipping, that's $2 under our mention from last fall and the lowest total price we could find now by $8. These OSHA-certified straps allow you to carry large objects at a low center of gravity. They feature a 600-lb. capacity.
Two Rain-X Latitude Wiper Blades for $26 + free shipping

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 12:06pm MDT

Amazon.com offers two Rain-X Latitude Wiper Blades (most models) for about $26 ($13 each) depending on model. With free shipping, that's $3 over our July mention but still the lowest total price we could find. (Most stores charge $15 to $22 each for these wipers.)
Refurbs at eVGA: nForce 730i Intel Mobo for $30 + free shipping, more

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 11:59am MDT
eVGA discounts a selection of its factory-refurbished (B-Stock) components. Combined with free shipping, each item is well below the lowest total price we could find for its new, factory-sealed counterpart. These items are backed by a 90-day eVGA warranty, but may not include any accessories. Some best bets (note that you'll have to scroll down to find them):
- eVGA UV Plus+ UV12 Graphics Adapter for $14.99
- eVGA nForce 730i Intel ATX Motherboard for $29.99
- eVGA e-GeForce 7300GT Graphics Adapter for $34.99
- eVGA X58 SLI ATX Intel Motherboard for $99.99
- browse all discounted eVGA B-Stock
Dyson DC17 All Floors Cyclonic Vacuum for $198 + $19 s&h

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 11:53am MDT

Best Buy offers the Dyson DC17 All Floors Bagless Cyclonic Upright Vacuum Cleaner in Yellow/Titanium, model no. 12744-01, for $197.99. Shipping adds about $19, or choose in-store pickup. Even with shipping, that's the lowest total price we could find by almost $200. Sales tax is added where applicable. It features auto-adjusting height, washable HEPA filter, and more.
14-LED Aluminum Flashlight for $2 + free shipping

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 11:44am MDT

Meritline.com offers this 14-LED Ultra Bright Aluminum Flashlight for $4.99. Coupon code "MLCK2480720904HPL1" drops it to $2.49. With free shipping, that's within pennies of the lowest total price we've seen for a 14-LED flashlight. It runs on three AAA batteries (not included) and features a black rubber grip. Coupon ends with 100 redemptions.
The Children's Place printable coupon: 20% off all purchases

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 11:35am MDT

The Children's Place retail stores take 20% off all purchases via this printable coupon. That's the best in-store discount we've seen from this merchant, last seen in July. Sales tax is added where applicable. Offer ends September 7.
Old Navy printable coupon: $5 off $25 or better

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 11:33am MDT

Old Navy retail stores offer printable coupons for at least $5 off a purchase of $25 or more with no minimum required via this Facebook game. That's the first Old Navy printable coupon we've seen in two weeks. You don't need a Facebook account to access the coupon. Coupons end September 9.

GottaDeal.com - Why Pay Retail?

Kodak EasyShare Z950 12-Megapixel Digital Camera - $109.99 Shipped AC - J&R

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 11:28am MDT

J&R has the Kodak EasyShare Z950 12-Megapixel Digital Camera for $109.99 after $10 off coupon code GEICO10. Free shipping is also included.
ProForm CrossWalk Sport Treadmill with 2.5HP Motor - $351.49 w/ Free Pickup - Sears.com

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 11:28am MDT

Sears.com has the ProForm CrossWalk Sport Treadmill with 2.5HP Motor for $351.49 after 5% coupon code 5OFFFITNESS. Free in-store pickup available in most locations.
iSymphony Audio System with Wireless Speakers - $108.00 Plus Shipping - Walmart.com

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 11:28am MDT

Value of the day! Walmart.com has the iSymphony Audio System with Wireless Speakers for $108.00. Save on shipping for selected items with free Site-to-Store shipping - see site for details.
16 Eberhard Faber Water-Based Chisel Art Markers - $5.00 w/ Free Shipping - eBay.com

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 11:28am MDT

eBay.com has the 16 Eberhard Faber Water-Based Chisel Art Markers for $5.00. Free shipping is also included.
MSI / AMD Quad Core 2.3GHz Barebones PC - $299.99 Plus Shipping - TigerDirect.com

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 11:28am MDT

TigerDirect.com has the MSI / AMD Quad Core 2.3GHz Barebones PC for $299.99.
D-Link 2-Bay Gigabit Ethernet NAS Enclosure - $69.99 AR Plus Shipping - TigerDirect.com

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 11:28am MDT

TigerDirect.com has the D-Link 2-Bay Gigabit Ethernet NAS Enclosure for $69.99.

dealnews - 20 most recent deals.

Kingwin 2.5" USB eSATA Drive Enclosure for $2 after rebate + free shipping

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 11:26am MDT

For its "M" Club members only, mwave.com offers the Kingwin 2.5" USB 2.0 External Serial ATA Hard Drive Enclosure, model no. KH-201U-S, for $6.99. ("M" Club membership is free; click here to sign up.) This $5 mail-in rebate knocks it to $1.99. With free shipping, that's the lowest total price we could find by $11, and among the cheapest such enclosures we've ever seen. This aluminum alloy enclosure features support for SATA hard drives with up to 500GB of storage. Rebate ends September 6.
Refurb Sony BDP-N460 Blu-ray Disc Player with Netflix for $100 + free shipping

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 11:22am MDT

Sony Style offers the factory-refurbished Sony BDP-N460 Blu-ray Disc Player for $99.99 with free shipping. That $20 less than the lowest total price we've ever seen for a new one. It features an HDMI output with DVD upconversion, as well as component video outputs and USB connectivity. It supports BD-Live and can stream content from Netflix, Amazon Video On Demand, YouTube, and more via its built-in Ethernet port. A 90-day Sony warranty applies.

Techbargains.com

Yamaha A RX-Z7BL 7.1Ch 140W/Ch Network Home Theater Receiver $1250 Free Shipping at Newegg

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 11:20am MDT

Newegg Coupon Codes

dealnews - 20 most recent deals.

Samsung 1,000W 7.1 3D Blu-ray Home Theater System for $630 + $21 s&h

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 11:13am MDT

Sobongo.com offers the Samsung HT-C6930W 1,000-Watt 7.1-Channel 3D Blu-Ray Wireless Home Theater System for $629.99 with around $21 for shipping. That's the lowest total price we could find by $64. (However, it was $46 less in July, since expired.) It features a 3D Blu-ray disc player, 330 watts per channel into six channels, 1700-watt center channel speaker, 170-watt powered subwoofer, wireless-ready, one HDMI output, Dolby True HD, Dolby Digital Plus, and more. Deal ends September 6 at 11 am ET.

Techbargains.com

Sony VAIO Intel Core i3-350 2.26GHz 15.5in Laptop with Blu-Ray & Wireless Display $767.20 Free Ship at Buy.com

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 11:10am MDT

Buy.com Coupon Codes

xpBargains.com

Micro Center: OCZ 4GB DDR3-1333 (PC3-10666) Dual Channel Memory Kit $60 AR

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 11:08am MDT

Micro Center: OCZ 4GB DDR3-1333 (PC3-10666) Dual Channel Memory Kit $60 AR

Techbargains.com

Book Renter Coupon Code: 5% off 2 Book Rentals, 10% off 3 Book Rentals at BookRenter

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 11:05am MDT

BookRenter Coupon Codes

MSNBC.com: U.S. News

Craigslist removes adult services section

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 11:03am MDT

Craigslist has apparently closed the adult services section of its website, two weeks after 17 state attorneys general demanded it shut down the section.

MSNBC.com: Technology & Science

Craigslist removes adult services section

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 11:03am MDT

Craigslist has apparently closed the adult services section of its website, two weeks after 17 state attorneys general demanded it shut down the section.

xpBargains.com

Bloomingdales: 20-40% off select merchandise during Big Brown Bag Sale

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 11:02am MDT

Bloomingdales: 20-40% off select merchandise during Big Brown Bag Sale

Techbargains.com

LG BD570 Wireless Network Blu-Ray Player (802.11n; Netflix Streaming) $169.99 Free Shipping at Newegg

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 11:00am MDT

Newegg Coupon Codes

xpBargains.com

Macys.com: extra 25% off clearance during latest sale plus free shipping on $99 coupon

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 10:57am MDT

Macys.com: extra 25% off clearance during latest sale plus free shipping on $99 coupon

MSNBC.com: U.S. News

Delay in pulling out BP blowout preventer

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 10:55am MDT

Crews are having to wait to raise the device that failed to stop oil from spewing into the Gulf of Mexico.

Techbargains.com

Staples Backpacks 50% off at Staples

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 10:55am MDT

Staples Coupon Codes

dealnews - 20 most recent deals.

$5 to $15 off Anco Windshield Wiper Blades after rebate

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 10:53am MDT

Anco takes $5 to $15 off select pairs of wiper blades via this mail-in rebate. That's tied with our March mention as the best such rebate we've seen on these wiper blades. This offer is valid on Anco Contour, AeroVantage, 31-Series, Rear Blade, and Winter Blade. Rebate expires October 31.
For a best bet, Auto Parts 123 via Amazon.com offers two Anco Contour 17" Universal Wiper Blades (pictured), model no. C17UB, for $2.76 via this $15 mail-in rebate. Shipping adds $5.45. Click here to browse for more discounted Anco wiper blades at Amazon.com.

xpBargains.com

NewEgg: PANTECH PG-C120 Silver Unlocked GSM Bar Phone with Camera $30 shipped

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 10:51am MDT

NewEgg: PANTECH PG-C120 Silver Unlocked GSM Bar Phone with Camera $30 shipped

dealnews - 20 most recent deals.

Solid Wood Base for iPad for $12 + free shipping

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 10:51am MDT

Today only, Meritline offers this Solid Wood Base for iPad for $15.66. Coupon code "MLC188325090423AL1" drops it to $11.99. With free shipping, that's the lowest total price we could find for any such base by $2. Coupon ends after 100 redemptions.

xpBargains.com

Tigerdirect: Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB Hard Drive (OEM) $80

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 10:50am MDT

Tigerdirect: Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB Hard Drive (OEM) $80
Logitech: 25% off on Select G-Series Gaming Products

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 10:49am MDT

Logitech: 25% off on Select G-Series Gaming Products

MSNBC.com: U.S. News

Hoping to correct image, Muslims greet fairgoers

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 10:45am MDT

Despite the smells of fried dough and roasted meat wafting from the Minnesota State Fair, Salim and Zuleyha Ozonder were focused on the people who were leaving, not the food or festivities beckoning from across the street.

dealnews - 20 most recent deals.

Clear Acrylic Case for iPhone 3G / 3GS for $1 + free shipping

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 10:45am MDT

Today only, Meritline offers this Clear Acrylic Case for iPhone 3G / 3GS for $1.85. Coupon code "MLCK262416090446AL1" cuts it to 99 cents. With free shipping, that's the lowest total price we could find for such a case, although it was half as much back in June. Coupon ends after 800 redemptions.
Shipping takes 2-3 weeks.
Slim TPU Band Case for Apple iPhone 4 for $2 + free shipping

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 10:42am MDT

Meritline.com offers this Slim TPU Band Case for Apple iPhone 4 in White Transparent for $1.99 with free shipping. That's $3 under our our mention from Tuesday, although that came in many more colors, and the lowest total price we've seen. Similar to Apple's Bumper, it covers the edges of your iPhone 4 and includes an earphone jack cover.
Shipping takes 2-3 weeks.

xpBargains.com

Walmart: Sony Bravia KDL-46EX600 46in Class 1080p 60Hz LED LCD HDTV and Blu-ray Player Bundle $998

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 10:42am MDT

Walmart: Sony Bravia KDL-46EX600 46in Class 1080p 60Hz LED LCD HDTV and Blu-ray Player Bundle $998

Techbargains.com

Sony KDL-46EX600 Edge-Lit LED HDTV + Sony Blu-Ray Player $998 at Walmart

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 10:40am MDT

Walmart Coupon Codes

dealnews - 20 most recent deals.

McGuire-Nicholas 54-Pocket Builders Bucket Pro for $5 + $5 s&h

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 10:40am MDT

Preshers via Amazon.com offers the McGuire-Nicholas 54-Pocket Builders Bucket Pro Tool Organizer, model no. 1NT-22054, for $4.99. Shipping adds about $5, or spend over $25 for free shipping. Even with shipping, that's a $3 drop since our June mention and the lowest total price we've seen in years. This fits around a 5-gallon bucket to provide 54 pockets of tool storage.

xpBargains.com

Dell Outlet: 20% off Refurb Printers, 15% off all Dell Latitude series laptops and tablets

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 10:40am MDT

Dell Outlet: 20% off Refurb Printers, 15% off all Dell Latitude series laptops and tablets

dealnews - 20 most recent deals.

25-Foot CAT5e Ethernet Cable for $2 + free shipping

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 10:37am MDT

For "M" Club members only (it's free to join), mwave.com offers this 25-Foot CAT5 Ethernet Cable in Grey for $2.49 with free shipping. That ties a deal from two weeks ago and is the lowest total price we could find for CAT5 cable of this length by $3.
Acoustic Research 2.1-Channel Wireless Speaker System for $60 + free shipping

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 10:36am MDT

Today only, Dell Home offers the Acoustic Research AW880 2.1-Channel Wireless Speaker System for $59.99 with free shipping. That's the lowest total price we could find by $47. Sales tax is added where applicable. These 10-watt speakers operate on the 900MHz radio frequency and feature a 3.5mm port.

Techbargains.com

Livio Internet Radio Featuring Pandora (Access 11,000+ Radio Stations for FREE) $149.99 at Livio

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 10:35am MDT

Livio Coupon Codes
Bloomingdales Big Brown Bag Sale up to 65% Off + Extra 20% Off at Bloomingdale's

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 10:30am MDT

Bloomingdale's Coupon Codes

dealnews - 20 most recent deals.

Craftsman Professional 20V Cordless Circular Saw for $60 + $10 s&h

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 10:24am MDT

Today only, Sears offers the Craftsman Professional 20-volt Cordless Circular Saw, model no. 28102, for $85.49. In-cart, it falls to $59.99. Shipping adds $9.65, or choose free in-store pickup. Even with shipping, that's a $26 overnight drop and the lowest total price we've seen. Sales tax is added where applicable. This 7-1/4" circular saw features an electric brake, "on demand" Laser Trac laser, dual-bulb LED work lights, and more.

Techbargains.com

Logitech Anywhere Mouse MX Wireless Laser Mouse $39.99AR Free Shipping at Newegg

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 10:20am MDT

Newegg Coupon Codes

dealnews - 20 most recent deals.

Maytag 30" Self-Cleaning Stainless Steel Gas Range for $647 + pickup

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 10:19am MDT

Lowe's offers the Maytag 30" Self-Cleaning Freestanding Gas Range in Stainless Steel, model no. MGR8670WS, for $647.20. Opt for in-store pickup, otherwise you'll pay a stiff $79 for shipping. Even if you pay for delivery, that's the lowest total price we could find by $83. Sales tax is added where applicable. It features a 5.6 cu. ft. capacity, five burners, cast iron grates, and more. Deal ends September 8.

Techbargains.com

Asus UL50AT-X1 Intel Core 2 Duo SU7300 1.3GHz 15.6in Laptop (4GB/500GB/10hr) $585.75 at Buy.com

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 10:15am MDT

Buy.com Coupon Codes

dealnews - 20 most recent deals.

Seagate 1TB SATA 3Gbps Internal Hard Drive for $41 + free shipping

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 10:10am MDT

Today until 1 pm ET or when 100% claimed, Amazon.com offers the Seagate 7200.12 1TB Serial ATA 3Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive, model no. ST31000528AS, for $41.03 with free shipping ($0.04/GB). That's an $18 drop since our mention from two weeks ago and the lowest total price we've ever seen for a 1TB hard drive without rebate hassles. It features a 32MB cache and runs at 7200 rpm.

Techbargains.com

Logitech Coupon: 25% off Select G-Series Gaming Products (G700 $74.99) at Logitech

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 10:10am MDT

Logitech Coupon Codes

xpBargains.com

Bestbuy: Dyson DC17 HEPA Bagless Upright Vacuum - Yellow/Titanium $198

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 10:10am MDT

Bestbuy: Dyson DC17 HEPA Bagless Upright Vacuum - Yellow/Titanium $198

dealnews - 20 most recent deals.

Converse sale: Up to 50% off + extra 20% off, free shipping

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 10:09am MDT

Converse.com takes an extra 20% off with no minimum required via coupon code "20offnow". (It's even valid on Converse One and CONVERSE (RED) styles, which are often excluded from receiving extra discounts.) Plus, it applies to items in the sale section, which are already discounted by up to 50% off. Even better, all orders receive free shipping. Combined, it's the best discount we've seen from Converse this year. Sales tax is added where applicable. Gift cards, Design Your Own products, and international orders are excluded. Deal ends September 6.

Techbargains.com

Guitar Center: 15% off Any Single Item (Up to $500) at Guitar Center

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 10:05am MDT

Guitar Center Coupon Codes

dealnews - 20 most recent deals.

10-Foot HDMI Cable for $2 + free shipping

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 10:01am MDT

eForCity.com offers this 10-Foot HDMI Cable for $8.99. Coupon code "WOOTH10F" drops it to $1.99. With free shipping, that's the lowest total price we could find for an HDMI cable of this length, although we saw the same cable for $1 less three weeks ago.

Techbargains.com

Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB Internal SATA Hard Drive $79.99 at TigerDirect

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 10:00am MDT

TigerDirect Coupon Codes

dealnews - 20 most recent deals.

IDeePal for iPhone/iPad for $10

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 9:58am MDT

The iTunes App Store offers downloads of IDeePal for iPhone / iPod touch for $9.99. That's a $5 overnight drop and the best deal we've seen for this password utility. It combines a password manager with a web browser, enabling "one tap" logins. (See the demos.) Deal ends September 6.
Kershaw Hunting Knives for $10 + $5 s&h

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 9:54am MDT
Amazon.com offers a selection of Kershaw hunting knives for $9.99 each, as listed below. Shipping adds around $5, or spend over $25 for free shipping. Even with shipping, each knife is at the lowest total price we could find by at least $2. The deals:
- Kershaw LFK Pocket Knife for $9.99
- Kershaw Lockback Knife with Stainless-Steel Folder (pictured) for $9.99
- Kershaw Stainless Steel Folding Knife for $9.99
- Kershaw Little Lockback Folding Pocket Knife in Grey, Red, or Blue for $9.99
Amazon.com: Dog Toys from $4 + $5 s&h

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 9:51am MDT
Amazon.com takes 47% to 60% off the following dog toys. Shipping adds about 45, or spend over $25 for free shipping. Each is the lowest total price we could find (and is particularly low if you qualify for free shipping). The items:
- Coleman Brown Rabbit Pet Toy for $4.29
- Coleman Plump Duck Pet Toy for $4.75
- Doggles Cast of Characters Dog Toy for $5 in S, $7.99 in L (sold by Go Dogger)
- Coleman Prehistoric Pet Toy Stegosaurus Dino for $5.31

Techbargains.com

Kata DR-466 Digital Rucksack and National Geographic Tundra Monopod $49.95 at Adorama

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 9:50am MDT

Adorama Coupon Codes
Dyson DC17 All Floors Vacuum $197.99 at Best Buy

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 9:45am MDT

Best Buy Coupon Codes
PANTECH PG-C120 Silver Unlocked GSM Bar Phone with Camera $29.99 Free Ship at Newegg

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 9:40am MDT

Newegg Coupon Codes

dealnews - 20 most recent deals.

Sans Digital 3.5" SATA to USB 3.0 Hard Drive Enclosure for $30 + free shipping

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 9:38am MDT

For "M" Club members (free to join), mwave.com offers the Sans Digital TS1U-B 3.5" Serial ATA to USB 3.0 External Hard Drive Enclosure for $29.99 with free shipping. That's the lowest total price we could find by $10. This fanless "SuperSpeed" enclosure features a heat sink and support for hard drives up to 2TB.
Playskool Mrs. Potato Head Silly Suitcase for $10 + $4 s&h

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 9:36am MDT

Walmart offers the Playskool Mrs. Potato Head Silly Suitcase for $10. Shipping adds $3.97, or choose free Site-to-Store. Even with shipping, it's the lowest total price we could find by $2. (We saw two for $26 shipped in July.) Sales tax is added where applicable. It comes with 40 mix-and-match parts, a potato body, and carrying case.

Techbargains.com

HP dv7tse Intel Core i7-720QM Quad-Core 17.3in Laptop (6GB/640GB/Radeon HD5650/9-Cell Battery) $934 at HP

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 9:35am MDT

HP Coupon Codes
HP dv6tse Intel Core i5-450M 2.4GHz 15in Touchscreen Laptop (6GB/640GB/Blu-Ray/Radeon HD5470/Backlit Keyboard) $929 at HP

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 9:30am MDT

HP Coupon Codes

dealnews - 20 most recent deals.

Kodak EasyShare Z950 12MP 10x Zoom Digital Camera for $110 + free shipping

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 9:29am MDT

JR.com offers the Kodak EasyShare Z950 12-Megapixel Digital Camera in Black, model no. 1946193, for $119.99. Coupon code "GEICO10" drops it to $109.99. With free shipping, that's a $22 drop since our mention from a month ago and the lowest total price we could find now by $8. Features include a 10x 35-350mm optical zoom, 30 fps HD video capture with YouTube uploading, face detection, 32MB internal memory, SDHC card slot, PictBridge, USB 2.0 connectivity, and more.
Hot Diggity Dog Halloween Costume (M only) for $6 + free shipping

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 9:21am MDT

EntirelyPets via Amazon.com offers the Hot Diggity Dog Halloween Costume for Dogs in size M only for $6.20 with free shipping. That's 61% off and the lowest total price we could find. (It's $7 less than what EntirelyPets.com charges.) It fits dogs that measure 10"-14" from their nape of neck to base of tail.
0.31"-thick Samsung 55" 240Hz 3D LED-Backlit HDTV for $3,320 + free shipping

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 9:19am MDT

Electronics Expo offers the 0.31"-thick Samsung Series 9 Titanium 55" 240Hz 1080p Widescreen 3D LED-Backlit LCD HD Television, model no. UN55C9000, for $3,999. Coupon code "LSDA0903" cuts it to $3,320. With free shipping, that's $1,278 under our July mention and the lowest total price we've seen for this 2010 model. (It's also a current price low by $10, although most merchants charge over $3,600.) Coupon ends September 20.
The UN55C9000 features a built-in 3D processor that upconverts 2D content to 3D, native resolution of 1920x1080 (1080p), 240Hz refresh rate, edge-lit LED lighting, touchscreen remote, Ethernet connectivity, Internet @TV with Samsung Apps for content streaming from included Internet widgets (NetFlix, Pandora, and more), four HDMI inputs, and VGA, component, and other video inputs. Note that it doesn't include 3D glasses.
Backbreaker Football for iPhone or iPod touch for free

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 9:16am MDT

Today only, the iTunes App Store offers NaturalMotion's Backbreaker Football for iPhone or iPod touch for free. That's a $1 overnight drop and the best deal we've seen for this football game.

xpBargains.com

Mwave: Kingwin Kh-201u-s Aluminum Usb 2.0 External Enclosure $2 shipped AR

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 9:16am MDT

Mwave: Kingwin Kh-201u-s Aluminum Usb 2.0 External Enclosure $2 shipped AR
Verizon: High Speed Internet from $19.99/mo, Triple play bundle (TV + phone + Internet) from $84.99

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 9:15am MDT

Verizon: High Speed Internet from $19.99/mo, Triple play bundle (TV + phone + Internet) from $84.99
AT&T DSL: Price Drop - Elite Package $20/mo, Pro $15 + free Wireless Gateway or Modem+ Free WiFi+no contract

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 9:15am MDT

AT&T DSL: Price Drop - Elite Package $20/mo, Pro $15 + free Wireless Gateway or Modem+ Free WiFi+no contract

Techbargains.com

EXPIRING Sony BDP-N460 Network Blu-Ray Player (Refurb, Netflix & Pandora Streaming) $99.99 Free Ship at Sony Style

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 9:10am MDT

Sony Style Coupon Codes

dealnews - 20 most recent deals.

Set of 2 Winsome Wood Air Lift Adjustable Stools for $69 + free shipping

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 9:05am MDT

Amazon.com offers this Set of 2 Winsome Wood Air Lift Adjustable Stools, model no. 93329, for $69 with free shipping. (Walmart charges the same.) That's tied with last month's mention as the lowest total price we could find, this time by $35. They feature an air lift design for seat height of 25" to 30", metal stool base, black faux leather covered wooden seat, and more.

Techbargains.com

eBags 20% off + Free Shipping at eBags

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 9:05am MDT

eBags Coupon Codes

dealnews - 20 most recent deals.

Refurb Kodak Zi8 Pocket 1080p SDHC HD Camcorder for $80 + free shipping

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 9:04am MDT

Today only, newegg.com offers the factory-refurbished Kodak Zi8 1080p Secure Digital Card HD Digital Camcorder in Black, model no. 8796062, for $79.99 with free shipping. That's a $20 drop since our mention from two weeks ago and $50 under the lowest total price we could find for a new one. Features include a 1920x1080 (1080p) video resolution, built-in image stabilization, 128MB internal memory, SDHC card slot, up to 10 hours of video storage, 5-megapixel digital still shots, USB 2.0 connectivity, and more. A 90-day Kodak warranty applies.

Techbargains.com

LG M2762D-PM 27 inch Hybrid LCD HDTV & Monitor (HD Tuner, HDMI) $319.99 at Newegg

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 9:00am MDT

Newegg Coupon Codes

dealnews - 20 most recent deals.

New 6pm sales: 30% to 87% off Diesel, 30% to 72% off Columbia, more

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 8:58am MDT
This weekend, 6pm.com discounts a selection of men's, women's, and kids' apparel and shoes, as listed below. With $6.95 for shipping, that puts many items at the lowest total price we could find. (Spend over $100 for free shipping.) The deals, all ending September 6:
- 40% to 91% off XCVI women's apparel
- 30% to 87% off Diesel apparel, shoes, and accessories
- 64% to 78% off Chip and Pepper apparel
- 40% to 72% off Rieker shoes
- 30% to 72% off Columbia apparel and shoes
- 30% to 64% off 7 For All Mankind apparel
- 30% to 58% off Kamik shoes

Techbargains.com

Macys Extra 25% Off Clearance + Free Shipping $99+ at Macys

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 8:55am MDT

Macys Coupon Codes

xpBargains.com

Overstock: Olympia 22-inch 8-pocket Rolling Duffel $24

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 8:55am MDT

Overstock: Olympia 22-inch 8-pocket Rolling Duffel $24

Techbargains.com

HP TouchSmart TS600 2.13GHz All-In-One Desktop w/ 23in Touchscreen LCD (TV Tuner/Discrete GPU) $959.20 at Newegg

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 8:50am MDT

Newegg Coupon Codes

xpBargains.com

NewEgg: HP TouchSmart 600-1055 All-in-one 23in desktop P7450 4GB 750GB Blu-ray 11n $975 shipped

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 8:48am MDT

NewEgg: HP TouchSmart 600-1055 All-in-one 23in desktop P7450 4GB 750GB Blu-ray 11n $975 shipped

dealnews - 20 most recent deals.

Surebonder Heavy Cable Tacker for $5 + $6 s&h

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 8:46am MDT

Preshers via Amazon.com offers the Surebonder Heavy Cable Tacker, model no. 5545, for $4.99 plus $5.82 for shipping. (Spend over $25 for free shipping.) That's the lowest total price we could find by $12. This wire / cable tacker fastens 1/4" of round cable and 5/32" of flat wire.

Techbargains.com

Olympia 22-inch 8-pocket Rolling Duffel $23.99 at Overstock

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 8:45am MDT

Overstock Coupon Codes

dealnews - 20 most recent deals.

Men's 8mm Tungsten Carbide and Gold IP Ring for $16 + $3 s&h

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 8:37am MDT

Today only, AlphaShark.com offers this Men's 8mm Tungsten Carbide and Gold IP Ring for $19. Apply coupon code "3DEALNEWS3" to cut it to $16. With $2.95 for shipping, it's $12 less than the lowest total price we could find for a similar ring elsewhere. It features a gold iconic plate finish on the center band and is available in sizes 8 to 13.

Techbargains.com

Ashford 10% off Seiko + Free Shipping at Ashford

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 8:35am MDT

Ashford Coupon Codes
EXPIRING - GoGamer Coupon Codes Techbargains Exclusive! (save up to 80%) at GoGamer

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 8:30am MDT

GoGamer Coupon Codes

dealnews - 20 most recent deals.

Cobalt Flux Dark Ops Lock 'N Load Gun for Wii for $6 + $3 s&h

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 8:27am MDT

Today only, ihavetohavethat.com offers the Cobalt Flux Dark Ops Lock 'N Load Gun for Nintendo Wii for $5.99 plus $3 for shipping. That's the lowest total price we could find by $4. It turns a Wii remote (sold separately) into a gun peripheral.

CNNMoney.com

Can Ping be saved?

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 8:26am MDT

dealnews - 20 most recent deals.

Teenage Fanclub "Shadows" MP3 album for $3

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 8:26am MDT

Today only, the Amazon MP3 Store offers downloads of Teenage Fanclub's Shadows for $2.99. That's the best deal we could find for this 12-track alt-rock album, released in June. (iTunes charges $9.99.) Amazon MP3 downloader is required.

Techbargains.com

Dell Vostro 3500 Intel Core i3-350M 2.26GHz 15.6in Laptop (Aluminum) $549 Free Overnight Shipping at Dell Small Business

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 8:25am MDT

Dell Small Business Coupon Codes

xpBargains.com

Amazon: DEWALT DCD959KX 18-Volt 1/2-Inch XRP Hammerdrill/Drill/Driver $228 shipped

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 8:23am MDT

Amazon: DEWALT DCD959KX 18-Volt 1/2-Inch XRP Hammerdrill/Drill/Driver $228 shipped
Mwave: Mwave Premium Cat5e 25ft 350mhz Stranded Network Cable $2 shipped

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 8:22am MDT

Mwave: Mwave Premium Cat5e 25ft 350mhz Stranded Network Cable $2 shipped
Dell Home: MICROSOFT 250GB Xbox 360 Console with PRE-ORDER Madden NFL 11 $325 shipped

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 8:22am MDT

Dell Home: MICROSOFT 250GB Xbox 360 Console with PRE-ORDER Madden NFL 11 $325 shipped

dealnews - 20 most recent deals.

iSymphony W2C Wireless Digital Music System for $108 + $1 s&h

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 8:20am MDT

Today only, Walmart offers the iSymphony W2C Wireless Digital Music System for $108 plus 97 cents for shipping. (Or choose free Site-to-Store.) That's the lowest total price we could find by $48. Sales tax is added where applicable. It features 2.4GHz wireless speakers, 30 watts of power, universal iPod dock, MP3 playback via its slot-loading CD player, USB, and SD/MMC, and both a remote control and mini remote for the speakers.

Techbargains.com

Dell Vostro 3400 Intel Core i3-370M 2.4GHz 14in Laptop (Aluminum, 2GB/250GB) $549 at Dell Small Business

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 8:20am MDT

Dell Small Business Coupon Codes

xpBargains.com

Dell Home: CANON Canon EOS Rebel T1i EF-S IS Digital SLR Camera Kit $700 shipped

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 8:17am MDT

Dell Home: CANON Canon EOS Rebel T1i EF-S IS Digital SLR Camera Kit $700 shipped

Techbargains.com

Dell Vostro 3300 Intel Core i3-350M 2.26GHz 13.3in Laptop (Aluminum, 2GB/250GB) $599 at Dell Small Business

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 8:15am MDT

Dell Small Business Coupon Codes

xpBargains.com

Amazon: Porter-Cable 690LR 11 Amp Fixed-Base Router $122 shipped

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 8:12am MDT

Amazon: Porter-Cable 690LR 11 Amp Fixed-Base Router $122 shipped

Techbargains.com

Logitech G9x Wired Gaming Laser Mouse (Dented Box, Adjustable DPI/Weights/Grip) $47.99 Free Shipping at Logitech

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 8:10am MDT

Logitech Coupon Codes

xpBargains.com

Amazon: Serif WebPlus X4 $50 shipped

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 8:09am MDT

Amazon: Serif WebPlus X4 $50 shipped
Sears: Craftsman Professional 20-volt Lithium-Ion Cordless Circular Saw $60

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 8:08am MDT

Sears: Craftsman Professional 20-volt Lithium-Ion Cordless Circular Saw $60

Techbargains.com

The Sharper Image Airwerks Collection TSA Approved Notebook Case $15.99 Free Shipping at Geeks

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 8:00am MDT

Geeks Coupon Codes

The Simple Dollar

The Simple Dollar Time Machine: September 4, 2010

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 8:00am MDT by Trent

Many newer readers of The Simple Dollar haven’t been exposed to the hundreds of great articles in the archives of the site, so this is a weekly series that highlights the five best posts from one year ago this week, two years ago this week, and three years ago this week. I call it … the Time Machine.

One Year Ago (August 29 – September 4, 2009)
Revising My Money Goals – And Setting New Ones This isn’t just a one time thing. For me, it’s something to constantly revisit, think about, and reformulate.

Seven Tempting Places – And Eight Ways to Minimize Their Impact My best tactic is to simply avoid them. I rarely go to bookstores at all at this point, simply because I know they’re really tempting for me.

Some Thoughts on Building a Successful Friendship Relationships of any kind aren’t easy, especially if you aren’t blessed with a natural gift of social skills. Here are some thoughts on making friendships wirk.

21 Ways to Reduce Your Spending Without Making Your Life Miserable Many people associate cutting back with “lack of fun.” That doesn’t have to be true at all.

Your Mileage May Vary Not everyone has the same experiences with the same things in life. Something that works well for me might not work for you, and vice versa. That doesn’t mean that the ideas are bad, it just means you need to try lots of things and stick with what fits you.

Two Years Ago (August 29 – September 4, 2008)
Everything’s So Easy for Pauline: Thoughts on Luck, Fate, Money, and Life This is my single favorite post I’ve ever written on The Simple Dollar. I have felt like it was the pinnacle for two years now. It just clicks for me in a way that’s hard to describe.

The Personal Finance Secrets “They” Don’t Want You to Know About I just don’t think that paranoia and personal finance mix well. Making choices out of fear almost always results in more failure and fear.

How to Avoid the Trap of Splurging as a Reward for “Being Good” It’s tempting to splurge when you’re doing well, but when splurges undo all of your good work, it’s worthwhile to keep an eye on how far you’ve come and how much you can undo with just one choice.

Some Thoughts on Plasma Donation It works in a desperate pinch, but there are enough drawbacks that I don’t recommend it as a big money maker.

What’s An Appropriate Home Food Budget for a Family of Four? This post certainly stirred up some debate. It’s important to keep in mind that I only matched the USDA numbers buy buying expensive food items – organics, saffron, and so on.

Three Years Ago (August 29 – September 4, 2007)
Seven Nifty Tactics Credit Card Companies Use To Get Into Your Pocket – And How To See Right Through Them It’s all about the marketing – and big marketing firms, like the ones that represent credit card companies, are good at getting your attention and getting into your pocket.

Is An “Entertainment” Coupon Book Worth It? It really depends on your lifestyle and your willingness to really figure out the big values in the book.

The Real Scoop On Debt Elimination Programs Most of them repackage the advice you’ll find elsewhere and sell it to you as something fresh.

Potential Pitfalls For Paying Off Someone Else’s Debt The pitfall is that it adds a lender-borrower element to a personal relationship. Do you have a deep, unabiding love for your bank? I don’t either, and I don’t want to inject that feeling into my relationships.

What Constitutes An “Emergency” Where One Should Use An Emergency Fund? The answer varies for everyone, but I think it mostly comes down to the things you can’t handle in your monthly money cycle.

If you’d like to browse through more of the archives, visit the chronology, where all posts are listed in chronological order.

Ten Ways to Get More out of The Simple DollarUpdated!
This is kind of a FAQ for new readers and is posted each week along with the Time Machine. Here are ten great ways for new readers to dig deeper into The Simple Dollar.

1. Subscribe by email or RSS. Visiting The Simple Dollar’s website is great, but for many people, it’s more convenient to receive the articles in another form. It’s easy to join 60,000 other subscribers and get The Simple Dollar’s content by email or in your RSS feeder (if you’re unfamiliar with RSS, check out Google Reader.

2. Comment. Each article on The Simple Dollar has lively discussion. Just click on the green square in the upper right of each article on the website and join in!

3. Become a fan of The Simple Dollar on Facebook. I put up questions and other materials about once every week or two on Facebook (so you won’t be flooded with Simple Dollar updates). Join in the conversation with other Simple Dollar fans and occasionally get some interesting freebies, too.

4. Follow me on Twitter. I post interesting articles, quotes, follow-up material, commentary, and other material on Twitter. Follow me! If you’re unfamiliar with Twitter, it’s essentially an open discussion forum for people to share ideas and thoughts with other like-minded folks – you just choose the people you want to listen to and their ideas and thoughts are all delivered to you on a single page.

5. Read my story of financial meltdown and recovery. The Simple Dollar isn’t based on what I’ve read in books or learned in school. I’ve made a lifetime of financial mistakes – The Simple Dollar is a record of what works for me during the process of getting my life on a better track.

6. Download my free 49 page e-book. Everything You Ever Really Needed to Know About Personal Finance On Just One Page is completely free. It summarizes all of the key lessons I’ve learned along the way about personal finance in one tidy package – in fact, all of the main principles can be found right on the cover.

7. Dig through “31 Days to Fix Your Finances.” 31 Days to Fix Your Finances is an article series that outlines how you can get a grip on your finances over the course of a month.

8. Send me your questions and suggestions. Send me an email and let me know what you’re thinking, what you’d like to see, and any questions you might have. I try to respond to as many emails as possible and I read them all. I may even use your question in a future article!

9. Become a “Friend of The Simple Dollar.” If you find the stuff on The Simple Dollar valuable and are willing to spend five minutes or so a month to help me out with small things, please consider signing up to be a “Friend of The Simple Dollar”.

10. Email a great article you find to a friend. Find an article that you think your friend would love? At the bottom of each article, you’ll find a link that says “Email this” – just click on that, type in your friend’s address, and send it right along to them!

xpBargains.com

Amazon: Seagate Barracuda 7200 1TB Internal Hard Drive $41 shipped

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 7:59am MDT

Amazon: Seagate Barracuda 7200 1TB Internal Hard Drive $41 shipped

Techbargains.com

Pulsar by Seiko PXD958 Black IP and Goldtone Stainless Steel 50M Mens Watch $43 at ChronoShark

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 7:50am MDT

ChronoShark Coupon Codes
Lenovo IdeaPad U460 Intel Core i3-350M 2.26GHz 14in Laptop (only 4lbs/4GB/500GB/8-Cell) $649 at lenovo

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 7:40am MDT

lenovo Coupon Codes

xpBargains.com

Amazon: Coleman Brown Rabbit Pet Toy $4

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 7:37am MDT

Amazon: Coleman Brown Rabbit Pet Toy $4

Techbargains.com

HP Photosmart MZ67 8MP 6X Zoom Digital Camera (Refurb) $54.99 at Tanga

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 7:30am MDT

Tanga Coupon Codes

xpBargains.com

Dell Home: AUDIOVOX Acoustic Research AW880 Indoor Wireless Speakers (pair) $60 shipped

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 7:26am MDT

Dell Home: AUDIOVOX Acoustic Research AW880 Indoor Wireless Speakers (pair) $60 shipped
tanga: HP Photosmart MZ67 8MP 48X Zoom Digital Camera $55

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 7:24am MDT

tanga: HP Photosmart MZ67 8MP 48X Zoom Digital Camera $55

Techbargains.com

TODAY ONLY Acoustic Research AW880 Indoor Wireless Speakers (Pair) $59.99 Free Ship at Dell Home

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 7:20am MDT

Dell Home Coupon Codes

xpBargains.com

Walmart: Playskool Mrs. Potato Head Silly Suit $10

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 7:19am MDT

Walmart: Playskool Mrs. Potato Head Silly Suit $10
JandR: Kodak EasyShare Z950 12MP Digital Camera $110 shipped

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 7:17am MDT

JandR: Kodak EasyShare Z950 12MP Digital Camera $110 shipped

Techbargains.com

Schwinn Elite Heart Rate Monitor, Watch and Timer $29.97 at yugster

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 7:15am MDT

yugster Coupon Codes

xpBargains.com

Amazon: Kodak EasyShare Z950 12MP 10x optical Zoom Digital Camera $140 shipped

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 7:12am MDT

Amazon: Kodak EasyShare Z950 12MP 10x optical Zoom Digital Camera $140 shipped

Planet PHP

Local video stores going away? Hopefully not.

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 7:11am MDT by Michael Kimsal

Just saw a comment on a forum that ‘Blockbuster has a dead business model’, and I’ve noticed that one branch of our local video store chain closed. The other store, while still big, is feeling empty.

The rise of Netflix predicted the end of video stores years ago, but it didn’t happen. At least, not quickly. The rise of ‘video on demand’ also was seen as a nail in the coffin for video stores, but it didn’t happen right away either. ‘Video on demand’ is something we’ve had via Tivo for 3 years from Amazon, but I’ve only used it once. It’s not that convenient, perhaps due to a slow internet connection?

Cable services’ “on demand” options have probably hurt video stores too, but those have been around for a long time, and it didn’t seem to hurt video stores that much.

The advent of redbox and similar services, allowing quick, cheap rental of popular videos in convenient places – this is likely hurting video stores too.

It does seem the local video store may be in danger, and I’ll offer a few suggestions for local video stores who want to stay in business, and perhaps thrive.

1. Offer dropoff service with various local merchants. If I could drop off video-store X videos at the local grocery, subway, dry cleaners, gym, etc., even if I couldn’t rent another one, it would save me a trip and add to the convenience factor of dealing with your store.

2. Offer in-store systems to give me recommendations. I’ve been surprised that in 10 years, I’ve never seen a kiosk in any store that would let me hit IMDB or something similar. I can turn to the net and get movie recommendations, reviews, etc, but I’ve never been able to do that *at the moment I’m trying to make a decision*. Yes, many people come get the new releases and that’s it, but many stores have a large vast back catalog of items that just sit unwatched because people don’t know anything about them. Yes… it might be that videos people find on the web aren’t in stock. So… keep track of the movies people are looking up and… *get them* to rent.

3. Offer meal/movie deals with local eateries. Our local video store has a Burger King, Dairy Queen, PIzza Hut, Subway and private Greek and Chinese restaurants in the same shopping plaza – 1 minute walk from store to store. Yet none of them have ever paired up. I sometimes order my Chinese, walk down to the video store, rent a movie, come back and pick up the Chinese. I can’t be the only one doing this, but I bet if more people were offered $1 off a movie rental with a Chinese takeaway order, they’d be back. Or just a $20 “dinner/movie” package – here’s your coupon, go pick up the movie, and dinner’ll be ready in 10 minutes.

Eventually – years from now, even more people will live a digital lifestyle, and most movies will be available at the click of a button. But… I suspect it’ll be newer releases for a long time. Local video stores can survive for many years by offering a better shopping experience and catering to the niche interests.

Techbargains.com

OtterBox Cases Exclusive Coupon - 10% off + Free Shipping (iPhone 4 Defender Case $44.95) at OtterBox

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 7:10am MDT

OtterBox Coupon Codes

xpBargains.com

Amazon: Winsome Wood Air Lift Adjustable Stools, Set of 2 $69 shipped

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 6:57am MDT

Amazon: Winsome Wood Air Lift Adjustable Stools, Set of 2 $69 shipped

Techbargains.com

Dell Vostro 230 Mini Intel Core 2 Duo E7500 Desktop (2GB/160GB) w/ 20in LCD $419 at Dell Small Business

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 6:45am MDT

Dell Small Business Coupon Codes

MSNBC.com: U.S. News

Earl brushes Northeast, bears down on Canada

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 6:25am MDT

After toying with tens of millions of coastal residents and tourists along the East Coast, Earl finally made landfall Saturday morning — but in Canada's Nova Scotia province.

xpBargains.com

NewEgg: Kodak Zi8 Black 1.6MP 4x Digital HD Pocket Video Camera $80 shipped

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 6:21am MDT

NewEgg: Kodak Zi8 Black 1.6MP 4x Digital HD Pocket Video Camera $80 shipped
Walmart: iSymphony Audio System with Wireless Speakers $109 shipped

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 6:16am MDT

Walmart: iSymphony Audio System with Wireless Speakers $109 shipped

MSNBC.com: Technology & Science

Cheers to 'Dance Central' — the cure for two left feet

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 5:00am MDT

Just as "Guitar Hero" and "Rock Band" have created legions of rock 'n roll gods, the forthcoming motion-controlled game "Dance Central" will soon create an army of dancing queens and kings.

Planet PHP

Highlight source code lines in LaTeX

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 2:03am MDT by Tobias Schlitt

I love LaTeX for any kind of text writing (actually typesetting), simply because it creates so nice looking and consistent layouts. And, of course, because I can write it in my favorite text editor. We use LaTeX especially for presentation slides at Qafoo, since the beamer package provides such a convenient environment. Combined with listings package, presenting source code snippets with nice syntax highlighting has never been easier. However, there was one problem we did not solve, yet, until some days ago: Highlighting certain source code lines of a listing on different slides.

MSNBC.com: Technology & Science

Babes, bullets, bombs! Duke Nukem makes a comeback

Posted: September 3rd, 2010, 10:31pm MDT

Game icon Duke Nukem will wield his over-the-top guns and attitude yet again. After more than a decade of delays, "Duke Nukem Forever" will debut on the PS3, Xbox 360 and PC game systems in 2011.

Nettuts+

Build a Custom HTML5 Video Player: Free Premium Tutorial

Posted: September 3rd, 2010, 8:32pm MDT by Jeffrey Way

Much like the other various Envato marketplaces, our newly launched Tuts+ marketplace will offer a free file each month. For September, that free file/tutorial just so happens to mine! I’ll show you how to build a custom HTML5 video player with Flash fallback support.

Be sure to grab this one for free for the entire month of September. Next month, it’ll return to its original price.

Though the idea of a video-specific HTML element was suggested well over a decade ago, we’re only just beginning to see this come to fruition! Forget all of that “HTML5 2012” mumbo-jumbo; the truth is that you can use the video element in your projects right now! The only problem is that the video players are inconsistent from browser to browser, and full-screen support is, at the time of this writing, only available in certain browsers, via a right-click. Further, what if we want to brand our video player? Unfortunately, there isn’t an easy way to do so by default. The solution is to create a custom player that remedies all of these issues.

While we’re using a great deal of our Premium catalog to populate the new marketplace, it will quickly become dominated by unique tutorials, screencasts, and eBooks! Be sure to check it out if you haven’t already.

MSNBC.com: Technology & Science

NASA advises Chile on trapped, isolated miners

Posted: September 3rd, 2010, 7:00pm MDT

A team of NASA doctors and engineers recommended Friday that Chilean authorities regulate the day-and-night sleep patterns of 33 trapped miners, boost their Vitamin D intake and phase in an exercise program as their nutrition improves.
Is the grand design within our grasp?

Posted: September 3rd, 2010, 6:48pm MDT

Science editor Alan Boyle's Weblog: More than a decade ago, British physicist Stephen Hawking said there was a 50-50 chance that a unified "theory of everything" would be discovered within 20 years. Now he explains why he thinks the theory has been found.
Amazon may be headed for another bad drought

Posted: September 3rd, 2010, 5:02pm MDT

Drought has cut Peru's Amazon River to its lowest level in 40 years and it is already below the minimum set in 2005, when a devastating dry spell damaged vast swaths of South American rainforest in the worst drought in decades.

Nettuts+

An Analysis of Typography on the Web

Posted: September 3rd, 2010, 4:16pm MDT by Toni Kukurin
Typography is one of the most—if not the most—important aspects of web design. Some would argue that it takes up to 95% of web design, so why do we often neglect its importance? The readers who come to your site will often decide whether or not to stay according to your typographic choices. After all, they came here to read in the first place. Think about it for a second: if content really is king, logically typography should be treated as the queen.

In fact, even some font names suggest that classification; Futura, Optima, Times New Roman (OK, that’s probably a dude), Verdana, Lucida, Georgia, Helvetica… There’s no question about it, Typography is the queen. Therefore, she also needs to be dressed up properly before going out: she should put on some kerning and tracking, maybe a different font-variant, and already she’s looking like a real lady.

Not sure what I’m talking about? Well, read on.
Knowing Your (sans) Serifs
Before proceeding with this article, and especially if you don’t have much contact with typography, I suggest you fill the gaps of your Typographic knowledge from Typedia, taking special note of Typeface classifications and the anatomy of a typeface, which will serve you well when making your own font-stacks and pairing fonts.

After you finish reading the two articles on Typedia, come back here so we can tighten your newly-founded Typographic knowledge and prepare it for the next few chapters of this article.
Tightening Wisdom #1: Typefaces Relate
Typefaces have dynamic relationships and can look good or bad together, depending on who they’re mixed with and their differences. If we’d like to get technical, there are in fact three ways in which typefaces can relate:
1. Concord
  A concordant relationship is the one with no thrills, where two typefaces are very similar in characteristics. It can also be a single typeface in multiple styles and/or sizes.
2. Contrast
  When typefaces are fairly different from each other, contrast appears. It’s usually good to aim for contrast, for instance, between a serif and sans-serif typeface.
3. Conflict
  Two (or more) typefaces who have different characteristics that are still similar enough to create distress on a page are in conflict. You should usually avoid this type of relationship.
Tightening Wisdom #2: Typefaces Differ
Typefaces can vary. Whether it is weight, height, width, or anything else, every single typeface has some characteristic that makes it stand out. You should learn to spot these subtleties and adapt to their influence. And don’t think it doesn’t matter, since even various iterations of the same typefaces can be significantly unequal at times.

This specifically relates to the Web, where the art of creating and applying font stacks is very important. You do not have to pick exactly the same-looking typefaces for a fallback, but it’s only fair to say that an oldstyle font like Garamond should be backed up by another oldstyle typeface with sensibly similar characteristics (Caslon, Baskerville, Times, for instance).

Although they’re all serifs, Georgia, Garamond and Adobe Garamond Pro (200 point size in example above) look very different. Tightening Wisdom #3: Not Every Typeface is Suitable For All Situations
A modern font, such as Bodoni Condensed or Bodoni Bold is an excellent choice for headlines, whereas it would likely be a bad typeface for extensive lines of body copy, where it would only distract the reader from the content. An oldstyle like Garamond (I ♥ Garamond) is a much better choice for these situations.

Non-designers often make poor decisions when choosing typefaces for different occasions, and—although I’m going to skip the Comic Sans lecture—you should be aware of the fact that it’s not always suitable to use, say, Georgia for body copy. It’s also not always bad to use Arial as your preferred typeface; but do consider what message you are trying to convey, via your typography.
Learning From The Best
This article is not primarily a showcase, yet it’s always interesting to observe what other talented designers have done to make their (client’s) websites a delight to look at. We’re going to see what can be done with careful consideration for font decoration, as well as solid font-stacks and smart typographic choices.

(P.S. If you’d like to see other examples of nice Typography on line, browse through Typesites’ archives. There’s not too much content there, but they’ve covered some very good sites.)
Websafe Fonts: A List Apart
A List Apart shows how Websafe fonts can look good indeed when given enough thought.
Is Verdana the most boring typeface you can use? Not if you ask Jason Santa Maria. He was smart in using Verdana’s strength (X-height) to make body copy rather small in size for a dignified, elegant look that A List Apart deserves. The small size also makes it pleasant to read in the long run.

Georgia is mostly used for emphasis on certain page elements, and as a display typeface. From other noticeable design decisions, uppercase letters are small in size and positive letter-spaced for easier readability and better looks.
Font Stacks: Jon Tan
Jon Tan, attention to detail brings Typographic perfection.
Jon Tan, like Khoi Vin and Daniel Mall, also follows the cult of black & white minimalist design with carefully placed splashes of orange. Although there’s a lack of excitement in color choice, you could say that Jon makes up for it by taking extra care of his typographic choices. The CSS file of Jontangerine.com contains more than 250 different declarations for all micro-typography!

The main body copy is set in lovely Georgia, while centered headings appear in a Times-based font stack with Baskerville and Palatino:
```
font-family: baskerville, 'palatino linotype', 'times new roman', serif;
```
In other areas, typographic “color” is achieved using different font-variants, various shades of black and excellent font styling. Definitely one of the best typography-centered sites out there!
@font-face Embedding: Information Highwayman
Information Highwayman is embedding Justus, a free font.
You have probably heard a lot about @font-face embedding with CSS during the past few months. Although Internet Explorer has had a similar technique ever since its fourth iteration (we’re ashamed to admit this), only in 2009—when all of the five big browsers implemented @font-face (the right way)—did we start talking intensively about using non-core webfonts online.

There are, as you might know, a few considerable drawbacks to this technique (primarily copyright issues), but if you find a suitable font for your needs, you have every chance of improving the way readers experience your site. D. Bnonn Tennant (Information Highwayman) decided to use Justus for body copy, which contrasts quite well against the sans-serif background element (the “compelling magnum”) and helps in achieving the “worn-out” effect on the site.
Typekit: Elliot Jay Stocks
The slabby FF Tisa goes perfect with Elliot’s website.
Elliot likes to use Slab-Serif typefaces, which is exemplified in both his excellent 8 faces magazine on Typography (highly recommend it), with FF Unit Slab, and his own Website, where FF Tisa Web Pro is embedded using Typekit’s font embedding service.

There isn’t as much typographic styling on the site as, for instance, Jon Tan has; however, he’s done a great job with alignment and color, which also never should be overlooked and are important ingredients in good typography.
Image Replacement and sIFR: Squared Eye
Squared Eye uses sIFR Flash text replacement.
Although they’re rapidly becoming “old” replacement techniques, Flash and image-replaced text (both Cufón and manually inserted images) instead of ordinary text are important for cross-browser compatibility in sites whose visitors aren’t predominantly using modern browsers, as well as in cases where the particular font isn’t available due to one or the other reason (e.g., copyright issues).

Squared Eye places emphasis on different levels of headings with sIFR, as well as with manually inserted images. He’s using a beautiful slab-serif Archer in harmony with a Lucida-based font stack for a modern, yet still elegant look.
Putting Our Knowledge to Good Use
Although I’m going to provide a few font-stacks you can use in your designs, consider the following more as a “training” for making your own font stacks. There are already plenty of other sites out there which offer a lot of readymade solutions for both display and body copy text.

As the saying goes, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”
Gripping the Bases: Your Readers
Before beginning to build font stacks, you should become acquainted with your primary audience and determine what software and Operating Systems they use. That way, you can predict which fonts they might have installed, and how much typographic flexibility that provides you.

For instance; Matthew Smith (Squared Eye) probably (rightfully) predicted that most of his audience will not have a font like Archer installed on their computers and decided to embed it using Flash font replacement (comparing to Archer, ~97% of users have Flash installed).

Always design with core Webfonts first, and then gradually improve with font stacks)

For more information on fonts shipped with different software, browse through 24 Ways’ Font Matrix, Fluid Web Type and Apaddedcell. You might also find Microsoft’s extensive documentation on fonts that come with their products, as well as insight into their Typographic department, a useful read.
Notice The Small Things
When it comes to building font stacks, you’ll need to consider a few variables, when determining what make fonts different from one other (remember the Georgia-Garamond-Garamond comparison above?). This, again, comes down to your experience and familiarity with different font categories. You’ll need to learn to notice not only the way serifs are presented (are they slanted, or straight? Or do they not exist?), but also the small(er) differences between two similar typefaces.

Consider how they communicate with each other, their x-heights and readability on small sizes, as well as their form and direction. Even if this sounds, perhaps, intimidating right now, remember how practice makes perfect.

Example: Ibis Display and Archer, although both slab-serifs by category, probably wouldn’t make a good pair due to the significant difference in the way their serifs are presented and the noticeable thick/thin transitions on Ibis versus a monoweight Archer.
Writing a Sample Font Stack
I’ve already mentioned I like Garamond. So I’m going to base a font stack off of Times New Roman, which is the Web-safe font closest in appearance to the aforementioned oldstyle typeface.

I would like to mention that Garamond, due to its low X-height, likely isn’t the best choice when designing for excellent readability on screen (after all, it wasn’t made for screen presentation primarily), but it is fine if used on high enough font sizes (in my opinion, 16-17 pixel/1em Garamond is optimal).

In optical scaling, as it is called, smaller text sizes typically have larger x-heights, wider stem widths, and less typographic stem contrast and larger display sizes have smaller x-heights with more variation in stem widths.
– MSDN Blogs

How our font family will degrade in case Garamond isn’t available (Garamond colored blue in examples).
According to 24 Ways’ Font Matrix, Garamond is shipped with Office Word 2007 for Windows, and Word 2004 for Mac, which means that it’s available to a huge percentage of visitors. For those who don’t have it installed, I’ve provided a backup in the form of Adobe’s Caslon, Garamond and Minion Pro typefaces which come shipped with the Creative Suite (notice, however, that all of these fonts are also available for individual download; I’m mentioning the programs they ship with because I suppose a lot of you bought them with Adobe’s software).

I’ve also decided to use Crimson text from Google’s Webfont repository to provide a decent fallback before Times. The final font stack looks like this:
```
font-family: Garamond, Adobe Garamond Pro, Minion Pro, Adobe Caslon Pro, Crimson Text, Times, serif;
```
This font stack should be used exclusively on higher font sizes, especially because Windows is notorious for poor font rendering.

Chrome with default settings (left) and Safari with font smoothing set to Medium (right). May look subtle at first, but it makes a big impact on readability in smaller sizes.
If you were looking for extremely good on-screen readability, the high-x-height-blessed Georgia and Verdana (both fonts are from the nineties, made specifically for screen rendering) will provide more pleasing results in font-stacks.

For instance, we could take advantage of the similarity between the Lucida serifs (Fax and Bright, which also come with MS Word) and Droid serif from the Google Webfont repository to make a highly readable font-stack with a large x-height:
```
font-family: Lucida Bright, Lucida Fax, Droid serif, Georgia, Serif;
```
Once again Google’s webfonts come to action before a generic solution, mostly because Droid serif is much closer in appearance to Lucida than Georgia and Times, respectively.

A very similar Verdana-based stack would also contain the three almost equal Lucida sans-serifs (Grande – ships with Mac, Sans, Sans Unicode):
```
font-family: Lucida Sans, Lucida Sans Unicode, Lucida Grande, Verdana, Sans-serif;
```
Notice how the replacement fonts have similar characteristics, particularly how the g letter is virtually the same across typefaces, and how the o resembles a circle rather than an ellipse. As with most sans-serifs, they’re monoweight and don’t have any thick/thin transitions (Optima, for instance, isn’t monoweight —that’s what makes it more difficult to pair with other fonts).
Being Picky
While creating sensible font stacks is important, in order to provide excellent typography, you’re going to have to do the “extra ten percent” and provide typographical contrast using different font variants, weights, direction and nurturing care to all micro typographic methods.

Jon Tan tackles micro typography with extra care.
Jon Tan, for instance, uses some CSS3 selectors to create great visual impact.
```
.entry-content p:first-line,
.entry-content img + p:first-line {
	font-variant: small-caps;
	font-weight: 900;
	text-indent: 0px;
}
```
He’s using centered and italicized headings within a blog post in a Times-based font stack. This, when combined with justified text and his minimalistic design, makes for a very pleasant reading experience. Remember: small things do matter.

Mixing things up with a bold typeface, uppercase titles and positive letter spacing for smaller headings will many times provide a far better experience and contrast, as well as clearer separation to the body copy, than just a different typeface. Samantha Warren has covered Typographic hierarchy very well, and I suggest you read her article for a broader understanding of the topic.

Contrast improves separation. Can you even notice the second heading?
A seventeen pixel Garamond for body copy and 15px Lucida Sans for subheading level 4 (h4) do look quite different in the upper two situations, only due to a few small changes in our CSS:
```
body {
	font: 17px/1.4 Garamond, Adobe Garamond Pro, /* ... (look at the Garamond-based stack above) */ serif;
	color: #333;
	text-align: justify;
} 

h4#uppercase {
	text-transform: uppercase;
	font: bold 14px/1 Lucida Grande, Lucida Sans, Verdana, sans-serif;
	margin-top: 15px; letter-spacing: 1px;
}

h4#normalcase {
	text-transform: none;
	font-weight: normal;
	letter-spacing:0;
}
```
The italicized ampersands are another one of those techniques that prove how “small things matter” (notice, however, that not all fonts have “special” ampersands):
```
.amp {
	font-family:Adobe Caslon Pro,Garamond, Palatino Linotype, Bell MT, Minion Pro, Garamond, Constantia, Goudy Old Style, High Tower text, serif;

	/* The font-stack above contains some font-families that
	have nice ampersands. You should pick a couple that suit your
	needs on a particular website, rather than use all.
	For instance, Caslon, Palatino and Baskerville do a nice job
		most of the time. */

	font-style: italic;
	line-height: 0;
}
```
If you would like to automate the use of fancy ampersands (enclosing them to proper classes, as well as having some advanced typographic help), I suggest looking up the WP-Typography plugin for WordPress.
Additional JavaScript Enhancement
We could further improve our user’s experience by enhancing the site with some simple JavaScript to test whether she has a particular font installed on her system. Then, it’s simply a matter of picking a suitable fallback font, if the font isn’t available (i.e., increase font size to make another font more readable, use image replacement, load additional fonts, etc.).

Note that you should still consider the fact that a small percentage of users browse the web with JavaScript turned off.

You could, perhaps, add a noscript class to the body if JavaScript is disabled and prepare some sensible typography for it, accordingly.

That said, there are a few, essentially equal, techniques for discovering if a particular font is installed on the user’s system. I’m going to use a slightly modified version of Lucas Smith’s code:
```
function testFont(name) {
    name = name.replace(/['"]/g,'');

    var	body  = document.body,
		test  = document.createElement('div'),
		installed = false,
		template =
			'<b style="display:inline !important; width:auto !important; font:normal 80px/1 \'X\',sans-serif !important">mmmmmwwwww</b>'+
			'<b style="display:inline !important; width:auto !important; font:normal 80px/1 \'X\',monospace !important">mmmmmwwwww</b>',
		ab;

    if (name) {
        test.innerHTML = template.replace(/X/g, name);

        test.style.cssText = 'position: absolute; visibility: hidden; display: block !important';

        body.insertBefore(test, body.firstChild);

        ab = test.getElementsByTagName('b');

        installed = ab[0].offsetWidth === ab[1].offsetWidth;

        body.removeChild(test);
    }

    return installed;
}
```
Upon pasting the code into your JavaScript file, you can simply test whether a particular font is installed on the users’ computer by using conditional statements:
```
if (testFont("FontName"))
	// Do stuff if the font is installed
else
	// Do stuff if the font isn't installed, i.e. load Cufón replacement
```
One of the more interesting uses of this technique would possibly be linking to a font-loading file (@font-face, Google Webfonts…), in the case our preferred fonts aren’t available on the user’s system. That way, we improve performance, and don’t force the user to download extra ~30kb for no reason:
```
if (!testFont("Lucida Fax") && !testFont("Lucida Bright") && !testFont("Droid serif")) {

  var head = document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0];
  var webfontLink = document.createElement('link');
  webfontLink.rel = 'stylesheet';
  webfontLink.href = 'http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Droid+serif';
	// now we have <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Droid+serif">
  head.appendChild(webfontLink);

}
```
Further Reading and Resources
- Flipping typical loads local fonts and displays them in your preferred text. Can be a bit intensive on the computer.
- Better CSS Font stacks, from Unit Interactive. An oldie but goodie providing sample font-stacks suitable for both headlines and body copy.
- Web font specimen is a great tool for testing different fonts locally. You should also read the supporting A list apart article.
- 50 helpful Typography tools and resources from Smashing Magazine
- The non-designer’s design book, which covers basic Typographic and design principles for visual novices, a simple and quick read. You might find it useful that all fonts in the book are clearly named, so expect to find out how to differentiate them by type and category rather quickly.
- Already know your basics? Try The Elements of Typographic Style, an essential and excellent read for all designers, recommended by some of the best designers.
♣ ♠ ♣ ♠ ♣ ♣ ♠ ♣

I hope that you now have a better understanding of typography on the web. There’s definitely more to the matter, and I’ll enjoy hearing what you have to say about it in the comments!

MSNBC.com: Technology & Science

Want to play with Kinect? Bring a sweat rag!

Posted: September 3rd, 2010, 3:56pm MDT

Playing video games by moving your body rather than by pressing buttons on a controller is sweaty, sweaty work.
Cosmic Log: Why the N.Z. quake is no Haiti

Posted: September 3rd, 2010, 3:50pm MDT

Science editor Alan Boyle's Weblog: In January, a 7.0 quake hit Haiti, and 230,000 people died. Today, a 7.0 quake hit New Zealand, and early indications are that it caused relatively few major casualties. Why the difference?
Texas opens inquiry into Google search results

Posted: September 3rd, 2010, 3:27pm MDT

Google says Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott is investigating whether its Web search rankings are fair.
Google settles Buzz privacy lawsuit

Posted: September 3rd, 2010, 2:25pm MDT

Google has settled a lawsuit alleging privacy violations in connection with its Buzz social networking service, according to a court document filed on Friday.
Chinese satellites bump during secret maneuvers

Posted: September 3rd, 2010, 1:35pm MDT

A Chinese satellite may have intentionally nudged another spacecraft during secretive space maneuvers in near-Earth orbit, according to analysts.
Digg trying to avoid getting dug into obscurity

Posted: September 3rd, 2010, 12:45pm MDT

Digg, one of the first Internet sites that let users "dig" Web news stories by voting them thumbs up or down, is trying to avoid getting dug into obscurity.

Nettuts+

How to Create a Web-Based Drawing Application Using Canvas: New Premium Tutorial

Posted: September 2nd, 2010, 7:51pm MDT by Alex Moore

Combining HTML with the all new <canvas> feature, you can make some pretty awesome web apps! In this Premium exclusive tutorial, we will create a neat interactive drawing application using HTML and JavaScript. Along the way, we’ll also learn the basic concepts of the all new <canvas> feature. Become a Premium member to access this, as well as many other amazing tutorials and screencasts.

Join Net Premium
For those unfamiliar, the family of Tuts+ sites runs a premium membership service. For $9 per month, you gain access to exclusive premium tutorials, screencasts, and freebies from Nettuts+, Psdtuts+, Aetuts+, Audiotuts+, and Vectortuts+! For the price of a pizza, you’ll learn from some of the best minds in the business. Become a Premium member.
Quick Tip: Getting Offline Access with HTML5 Application Cache

Posted: September 2nd, 2010, 6:24pm MDT by Andrew Burgess
Just when you thought you’d seen all the cool features of HTML5, I’m here to bring you yet another one. The internet is no longer about just websites; it’s about web applications. Often, our users are on portable or mobile devices, and they won’t always have access to a network. With HTML5’s Application Cache, you can provide them with all or some of the functionality they would have online, no matter where they go.

Premium Members: Download this Video ( Must be logged in)
Subscribe to our YouTube page to watch all of the video tutorials! Step 1: Make the Cache Manifest
The trick here is using a cache manifest file. In its most basic form, it’s incredibly simple:
```
CACHE MANIFEST

# version 0.1

index.html
style.css
script.js
preview.jpg
```
Step 2: Serve the Manifest Correctly
This file needs to be served with a content-type header of text/cache-manifest; it’s really simple to do this with a .htaccess file:
```
AddType text/cache-manifest manifest
```
This will serve all files with an extention of “manifest” with the appropriate content-type header.
Step 3: Hook the Manifest In
To use the cache manifest file, you simply add a property to the html element:
```
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en" manifest="site.manifest">
	<meta charset='utf-8'>
```
Now, the next time a user visits your site / app, their browser will cache the required files. It’s that easy. If they browse to your URL when they’re offline, they’ll get the cached content.
Caveat: Refreshing the Cache
It’s important to note that even when the user is online, the browser will only go to the server to get new content in three cases:
1. The user clears their cache (obviously removing your content).
2. The manifest file changes.
3. The cache is updated via JavaScript
So, to force all your users to reload their cache, you can change something in the manifest file (not the files linked to, the actual content of the manifest file). Most of the time, you’ll probably just want to change a comment, and that will be enough.

If you want, build cache updating into your app via the JavaScript API; that’s beyond the scope of this quick tip, but if you want to learn more, check out this article at html5rocks.com.
Browser Support
Like a lot of other HTML5 features, the Application Cache is supported by all the modern browsers.

Chart from www.findmebyip.com
And that’s HTML5′s Application Cache; it’s pretty cool, and I’m sure it will be used by developers, of almost any site, to provide a gracefully degrading experience that keeps their users happy wherever they are. Thanks for reading!

Techbargains.com

Asus MS236H 23 inch Widescreen LCD Monitor (2ms, 16.5mm Thin) $149.99AR Free Shipping at Newegg

Posted: September 2nd, 2010, 2:20pm MDT

mwave Coupon Codes

Nettuts+

Creating a Web Poll with PHP

Posted: September 2nd, 2010, 12:58pm MDT by Erik Wurzer
Polls are nearly ubiquitous on the web today, and there are plenty of services that will provide a drop-in poll for you. But what if you want to write one yourself? This tutorial will take you through the steps to create a simple PHP-based poll, including database setup, vote processing, and displaying the poll.

Step 1: Plan & Create the Database
In order to store poll results, we’re going to store three pieces of information:
- A question identifier
- An answer identifier
- The number of votes a question/answer pair has gotten
For this tutorial, we’ll be using PDO and SQLite. If you’re working with SQLite3, you can create a new database via the command line tool; if you’re using an older version, a quick PHP script will do the trick. Here’s the one used for this tutorial:
```
<?php
echo "creating database\n";
try {
    $dbh = new PDO('sqlite:voting.db');
    $dbh->setAttribute( PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE, PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION );
    $dbh->exec('
        CREATE TABLE tally (
        QID varchar(32) NOT NULL,
        AID integer NOT NULL,
        votes integer NOT NULL,
        PRIMARY KEY (QID,AID))
    ');
}
catch(PDOException $e) {
    echo "ERROR!!: $e";
    exit;
}
echo "db created successfully.";
?>
```
This simple script will create a SQLite database in the directory you run it. Unlike mySQL, the database here is a flat file. If you’re familiar with SQL, the create should make sense to you, although the last line may be new to some people:
```
PRIMARY KEY (QID,AID)
```
This creates a composite key for the database. Entries in either column do not have to be unique to that column, but the combination of the two must be unique.
Step 2: Design Your Poll’s HTML
Before you start writing any PHP, you need to decide how to create your poll in terms of markup. We’re going to try to keep the markup as semantic and simple as possible. Your poll will have two looks:
- Question waiting to be answered
- Current Results of the poll
In writing this HTML, some classes will be included to help with the CSS later.
Poll View
Because a poll is primarily a list of answers, we’re going to incorporate an unordered list to contain those answers. For the question itself, we’re going to use a heading tag.
```
<form class="webPoll" method="post" action="test.php">
    <h4>What question would you like to ask?</h4>
    <ul>
        <li>Answer Here</li>
        <li>Another Answer Here</li>
    </ul>
</form>
```
That’s pretty basic, but doesn’t include any form elements. Radio buttons are the most appropriate since we’re only allowing one answer per poll. Also, we’re going to use the label tag to associate answers with the proper radio button. Now our form HTML looks more like this:
```
<form class="webPoll" method="post" action="test.php">
    <h4>What question would you like to ask?</h4>
    <ul>
        <li>
            <label class='poll_active'>
            <input type='radio' name='AID' value='0'>
            First Answer Here
            </label>
        </li>
    </ul>
</form>
```
That’s a little more complex, but not too bad. Still a bit more to add. We’re going to include a fieldset tag to open up some styling options, and of course we need a submit button!
```
<form class="webPoll" method="post" action="/poll/test.php">
    <h4>What question would you like to ask?</h4>
    <fieldset>
    <ul>
        <li>
            <label class='poll_active'>
            <input type='radio' name='AID' value='0'>
            First Answer Here
            </label>
        </li>
    </ul>
    </fieldset>
    <p class="buttons">
        <button type="submit" class="vote">Vote!</button>
    </p>
</form>
```
For each answer, a new LI tag is added and the value of the radio button incremented. That will eventually be done by our PHP. The extra HTML is the fieldset tag, and the paragraph wrapped around the button – both of which will be used by our CSS.
Answer View
The HTML is going to be nearly identical for the answer view. The line-item tags won’t contain a form element and we’ll be adding a div which can be used to show the percentage of votes that answer received. Here’s how that will look:
```
<li>
    <div class='result' style='width:20px;'>&nbsp;</div>
    <label class='poll_results'>
        10%: First Answer Here
    </label>
</li>
```
Yes, that’s an inline style you see there. That style will be generated by our PHP based on the current percentage of each individual answer. Here’s what we have so far:
Step 3: Style the Form
The HTML we created in the last step was not very attractive. Let’s see if we can fix that up a bit. We’re going to use the wonderful CSS3 PIE (progressive Internet Explorer) library so we can obtain a similar look across all browsers. To make this library work properly, there are numerous cases where you must apply a relative position to elements. You can read all the details on the library website.
Style the Form Tag
We’re going to use the form tag as our container. It’s going to have nice, rounded corners, and a bit of a drop shadow. The styles below also specify a width, and padding.
```
form.webPoll {
    background:#ededed;
    behavior:url(PIE.php);
    border:1px solid #bebebe;
    -moz-border-radius:8px;
    -webkit-border-radius:8px;
    border-radius:8px;
    -moz-box-shadow:#666 0 2px 3px;
    -webkit-box-shadow:#666 0 2px 3px;
    box-shadow:#666 0 2px 3px;
    margin:10px 0 10px 8px;
    padding:6px;
    position:relative;
    width:246px;
}
```
The key line here is the behavior attribute. This will be ignored by non-IE browsers and will add the CSS3 functionality to IE6-8.

Still ugly, but a noticeable improvement.
Box the Answers
Next, we’re going to create a nice box around the answers and use a bit of illusion to make the border look inset by a pixel. This is done by coloring the outer-most border (the fieldset) the same color as the interior, and then using the unordered-list tag as our real border. Here’s the CSS:
```
form.webPoll fieldset {
    background:#FCFAFC;
    behavior:url(PIE.php);
    border:1px solid #FCFAFC;
    -moz-border-radius:10px;
    -webkit-border-radius:10px;
    border-radius:10px;
    margin:0;
    padding:0;
    position:relative;
}
form.webPoll ul {
    behavior:url(PIE.php);
    border:2px #bebebe solid;
    -moz-border-radius:10px;
    -webkit-border-radius:10px;
    border-radius:10px;
    font-family:verdana;
    font-size:10px;
    list-style-type:none;
    margin:0;
    padding:10px 0;
    position:relative;
}
```
Style the Answers
Next we need to add a little CSS to make our options look better.
```
form.webPoll li {
    margin:0 16px;
    overflow:auto;
    padding:4px 0 6px;
    position: relative;
}
form.webPoll input {
    position: absolute;
    top: 4px;
    *top: 0;
    left: 0;
    margin: 0;
    padding:0;
}
label.poll_active {
    float:right;
    width:90%;
}
```
You might ask why we’re using absolute positioning on the inputs and floating the label. The reason is simple: multi-line answers. If an answer to your poll question is long, you want the radio button to look like a bullet on an unordered list – hanging. This will keep the text from wrapping around it if it’s multiple lines.

There’s also a style targeting IE specifically with the * hack to cause the buttons to line up properly in IE6-8.

We also need to style the bar used to show results. We’ll add that now:
```
form.webPoll .result {
    background: #d81b21;
    background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, from(#ff8080), to(#aa1317));
    background: -moz-linear-gradient(top,  #ff8080,  #aa1317);
    -pie-background: linear-gradient(#ff8080, #aa1317);
    border:1px red solid;
    -moz-border-radius:3px;
    -webkit-border-radius:3px;
    border-radius:3px;
    clear:both;
    color:#EFEFEF;
    padding-left:2px;
    behavior: url('PIE.php');
}
```
There’s another new attribute here: -pie-background, which allows us to, in conjunction with the PIE library, use gradient backgrounds in IE. There’s still a few touches to add.
Question and Button
A default H4 may not be what you’re looking for, so let’s add some styling to that.
```
form.webPoll h4 {
    color:#444;
    font-family:Georgia, serif;
    font-size:19px;
    font-weight:400;
    line-height:1.4em;
    margin:6px 4px 12px;
    padding:0;
}
```
And I’m not a big fan of default buttons, so we’re going to use a CSS sprite to liven it up a bit.
```
.buttons {
    margin:8px 0 1px;
    padding:0;
    text-align:right;
    width:122px;
}
.vote {
    background:url(res/vote.png) repeat scroll 0 0 transparent;
    border:medium none;
    height:40px;
    text-indent:-9999em;
    width:122px;
}
.vote:hover {
    background-position:0 -41px;
    cursor:pointer;
}
```
What about IE6? It doesn’t support the hover psudo-class! We can either leave those users out in the cold (they’ll still see the button default state) or we can use another lovely little GPL licensed library, Whatever:hover.
Last Bits
In order to accommodate some IE6 quirks, certain elements need to have something called “HasLayout” triggered. The easiest way to do this is to set a property of zoom for these elements. The property is ignored by non-IE browsers.
```
form.webPoll ul,li { /*// Make IE6 happy //*/
    zoom:1;
}
```
You’ll also notice there are borders between each question. This was done with an additional class on the LI tags specifying a border. The class will be assigned to all but the last item by the PHP script.

The completed CSS file is contained in the download.
Step 4: Create a PHP Class — Decide on the Interface
Now it’s time to create the PHP to generate polls, show results, and handle votes. I’d like to keep using the script as simple as possible, so I’m planning the usage ahead of time. To create a poll in a particular place in a page, you’ll just use the following PHP:
```
$a = new webPoll(array(
        'What subjects would you like to learn more about?',
        'HTML & CSS',
        'JavaScript',
        'JS Frameworks (jQuery, etc)',
        'Ruby/Ruby on Rails',
        'PHP',
        'mySQL'));
```
That’s it. You’ll pass an array to the constructor which contains the question followed by the answers. In order to track the questions in the database, we’ll create an MD5 hash of the question to use as an identifier.
Step 5: Decide on the Class Properties
There’s certain data that’s going to be needed by each poll; we’re going to store some of this in class properties. We’ll need to store the question and the answers, the basic HTML, the question identifier, and some information on how to draw the results bars. Here’s the start:
```
class webPoll {

    # makes some things more readable later
    const POLL = true;
    const VOTES = false;

    # number of pixels for 1% on display bars
    public $scale = 2;

    # the poll itself
    public $question = '';
    public $answers = array();

    # the HTML
    private $header = '<form class="webPoll" method="post" action="%src%">
                       <input type="hidden" name="QID" value="%qid%" />
                       <h4>%question%</h4>
                       <fieldset><ul>';
    private $center = '';
    private $footer = "\n</ul></fieldset>%button%\n</form>\n";
    private $button = '<p class="buttons"><button type="submit" class="vote">Vote!</button></p>';

    # question identifier
    private $md5 = '';
```
The initial constants will be used in one of the methods to make it more readable so it’s easier to know whats going on.

Take note of the hidden input that’s been added here. This is the question identifier used to store information in the database. All the values in the HTML surrounded by percent signs will be replaced.
Step 6: Create the HTML Poll or Answers
Since it’s already been decided the poll will be made by creating an object, let’s examine the __construct method.
```
public function __construct($params) {
    $this->question = array_shift($params);
    $this->answers = $params;
    $this->md5 = md5($this->question);  

    $this->header = str_replace('%src%', $_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'], $this->header);
    $this->header = str_replace('%qid%', $this->md5, $this->header);
    $this->header = str_replace('%question%', $this->question, $this->header);

    # has the user voted yet?
    isset($_COOKIE[$this->md5]) ? $this->poll(self::VOTES) : $this->poll(self::POLL);
}
```
In the first line, we peel the question off the array stack with array_shift, and store it in a property. We also store the questions, leaving them as an array. We also create the question identifier here, by making an md5 hash of the question itself.

The next three lines perform some replacements on the HTML. The first sets our form action to point at the page the poll is one. The second puts our question identifier in a hidden form field. The third puts our question into the HTML.

In the final line of the constructor we check if the user has voted on this particular poll, and if he has, we show the votes. If he hasn’t, we show the poll.
Step 7: Generate the Poll
Both generating the poll and generating the results are very similar operations. In order to keep our code DRY we break the creation into three methods. The main one is “poll”.
```
private function poll($show_poll) {
    $replace = $show_poll ? $this->button : '';
    $this->footer = str_replace('%button%', $replace, $this->footer);

    # static function doesn't have access to instance variable
    if(!$show_poll) {
        $results = webPoll::getData($this->md5);
        $votes = array_sum($results);
    }

    for( $x=0; $x<count($this->answers); $x++ ) {
        $this->center .= $show_poll ? $this->pollLine($x) : $this->voteLine($this->answers[$x],$results[$x],$votes);
    }

    echo $this->header, $this->center, $this->footer;
}
```
Here’s the breakdown of what’s going on in this function:

lines 2 & 3: We only need a vote button if the user hasn’t voted. Here we determine if we’re going to use the button HTML or not, and then either insert the HTML, or replace the %button% placeholder with an empty string.

lines 6 – 8: If we’re not showing the poll, we obviously need the results, so here we go fetch them. We also calculate the total votes cast for use later in determining percentages.

lines 11 – 12: This generates the LI tags in our HTML. Depending on if we’re showing the poll or the results, we generate different HTML. This HTML generation is handed off to two functions:
- pollLine
- voteLine
line 15: Simply dumps out the data to the page.
Step 8: The pollLine() Method
This is a very simple method, which takes the current index of the answer as an argument.
```
private function pollLine($x) {
    isset($this->answers[$x+1]) ? $class = 'bordered' : $class = '';
    return "
    <li class='$class'>
            <label class='poll_active'>
            <input type='radio' name='AID' value='$x' />
                {$this->answers[$x]}
            </label>
    </li>
";
}
```
It checks if there’s an answer after the current one on its first line, and if there is, applies a class of bordered to that LI tag. The very last answer won’t get this class, allowing us to achieve the visual effect intended.
Step 9: The voteLine() Method
This method is getting 3 parameters passed into it:
- $answer : The question answer for this line
- $result : The number of votes this option has gotten
- $votes : The total number of votes cast in this poll
With that information, the LI tags for the voting results can be produced.
```
private function voteLine($answer,$result,$votes) {
    $result = isset($result) ? $result : 0;
    $percent = round(($result/$votes)*100);
    $width = $percent * $this->scale;
    return "
    <li>
            <div class='result' style='width:{$width}px;'>&nbsp;</div>{$percent}%
            <label class='poll_results'>
                $answer
            </label>
    </li>
";
}
```
Since it’s possible for there to be no votes for an option, it will effectively leave $result unset. If we detect this we’ll give it a default value of 0 votes.

Next, we determine what percent of the votes the option got and finally use the scale property to determine the width, in pixels, that the results bar should be. Then we finally return the HTML containing all that information.
Step 10: Write the getData() Method
If you look back up a bit, you’ll see we call the getData() method which is defined as a static method in the class. Why static? Because if we decide to enhance this poll later by making it AJAX based, we’ll want access to that method without object creation. Here’s the method:
```
static function getData($question_id) {
    try {
        $dbh = new PDO('sqlite:voting.db');
        $dbh->setAttribute( PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE, PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION );

        $STH = $dbh->prepare('SELECT AID, votes FROM tally WHERE QID = ?');
        $STH->execute(array($question_id));
    }
    catch(PDOException $e) {
        # Error getting data, just send empty data set
        return array(0);
    }

    while($row = $STH->fetch()) {
        $results[$row['AID']] = $row['votes'];
    }

    return $results;
}
```
The question ID is passed into the method and it will return an array containing the answer ID’s and the number of votes that answer has. If an answer has no votes, it won’t have an entry in the array, which we’ve already dealt with in the voteLine() method.

Since database errors in web polls are particularly tragic, we’re simply going to return an empty array if one occurs. The user will get 0 votes for each result. In a production environment you might want to log this error to a file, or send the admin an email.
Step 11: Handling a Vote
We’re going to add a second static method to the class, and this one will handle incoming votes. Votes will only be counted if the user hasn’t voted before (as determined by a cookie) and once the user has voted we’ll set a cookie indicating this.

In this type of web application, it’s nearly impossible to stop multiple votes without excluding some legitimate users. Setting a cookie is just a basic precaution.

This is one of the more complex methods in our webPoll class, and we’re going to look at it in three parts.
```
static function vote() {
    if(!isset($_POST['QID']) ||
       !isset($_POST['AID']) ||
       isset($_COOKIE[$_POST['QID']])) {
        return;
    }
```
A call to the vote() method will be at the top of our PHP page, so the first thing we want to do is decide if there’s a vote to process or not. The above statement is how we determine this. Here’s what it says:
- If there’s no Question Identifier in our POST data (OR!!)
- If there’s no Answer Identifier in our POST data (OR!!)
- If a cookie has been set already matching the Question Identifier
If any of those are true, we don’t have to process a vote, and we leave the method.
```
$dbh = new PDO('sqlite:voting.db');
$dbh->setAttribute( PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE, PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION );

try {
    $sth = $dbh->prepare( "INSERT INTO tally (QID,AID,votes) values (:QID, :AID, 1)" );
    $sth->execute(array($_POST['QID'],$_POST['AID']));
}
catch(PDOException $e) {
    # 23000 error code means the key already exists, so UPDATE!
    if($e->getCode() == 23000) {
        try {
            $sth = $dbh->prepare( "UPDATE tally SET votes = votes+1 WHERE QID=:QID AND AID=:AID");
            $sth->execute(array($_POST['QID'],$_POST['AID']));
        }
        catch(PDOException $e) {
            $this->db_error($e->getMessage());
        }
    }
    else {
        $this->db_error($e->getMessage());
    }
}
```
This looks a lot more complicated then it really is. What happens here is we check if a particular answer has gotten a vote before. If it hasn’t we create a new record for that answer, and give it one vote. If it has, we update the existing record. So how’s it decide which to do?

PDO exception magic.

Remember at the very beginning we created our multi-column primary key? When we try to insert a record into the table which matches an existing QID/AID pair, an exception is thrown, and in particular the exception code is 23000 (duplicate key).

If the insert throws an exception, we’re going to check the exception code, and if it matches 23000, we’ll try to update the record instead. Of course if the insert fails for a different reason, or the update fails as well, we’re going to just issue a call to a method called db_error() which just echos a generic error message. Like before, a production environment would log this error and/or notify the admin.

Finally, the end of the method:
```
    # entry in $_COOKIE to signify the user has voted, if he has
    if($sth->rowCount() == 1) {
        setcookie($_POST['QID'], 1, time()+60*60*24*365);
        $_COOKIE[$_POST['QID']] = 1;
    }
}
```
By using rowCount() we can verify that we’ve either updated or inserted a vote. If a vote has been successfully registered we set a cookie indicating as much, using the question identifier as the cookie name.

In addition to setting the cookie, we populate the super-global $_COOKIE, so when the poll displays, it shows answers rather then presenting the poll again.
Step 12: Put It All Into Action
We’ve written the PHP, set up the CSS and HTML, now it’s time to put it all into use. In this example, we’re just going to drop everything into a page that’s otherwise blank. At the very top of the page, insert the following:
```
<?php
    include('webPoll.class.php');
    webPoll::vote();
?>
```
It’s important that this be the very top of the page, before any HTML. Why? Because if there’s a vote to process, a cookie may be written, and you can’t write cookies after anything else has been sent. The call to the static method vote() returns if there’s not the proper POST data to process.

Next, we’ll include all the styles we wrote as a seperate stylesheet. Also, we’re going to include a particular style just for IE that was mentioned earlier to enable the :hover psudo-class.
```
<link rel="stylesheet" href="poll.css" type="text/css" />

```
In the BODY of your HTML page, you’ll drop in the following PHP to insert the polls:
```
$a = new webPoll(array(
        'What subjects would you like to learn more about?',
        'HTML & CSS',
        'JavaScript',
        'JS Frameworks (jQuery, etc)',
        'Ruby/Ruby on Rails',
        'PHP',
        'mySQL'));

$b = new webPoll(array(
        'What is your question?',
        'Don\'t have one',
        'Why?',
        'When?',
        'Where?'));
```
That’s it! Thanks for reading. Any thoughts, questions, or suggestions?

Planet PHP

My interview at dot KDE

Posted: September 2nd, 2010, 7:31am MDT by Henri Bergius

Jos Poortvliet did an interview with me for dot KDE in this summer's aKademy and it has been online for a while now. In it we discuss things like Midgard as a storage engine for desktop applications, and Maemo's open QA process for Downloads applications. Some excepts:

At maemo.org we have an appstore for FOSS applications on the Maemo platform. This appstore is enabled by default on all Nokia N900s so we wanted to have some quality control. We had to create our own appstore approval process, compatible with the FOSS philosophy. Now any developer can submit an app, and anyone can test and vote. The whole process is completely transparent, auditable and visible. And it also provides a feedback channel from testers and users to the developers!

...

Midgard is a data storage service. Whether you write desktop or web applications, instead of coming up with your own file format, you just use Midgard. You can work more easily and object-based. Users have many different devices these days, so Midgard has strong replication features to synchronize between different systems. Midgard is built on top of GObject; we provide bindings to a bunch of different languages so developers can choose the tools they like - PHP, Python, Javascript. Currently (as in now, while we're talking) Qt bindings are being developed here at Akademy.

Read the whole interview.
Packt launches fifth annual Open Source Awards

Posted: September 2nd, 2010, 4:21am MDT by Ken Guest

Packt launches fifth annual Open Source Awards

The 2010 Open Source Awards was launched last month by Packt, inviting people to visit www.PacktPub.com and submit nominations for their favorite Open Source project. Now in its fifth year, the Award has been adapted from the established Open Source CMS Award with the wider aim of encouraging, supporting, recognizing and rewarding all Open Source projects.
WordPress won the 2009 Open Source Content Management System (CMS) Award in what was a very close contest with MODx and SilverStripe. While MODx was the first runner up, SilverStripe, a Most Promising CMS Award winner in 2008, made its way to the second runner up position in its first year in the Open Source CMS Award final.
The 2010 Award will feature a prize fund of $24,000 with several new categories introduced. While the Open Source CMS Award category will continue to recognize the best content management system, Packt is introducing categories for the Most Promising Open Source Project, Open Source E-Commerce Applications, Open Source JavaScript Libraries and Open Source Graphics Software. CMSes that won the Overall CMS Award in previous years will continue to compete against one another in the Hall of Fame CMS category.
These new categories will ensure that the Open Source Awards is the ultimate platform to recognise excellence within the community while supporting projects both new and old. “We believe that the adaption of the Award and the new categories will provide a new level of accessibility, with the Award recognizing a wider range of Open Source projects; both previous winners while at the same time, encouraging new projects” said Julian Copes, organizer of this year’s Awards.
Packt has opened up nominations for people to submit their favorite Open Source projects for each category at [www.PacktPub.com] . The top five in each category will go through to the final, which begins in the last week of September. For more information on the categories, please visit Packt’s website [www.PacktPub.com]

Nettuts+

Quick Tip: What you May Not Know About JavaScript’s Logical AND Operator

Posted: September 1st, 2010, 6:41pm MDT by Jeffrey Way
In today’s video quick tip, we’ll be reviewing JavaScript’ logical AND operator. Those of you who are just beginning to get into JavaScript, or even a library like jQuery, might not realize that they can even be used as micro if statements!

Subscribe to our YouTube page to watch all of the video tutorials! Example 1: General Usage
```
// EXAMPLE 1
var a = 5,
	b = 10;

if ( (a === 5) && (b === 10) ) {
	alert('yay');
}
```
The AND operator’s use in the code above is what the huge majority of us are most familiar with. If a equals 5, and b equals 10, then do something awesome, like display an alert box that says, “Yay!”

The right side of the && operator will only run if the left side is equal to true. With that in mind, we can use this to our advantage!

Example 2: Checking if an Element Exists
In most of my AJAX-based applications, there will be a point where I must first determine whether an element with a particular id exists within the DOM. If it does not, I’ll create it. Otherwise, I’ll work with the element that already exists. Generally, we can use an if statement for this sort of task.
```
if ( !document.getElementById('contents') ) {
  // then call a function that inserts the element into the DOM.
}
```
Alternatively, we can use the && operator to accomplish this task.
```
!document.getElementById('contents') && createElem('div', 'contents', 'hello world');
```
Remember, that fake createElem function will, again, only run if the left side is equal to true. Think of it this way: is it true that we could not find an element with an id of contents on the page? If so, then move on to the right side. Now if it’s equal to false, the right side will never run.
Example 3: Loading jQuery Locally
When reviewing the HTML5 Boilerplate, I noticed that Paul uses a clever one-liner that potentially loads a local version of jQuery, if, for some reason, there was an error downloading the file from your CDN of choice.
```
!window.jQuery && document.write('<script src="localjQuery.js"><\/script>');
```
Is it true that jQuery does not exist? If so, move on to the right side, and insert a script element, which references jQuery locally. Nifty, eh?
Conclusion
Before you go crazy with this technique, be careful. It certainly makes for slightly less readable code, and that should be an important factor in your decision — especially when return to six month old projects!

Planet PHP

Zend Framework is a BOSSie Award Winner

Posted: September 1st, 2010, 10:22am MDT by Zend Developer Zone

Last week, while I was on vacation, the news broke that IDG's InfoWorld had announced its annual InfoWorld Bossie Award winners ("Bossie" stands for "Best of Open Source Software"), and that Zend Framework had won the " best open source application development software " award.
Speaking at PHPNW 2010

Posted: September 1st, 2010, 9:36am MDT by John Mertic

I’m excited to announce I’ll be speaking at PHPNW Conference, to be held October 9th, 2010 in Manchester, UK. I’ll be doing my talk, “Developing Easily Deployable PHP Applications“, which I also did in July at OSCON. I’m working on making the talk even better based upon feedback I received, and will talk more about the various tools we use and have developed to make building SugarCRM easier.

This is my first time to this conference, but judging from the lineup of talks it is not one to miss if you are in the area. The lineup has several exciting talks about PHP development from some of the biggest names in PHP. You can register now at the conference website; early bird registration ends on September 4th.

Dev Articles - Programming Help and Tutorials for all development technologies

Styling HTML Lists with CSS: Manipulating Padding and Margins at the Same Time

Posted: September 1st, 2010, 7:00am MDT

In this third part of a series I demonstrate how easy it is to manipulate simultaneously the padding and margins of an HTML list with CSS. In fact the process is so simple that you shouldn t have major trouble replicating it when designing your own web pages....
Recompile one file & boost performance Quickly find & fix hotspots with Intel® Parallel Studio. Get the eval guide.

Planet PHP

Contributing to ZendFramework

Posted: September 1st, 2010, 2:13am MDT by ThinkPHP /dev/blog - PHP

... on contribution
Who hasn't ever started writing his own Framework/CMS? It is considered best practice for learning purposes, but going through all the security stuff can be stressful and boring at the same time. That's where most devs start to contribute to big Open Source-projects like Typo3 or the Zend Framework, because they are already experienced working with it and yet evolving another system on the market or even getting people to contribute seems like an unachievable task. Instead of wasting his time on yet another ACL implementation, the developer is taking part in making a software become even better, no matter if he delivers new features, reports / fixes bugs or works on documentation (another, yet an often underestimated part of contribution). It is also worth noting that every single Blog-entry and every HowTo thats put on the web also is a great deal of contribution that helps the software spreading. Beginners articles are important to put on the web since every one of us had it's beginnings and these are the sort of articles where many people decide to either use the software for a certain project or not.

As you might see, this article is not only a guide on contributing bugfixes, but also I want to motivate you to just give it a try.
... on Zend Framework
Having spent almost a year at the IRC support channel, I can tell they're really fun guys to hang around with. Of course, the Framework itself developed into a great piece of software. I do not want to discuss the up or downsides of a use-at-will framework, neither I want to recommend it over {put your favourite software here}. But what I can talk about is a little summary of the support channel's chatlogs. The widely annouced channel (which is #zftalk on Freenode) includes all kinds of concerns. One kind of people finds bugs, the other do have really clever ideas on improvements, but when you ask them to contribute its all the same: they either think it takes years to get into it, the others think they might be "not good enough for this". We sure won't force or threaten people to contribute, but what I can do is taking the fear out of it and demystify the thing, so later you might see that its actually just a few minutes to spend. Let me just loose a few words to the latter ones before we get into it: You can't destroy anything, and every idea of yours can also lead to a great improvement either realted to your concern or in a completely different area. We're glad that you take your time, even if you are completely new to ZF. Some beginners concerns already caused developers to write guides and articles that are still around and are linked at times in #zftalk...
... on contributing to Zend Framework
Contributing any code to ZF requires signing the CLA, which is an agreement that both you have the right to share any code you supply, and that you will not patent that code. This is to ensure that the frameworks codebase remains business friendly, and free to use for everyone. In fact you have to actually sign a paper, having done this you can just scan and mail or fax it. This is an important step, and none of your code will be used in any official package unless you did this.

The next step will be reading the coding & subversion standards. If you already had a look at actual ZF components code you should be familiar with the standards. Once you took a short insight (you probably wont be able to just remember all of this at once), you can check out the official SVN repository. Notice, that you, even having signed the CLA and being confirmed, do not have commit rights. So you might now ask yourself how to contribute then? All magic is taking place in the bugtracker, ZF's official Jira. All bug tickets, additions and improvements are filed as tickets here. So if you find a bug, report it here, and soon there will be a discussion in the comments section of a ticket.

Mostly all of these people, being listed by their reallife names, are also to be found on different names in the support channel, so feel free to ask them any ticket-related stuff.

The code itself will be submitted as a patch file (svn diff > patchFile), and uploaded in the Jira-Ticket. This might also be done by people who do have commit rights, but one might not be sure how to fix a problem, or any question might be left. This method of code management then leaves it to the original package developer to decide whether a change should be made or it should be thought over again (might have side effects on other packages and so on).

The last yet very important point is unit tests. ZF makes heavy use of th
Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 1916 bytes)

Nettuts+

21 Ridiculously Impressive HTML5 Canvas Experiments

Posted: September 1st, 2010, 12:30am MDT by Abhin Sharma

HTML5 is the thing to talk about these day. Today, we have a collection of some ridiculously impressive HTML5 canvas-based experiments that will make you say, “Wow!” Let’s take a peek at some of the latest, cutting edge examples out there.

1. 8 Bit Color Cycle 2. Particle Letter Animation 3. Cloth Experiment
This is one of the best canvas-based experiments.
4. Particle System
This is one of my favorites — absolutely amazing!
5. Strange Attractors
This example generates beautiful fractals, like the ones generated by Apophysis. Be sure to tick the composite .
6. Canvas Nebula 7. Bomomo 8. Liquid Particles 9. Fake Floor Reflections 10. Sinous
This is a really fun game; is it not as easy as it looks!
11. Water in HTML5 12. Blob 13. Magnetic System 14. Trail 15. Particles 16. Shattering Box Physics Simulation
This incredible example depicts real world physics in action.
17. Flower Power
Try to guess the word.
18. 9Elements Particle Play
This is a beautiful example which demonstrates audio and canvas in action.
19. Beauty of Maths 20. Tree 21. Cloth Simulation
So what do you think? Getting your own ideas for a neat canvas application? Well, now you have more than one reason to create HTML5 apps: CodeCanyon just launched an HTML5 category! Have fun!
Quick Tip: Working with MySQL and SUM

Posted: August 31st, 2010, 4:17pm MDT by Burak Guzel

In today’s quick tip screencast, we’re going to learn a MySQL query trick. You might be already familiar with the SUM() and IF() functions. We will be combining them to come up with some useful queries. This can reduce the number of queries you need to run for fetching certain types of summary data, and also provide a performance improvement.

Premium Members: Download this Video ( Must be logged in) Subscribe to our YouTube page to watch all of the video tutorials!

Planet PHP

Big step forward in Modular Database Applications with DataObjects

Posted: August 31st, 2010, 4:00pm MDT by Alan Knowles

Article originally from rooJSolutions blog
Being a Software Developer is all about developing applications faster, and delivering quicker. At the same time ensuring that quality is not lost and readibility is kept. DB_DataObjects is one of the key tools in my productivity toolkit. It was originally designed as a way of ensuring that shared database related code ends up in the right place, In the Model layer of the application, rather than the View or Controller (or worse mixed in to some hybrid PHP html garbage..), along with doing cool stuff like Query building etc.
Over the years, of using DataObjects, I've built up quite a library of reusable DataObjects, which to some degree can be plugged in to any project. A Person object that handles login/authentication and authorization (working with the Permissions and Group objects). A Image object that handles storage of Images, and Files that can provide File type conversion for rendering (using things like unoconv, etc.)
More recently, I've been using the Roo Javascript library as the UI component, the Pman Components ontop of the very lightweight html_FlexyFramework. The result is a very modular set of Application development parts. That can quickly be thrown together to build applications. Here's how they all fit together and how it just got a whole lot more modular and flexible...
The fine art of application virtualization

Posted: August 31st, 2010, 9:23am MDT by John Lim (PHP Everywhere - By John Lim)
The new 8-core Intel Xeon 7550 processors are extremely powerful and a good platform for virtualised applications. My company is setting up PHP application running on a Xen based virtualisation on two HP Proliant DL580 for a total of 64 cores in a high availability environment. . Why Virtualise?
First let's investigate why virtualisation is attractive. The advantages are:
- Simplified maintenance, as all software is running on virtual machines (VMs). Easy to stop and start VMs from the VM server console.
- High availability is easier to achieve, as you can just restart the VM on a secondary server if the primary server fails, assuming that the VM is stored in shared storage accessible by all servers, using shared storage methods such as NFS, iSCSI or a SAN (Storage Area Network).
- Able to optimize server hardware utilisation globally as CPUs, memory, hard disk, network resources are all shared.
The disadvantages are strangely enough related to the advantages:
- The maintenance is simplified, but the initial setup is more complex as not merely do you need to setup the hardware and the operating systems, but you have to plan out the virtual environment, such as the virtual network, and make sure that everything is properly sized as you are buying a few big machines, instead of lots of smaller servers.
- High availability means you need to invest in high quality shared storage to store the shared VMs, typically a SAN, the SAN switches and the Fibre Channel HBA cards to connect to the SAN switches.
- Need to over-configure the hardware as there is some overhead in virtualisation, particularly in terms of network I/O and storage I/O. CPU overhead for virtualisation is normally not a concern with modern virtualisation technologies such as VMWare, Xen, or Hyper-V.
In this case, our customer was comfortable with virtualisation, as they are big users of IBM AIX Logical Partitions and VMWare. Secondly, they already operate several large Storage Area Networks, and merely had to upgrade the SAN to support us. Lastly they had the budget to pay for all of this :) VM Technology
We are using Zend Server CE (PHP 5.2), Apache 2.2 and Oracle 11gR2 running on Red Hat Linux 5.5 and Oracle VM 2.2 (which uses the Xen Hypervisor).
In the VM world, there are 4 main technologies that are popular:
- VMWare - the market leader, this company has been doing virtualisation for over 10 years and they have good products.
- Xen Based products - Xen is an open source technology that arose from some research on Hypervisors (the bare metal OS that controls all the virtual machines) done in Cambridge University. Today, several companies offer products using Xen, including Red Hat, Citrix, and Oracle. Has good support for Linux and Windows.
- KVM - many kernel hackers were dissatisfied with Xen (because the Xen Hypervisor is not Linux-based internally), resulting in the development of KVM, which is fully Linux based. KVM is not as mature as Xen, but improving really fast. Support Linux and Windows.
- Hyper-V - Microsoft's virtualisation technology. Microsoft is committed to supporting Linux also.
We chose Oracle VM (Xen) because it has good performance with Linux and Oracle databases (naturally). Oracle VM is free with optional paid support available. There are also licensing advantages to using Oracle VM with Oracle databases. Oracle database licensing dictates that if you are using virtualisation technologies such as VMWare and are purchasing CPU licenses, you still have to pay database licenses for all the CPU cores of the server, even if the database VM is using only 1 core. However if you are using Oracle VM, then you only have to pay for the CPU cores you use using; this is known as "hard-partition" licensing in Oracle terminology.
I also have experience with VMWare, and can recommend it as an mature alternative. Apparently the Citrix Xen Server is a good product, but I don't have experience with it.
I will cover more technical details in part 2, which i will be writing in September after I complete this installation.
The fine art of application virtualization

Posted: August 31st, 2010, 8:09am MDT by John Lim (PHP Everywhere - By John Lim)
The new 8-core Intel Xeon 7550 processors are extremely powerful and a good platform for virtualised applications. My company is setting up PHP application running on a Xen based virtualisation on two HP Proliant DL580 for a total of 64 cores in a high availability environment. . Why Virtualise?
First let's investigate why virtualisation is attractive. The advantages are:
- Simplified maintenance, as all software is running on virtual machines (VMs). Easy to stop and start VMs from the VM server console.
- High availability is easier to achieve, as you can just restart the VM on a secondary server if the primary server fails, assuming that the VM is stored in shared storage accessible by all servers, using shared storage methods such as NFS, iSCSI or a SAN (Storage Area Network).
- Able to optimize server hardware utilisation globally as CPUs, memory, hard disk, network resources are all shared.
The disadvantages are strangely enough related to the advantages:
- The maintenance is simplified, but the initial setup is more complex as not merely do you need to setup the hardware and the operating systems, but you have to plan out the virtual environment, such as the virtual network, and make sure that everything is properly sized as you are buying a few big machines, instead of lots of smaller servers.
- High availability means you need to invest in high quality shared storage to store the shared VMs, typically a SAN, the SAN switches and the Fibre Channel HBA cards to connect to the SAN switches.
- Need to over-configure the hardware as there is some overhead in virtualisation, particularly in terms of network I/O and storage I/O. CPU overhead for virtualisation is normally not a concern with modern virtualisation technologies such as VMWare, Xen, or Hyper-V.
VM Technology
We are using Zend Server CE (PHP 5.2), Apache 2.2 and Oracle 11gR2 running on Red Hat Linux 5.5 and Oracle VM 2.2 (which uses the Xen Hypervisor).
In the VM world, there are 4 main technologies that are popular:
- VMWare - the market leader, this company has been doing virtualisation for over 10 years and they have good products.
- Xen Based products - Xen is an open source technology that arose from some research on Hypervisors (the bare metal OS that controls all the virtual machines). Several companies offer products using Xen, including Red Hat, Citrix, and Oracle. We chose Oracle VM because it has good performance when running Oracle databases (naturally), it is free to download, and also for database licensing reasons. Oracle database licensing dictates that if you are using virtualisation technologies such as VMWare and are purchasing CPU licenses, you still have to pay database licenses for all the CPU cores of the server, even if the database VM is using only 1 core. The only exception is if you are using Oracle VM, then you only have to pay for the CPU licenses you use using what is known as "hard-partition" licensing.
- KVM

Dev Articles - Programming Help and Tutorials for all development technologies

Styling HTML Lists with CSS: Specifying Padding and Margins in Pixels

Posted: August 31st, 2010, 7:00am MDT

In this second part of a series you will learn how to assign individual values to the padding and margin properties of an HTML list. The process is simple to understand it s very similar to performing the same task with other web page elements....
GoGrid Cloud Center Connect Cloud and Dedicated Servers on Your Private Data Center

Planet PHP

Collecting Garbage: PHP's take on variables

Posted: August 31st, 2010, 2:23am MDT by Derick Rethans
Collecting Garbage: PHP's take on variables London, UK Tuesday, August 31st 2010, 09:23 BST
This is the first part of three-parts column that was originally published in the April 2009 issues of php|architect.

In this three part column I will explain the merits of the new Garbage Collection (also known as GC) mechanism that is part of PHP 5.3. Before we start with the intricate details of PHP's new GC engine I will explain why it is actually needed. This, combined with an introduction how PHP deals with variables in general is explained in this first part of the column. The second part will cover the solution and some notes on the GC mechanism itself, and the third part covers some implications of the GC mechanism, as well as some benchmarks. But now first on to the introduction.

PHP stores variables in containers called a "zval". A zval container contains besides the variable's type and value, also two additional bits of information. The first one is called "is_ref" and contains a boolean value whether this variable is part of a "reference set". With this bit PHP's engine knows how to differentiate between normal variables, and references. However, PHP has user-land references—as created by the & operator, but also an internal reference counting mechanism to optimize memory usage. The second piece of additional information, called "refcount", contains how many variables names—also called symbols—point to this one zval container. All symbols are stored in a symbol table, of which there is one per scope. There is a scope for the main script (ie, the one requested through the browser), as well as for every function or method.

A zval container is created when a new variable is created with a constant value, such as:
```
$a = "new string";
```
In this case the new symbol name "a" is created in the current scope, and a new variable container is created with type "string", value "new string". The "is_ref" bit is by default set to "false" because no user-land reference has been created. The "refcount" is set to "1" as there is only one symbol that makes use if this variable container. Also, if the "refcount" is "1", "is_ref" is always "false". If you have Xdebug installed you can display this information by calling:
```
xdebug_debug_zval('a');
```
which displays:
```
a: (refcount=1, is_ref=0)='new string'
```
Assigning this variable to another variable name, increases the refcount:
```
$a = "new string";
$b = $a;
xdebug_debug_zval( 'a' );
```
which displays:
```
a: (refcount=2, is_ref=0)='new string'
```
The refcount is "2" here, because the same variable container is linked with both "a" and "b". PHP is smart enough not to copy the actual variable container when it is not necessary. Variable containers get destroyed when the "refcount" reaches zero. The "refcount" gets decreased by one for each symbol linked to the variable container leaves the scope (f.e. if the function ends) or when unset() is called on a symbol. The following example shows that:
```
$a = "new string";
$c = $b = $a;
xdebug_debug_zval( 'a' );
unset( $b, $c );
xdebug_debug_zval( 'a' );
```
which displays:
```
a: (refcount=3, is_ref=0)='new string'
a: (refcount=1, is_ref=0)='new string'
```
If we now call "unset( $a );" the variable container, including the type and value will be removed from memory.

Things get a tad more complex with compound types such as arrays and objects. Instead of a scalar value, arrays and objects store their properties in a symbol table of their own. This means that the following example creates three zval containers:
```
$a = array( 'meaning' => 'life', 'number' => 42 );
xdebug_debug_zval( 'a' );
```
which displays (after formatting):
```
a: (refcount=1, is_ref=0)=array (
        'meaning' => (refcount=1, is_ref=0)='life',
        'number' => (refcount=1, is_ref=0)=42
)
```
Graphically, it looks like:

You can see the three zval containers here: "a", "meaning" and "number". Similar rules apply for increasing and decreasing "refcounts". Below we add another element to the array, and set it's value to the contains of an already existing element:
```
$a = array( 'meaning' => 'life', 'number' => 4
```
Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 4743 bytes)
How to Roll Your Own JavaScript Compressor with PHP and the Closure Compiler

Posted: August 31st, 2010, 1:21am MDT by SitePoint Â» PHP
In my previous post, I discussed the Closure Compiler’s REST API. In this article, we’ll develop a small PHP program that shows how the API can be used to compress JavaScript code whenever you need it.
Why write your own system?

You’ll find that several free tools handle this task; one of the first PHP JavaScript compressors was written by Ed Eliot. Sometimes, however, they require technologies you don’t use — such as Java — or may not cater for internal workflow processes, including:
- distributing uncompressed JavaScript to developer PCs
- integration with source control systems
- automating your build, and so on
Important: This is not production-level code!
The code below implements a rudimentary JavaScript compressor in PHP to illustrate the basics. The code calls the Closure Compiler compression API every time a request is made, so it’s likely to be slower than multiple uncompressed JavaScript files. You should add your own functions to handle caching to a file or database.
The html

Assume you normally include the following script tags at the bottom of your html:
```
<script src="script/file1.js"></script>
<script src="script/file2.js"></script>
<script src="script/file3.js"></script>
```
We’ll replace this block with a single script tag that references all three files.
The .js is removed and the file names are separated with an ampersand:
```
<script src="script/?file1&file2&file3">
</script>
```
The PHP

We now require an index.php file within our script folder. The first code block transforms the GET parameters into an array (file1, file2, file3) and initializes the variables:
```
<?php
// fetch JavaScript files to compress
$jsfiles = array_keys($_GET);

$js = '';		// code to compress
$jscomp = '';	        // compressed JS
$err = '';	        // error string
```
We now loop through the JS files, read the content, and append it to the $js string. If a file is unable to be found or read, its name is appended to the $err string:
```
// fetch JavaScript files
for ($i = 0, $j = count($jsfiles); $i < $j; $i++) 
{
  $fn = $jsfiles[$i] . '.js';
  $jscode = @file_get_contents($fn);
  if ($jscode !== false) {
    $js .= $jscode . "\n";
  }
  else {
    $err .= $fn . '; ';
  }
}
```
If any files are missing, we can generate a JavaScript alert to inform the developer:
```
if ($err != '') {
  // error: missing files
  $jscomp = "alert('The following JavaScript files 
could not be read:\\n$err');";
}
```
If there are no errors and we have some JavaScript code, we can proceed with the compression. The $apiArgs array contains a list of Closure Compiler API options — you can add, remove, or modify these as necessary. The arguments are encoded and appended to the $args string:
```
else if ($js != '') {
  // REST API arguments
  $apiArgs = array(
    'compilation_level'=>'ADVANCED_OPTIMIZATIONS',
    'output_format' => 'text',
    'output_info' => 'compiled_code'
   );
   $args = 'js_code=' . urlencode($js);
   foreach ($apiArgs as $key => $value) {
     $args .= '&' . $key .'='. urlencode($value);
   }
```
We can now call the Closure Compiler API using PHP’s cURL library. The compressed JavaScript is returned to the $jscomp string:
```
  // API call using cURL
  $call = curl_init();
  curl_setopt_array($call, array(
    CURLOPT_URL => 
'http://closure-compiler.appspot.com/compile',
    CURLOPT_POST => 1,
    CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS => $args,
    CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => 1,
    CURLOPT_HEADER => 0,
    CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => 0
  ));
  $jscomp = curl_exec($call);
  curl_close($call);
```
Finally, we return our compressed code to the browser with the appropriate MIME type:
```
}
// output content 
header('Content-type: text/javascript'); 
echo $jscomp; 
?> 
```
Download the Code

Save yourself some typing and "/>
Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 3132 bytes)

Nettuts+

Introducing the Tuts+ Marketplace – Making Premium Accessible to Everyone

Posted: August 30th, 2010, 9:03pm MDT by Skellie
We’ve just launched the Tuts+ Marketplace, where Premium quality tutorials – both from our Tuts+ Premium program and from unaffiliated authors – are available to purchase individually. Our Tuts+ Premium program will still stay exactly the same – you’ll get all the same things, for the same price. But now, non-members will be able to purchase selected Premium tutorials on a one-off basis, without a Premium membership.
Hey! Look for this link!
So far we’ve added nearly half our Premium tutorials to the Tuts+ Marketplace, and will be adding more over time. To find out if a Premium tutorial is available for sale on the Tuts+ Marketplace, look for this link:
Q + A More Information
Here are answers to some of your likely questions about the Tuts+ Marketplace. Please read through these, and if you have any more questions they may be answered in the special edition podcast Introducing the Tuts+ Marketplace (with me and Sean Hodge as a special guests hehe). If not, leave a comment!

Listen to the podcast! QWhat does this mean for Premium members?
That it’s a lot easier to see the value you’re getting as part of Premium. With files on the marketplace priced between $3 and $7, your Premium subscription gives you access to thousands of dollars worth of files for $9 a month. Premium will still work exactly the same and cost the same – so you’ve got nothing to worry about! The marketplace is more for people who aren’t Premium members, and for those who want access to user-submitted tutorials that aren’t available as part of Premium – or anywhere else.
QWhat will be sold on the Tuts+ Marketplace?
We’ve seeded the site with our Tuts+ Premium tutorials, but anyone can submit a tutorial for sale on the Tuts+ Marketplace. If it’s ‘Premium’ quality, it will be accepted. Eventually, the marketplace will be filled with tutorials you can’t find anywhere else.
QWho benefits from the Tuts+ Marketplace?
If you only have time to go through 1 or 2 Premium tutorials a month, or only want to pay for the Premium tutorials you need, the Tuts+ Marketplace is perfect for you. You can purchase tutorials on a one off basis, and files are priced between $3 – $7.

As the marketplace grows, authors will come in from elsewhere to sell their tutorials. There will be high-quality tutorials on the Tuts+ Marketplace that you can’t get anywhere else, so if you love learning from great tutorials, you should keep tabs on the Tuts+ Marketplace.

If you go through lots of Premium tutorials, the Tuts+ Premium subscription is better value for you. The option that’s right for you will depend on your needs.
QWhat categories does the marketplace cover?
We currently host the following categories, and will be expanding our selection over time:
- Design
- Web Development
- Audio & Music
- Multimedia
- Video
- 3D Graphics
- Photography
- Mobile Development
- Business
- eBooks
Forums Have your say!
Because the Tuts+ Marketplace is built on our Envato Marketplaces app, we have dedicated Forums. Head on over, sign up for the marketplaces, and tell us what you think of the Tuts+ Marketplace.

Planet PHP

The fine art of application virtualization

Posted: August 30th, 2010, 8:19pm MDT by John Lim (PHP Everywhere - By John Lim)

The new 8-core Intel Xeon 7550 processors are extremely powerful and a good platform for virtualised applications. My company is setting up PHP application running on a Xen based virtualisation on two HP Proliant DL580 for a total of 64 cores in a high availability environment. We are using Zend Server CE (PHP 5.2) and Oracle 11gR2. More info later as i have to go for dim-sum with relatives in a few minutes time.
Beware of the default Apache 2 config for PHP

Posted: August 30th, 2010, 12:52pm MDT by Ilia Alshanetsky

About a week ago, I was doing some upgrades on my development machine and came across a rather nasty issue when it comes to how .php(s) files are associated with PHP in Apache. It seems that a number of distros including Gentoo (which is what I was using) are using the following configuration directive to make the PHP module parse PHP files:
<IfModule mod_mime.c> AddHandler application/x [httpd-php] .php AddHandler application/x [httpd-php-source] .phps </IfModule>

The non-obvious problem with the above is that it will allow not only "file.php" to be treated as PHP scripts, but also "file.php.txt", which means that any file containing ".php" in its name, no matter where in the filename, would be treated as a PHP script. This of course creates a rather nasty security hole, since many upload file validation tools, only check the final extension. Consequently allowing the user to by-pass the validation, by simply prefixing another "harmless" extension like .txt, .pdf, etc... to the filename, but still get the code to execute.

To mitigate this problem you should instead use the following configuration, that would only pick-up of files ending with a .php extension.

<IfModule mod_mime.c> AddType application/x [httpd-php] .php AddType application/x [httpd-php-source] .phps </IfModule>

The difference between the two configurations being that the original uses AddHandler (bad) and the latter uses AddType (good).
PHP Manager for IIS 7 – beta release

Posted: August 30th, 2010, 10:30am MDT by Ruslan Yakushev
Today I am releasing PHP Manager for IIS 7 – beta, which is an IIS extension for setting up and managing multiple PHP installations on IIS 7 servers. It can be used to:
- Register PHP with IIS;
- Run multiple PHP versions side by side;
- Check PHP runtime configuration and environment (output of phpinfo() function)
- Configure various PHP settings
- Enable or disable PHP extensions
- Remotely manage PHP configuration in php.ini fille
The PHP Manager installation packages can be downloaded from these locations:
- PHP Manager for IIS 7 – beta – x86
- PHP Manager for IIS 7 – beta – x64
The project’s home page and documentation are located at [phpmanager.codeplex.com] . This blog post describes how the PHP Manager for IIS can be used.
Installation
From the Downloads page select the installation package that is appropriate for your target machine. Download and run the installer, which will install and register PHP Manager’s binaries with IIS. Note that only IIS versions 7.0 and above are supported. After installation is complete, launch the IIS Manager and find the “PHP Manager” feature:

When opened, the “PHP Manager” feature provides a configuration overview for the PHP installation that is registered with IIS and is currently active. If no PHP is registered with IIS, then the only action that can be performed is the registration of a new PHP version.
Registering PHP with IIS
To register a new PHP version with IIS, first you need to download the zip archive with PHP binaries from [windows.php.net] and then extract the files from it into a folder of your choice. Note that you can also install PHP by using Web Platform Installer or the Windows installer from [windows.php.net] – the PHP Manager can be used to manage those PHP installations as well.

Click on “Register new PHP version” task and then provide the full path to the location of the main php executable file: php-cgi.exe:

After clicking OK the new PHP version will be registered with IIS and will become active. This means that all the sites on this IIS server by default will use this PHP version.
Switching between PHP versions
After multiple PHP versions have been registered with IIS, you can use PHP Manager to easily switch between the versions on a server and site level. This means that you can configure some IIS sites to use one PHP version, while other sites use different version.

Checking phpinfo() output
phpinfo() function in PHP provides very detailed information about all aspects of PHP runtime configuration. To check the phpinfo() output from within PHP Manager use the “Check phpinfo()” task.

Configuring Error Reporting
You can use PHP Manager to configure error reporting level in PHP. If IIS is used on a development machine then you may want to use verbose error reporting in order to see all the errors, warnings and notices from your PHP application right away. If IIS is used as a production server, then error reporting level is less verbose and errors are logged in a log file, but never communicated to HTTP client.

"/>
Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 2028 bytes)

Nettuts+

Building a Sleek AJAX Email Signup Form

Posted: August 30th, 2010, 10:06am MDT by Michael Barrett
In this tutorial, we’ll learn how to create a slick email signup form. This form will harness the full power of AJAX, meaning that we will submit data to the server, validate it, and receive a response – all without a single page refresh! Along the way, you should pick up some useful tips related to PHP and JavaScript, as well as general programming best practices.

Step 1: The Plan
So, we want to create an email signup form, but not just any signup form: we want to create a super-responsive, AJAX-powered email signup form. This means no pesky page refreshes, giving the end user real-time status updates, and all the juicy goodness of server side data validation. Here is a flow chart of exactly how we want this to work:

To accomplish all this hocus pocus, we’ll need to use some pretty cool web technologies. These include JavaScript (with a little lot of help from jQuery), AJAX, PHP, MySQL and JSON. Heres a rundown of what we will be using each technology for:
- JavaScript – Submit data to the server and parse messages received from the server. We will be using jQuery to handle our AJAX calls and parse our JSON.
- PHP – Process the data sent to the server. This will include validating the data (making sure it’s OK to put in the database) and handling the response to send back to the browser.
- MySQL – Store the signup data.
- JSON – Glue all of the above together. I will explain more about JSON later in this tutorial.
So we know how we want it to work, and we know what technologies we want to use: it’s time to get started!

Step 2: Setting Up the MySQL Database
Ok, first things first: we need to set up our database. At the moment the only data we want to record is the user’s email address, and the date and time he or she signed up. Open up PHPMyAdmin (or whatever program you use to manage your MySQL database) and create a new table in your database using the following statement:
```
CREATE TABLE `signups` (
  `signups_id` int(10) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `signup_email_address` varchar(250) DEFAULT NULL,
  `signup_date` date DEFAULT NULL,
  `signup_time` time DEFAULT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`signups_id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM AUTO_INCREMENT=1 DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;
```
The above should be sufficient for what we need. signups_id is an auto incrementing field to assign a unique id to each record, signup_email_address is a varchar field and will be the email address the user uses to sign up with, and signup_date and signup_time are date and time fields which will record when the user signed up. Next, we need to set up the HTML.

Step 3: Setting up the HTML
```
<form id="newsletter-signup" action="?action=signup" method="post">
    <fieldset>
        <label for="signup-email">Sign up for email offers, news & events:</label>
        <input type="text" name="signup-email" id="signup-email" />
        <input type="submit" id="signup-button" value="Sign Me Up!" />
        <p id="signup-response"></p>
    </fieldset>
</form>
```
This should be the bare minimum HTML that we need to get this working (I have not included the body tags or header stuff in this snippet just to save space. Do note that you will need to have jQuery loaded on your page). All we need is a text input, a submit button, and a message placeholder. Obviously, you need a label for the input, and I have used a fieldset as I am working with an XHTML strict doctype. The placeholder is where our status message to the user is going to be shown. At the moment it should just be empty.

So here’s our form in all its glory. Looks pretty plain, doesn’t it? I’m going to do some CSS for our form to make it look a little less windows95-ish.
```
* {
    padding:0;
    margin:0;
}

body {
    font-size:12px;
    font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
}

fieldset {
    border:none;
}

form {
    width:930px;
    margin:20% auto;
    padding:15px;
    border:solid 6px #9FCBFF;
    -moz-border-radius:6px;
    -webkit-border-radius:6px;
    border-radius:6px;
}

input {
    border:none;
    background-color:none;
}

#signup-email {
    border:1px solid #999999;
    color:#9E9E9E;
    padding:5px;
    margin-left:10px;
    margin-right:4px;
}

#signup-email:focus {
    border-color:#9FCBFF;
    background-color:#DFEEFF;
    background-image:none;
    color:#000;
}

#signup-button {
    background-color:#9FCBFF;
    color:#FFF;
    -moz-border-radius:10px;
    -webkit-border-radius:10px;
    border-radius:10px;
    padding:5px;
    text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px #5FA8FF;
}

#signup-button:hover {
    cursor:pointer;
    background-color:#7FB9FF;
}

#signup-response {
    display:inline;
    margin-left:4px;
    padding-left:20px;
}

.response-waiting {
    background:url("loading.gif") no-repeat;
}

.response-success {
   background:url("tick.png") no-repeat;
}

.response-error {
   background:url("cross.png") no-repeat;
}
```
That’s better. Although our response message is not yet visible (as there in no response yet) it will appear next to the “sign me up” button like so:

Step 4: The Glue
Now that the database access and mark-up have been completed, we need to know how we are going to link the two together.

How is the JavaScript going to be able to send and receive messages from a completely different programming language (PHP)? We are going to use something called JSON.
What is JSON?
JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight, text-based open standard designed for human-readable data interchange (similar to XML in intent). JSON is often used for serializing and transmitting structured data over a network connection. It is primarily used to transmit data between a server and web application, serving as an alternative to XML. JSON is derived from the JavaScript programming language for representing simple data structures and associative arrays, called objects. Despite its relationship to JavaScript, it is language-independent, with parsers available for virtually every programming language. Yep, that includes PHP. Here is a snippet of JSON:
```
{"hey I'm a key":"and I'm its value!"}
```
As you can see it’s super-simple. We have encapsulated a key-value pair in some curly braces. The key-value pair relationship is indicated using a colon. The curly braces indicate that this is an object, and everything inside of them is part of that object. You can have multiple key-value pairs in an object:
```
{"hey I'm a key":"and I'm its value!",
 "hey I'm another key":"and I'm its value!",
 "you guessed it, I'm a key":"and I'm its value!"}
```
All we have done is split the key-value pairs using a comma. The key-value pairs are actually referred to as members of the object (the JSON object). You can get even more fancy and have an array as a value of a key which holds more objects
```
{"key1": {
  "key2": "value2",
  "key3": "value3",
  "key4": {
    "value4": [
      {"newobject_1_key_1": "newobject_1_value_1", "newobject_1_key_2": "newobject_1_value_2"},
      {"newobject_2_key_1": "newobject_2_value_1", "newobject_2_key_2": "newobject_2_value_2"},
      {"newobject_3_key_1": "newobject_3_value_1", "newobject_3_key_2": "newobject_3_value_2"}
     ]
  }
}}
```
Let’s go through this:
- Key1′s value is an object.
- Inside that object there are key-value pairs for key2 and key3.
- Key4 has an object for its value.
- Value 4 is an array of 3 more objects, which contain 2 key-value pairs each.
But that’s getting too complicated for our needs.

All we are going to need to do is get the server to send us a JSON response containing two members (key-value pairs): one for the status and one for the message. This will look like so:
```
{"status":"success","message":"Wahey! You've been signed up!"}
```
status will indicate whether the signup process was successful or not. message will be the message related to the status. If the status is ‘success’ we want to tell the user they are signed up. If the status is ‘error’, then we want to tell the user what went wrong. So if we’re telling the user what has happened via the message member, why do we need the status member? Well, there are two reasons. The first is that we want to apply a class to the response message holder, so that we display a green tick for success and a red cross for an error. The second reason is there can be only one success message that can be sent back (indicating the user has been signed up), but there are up to four error messages that could be sent back. Error messages will occur in the following cases:
- The user did not enter an email address.
- The user entered an invalid email address.
- The email address the user entered has already been used.
- There is some kind of technical error and the user can not be validated or added to the database.
This means that we also need to know the exact text responses of each message, in order to assign the correct class to the message holder. This equals one massive headache. What if we wanted to change the message sent back? We would then need to revise the code used to assign the class to the message holder as well. It is so much easier to send back the status.

Don’t worry if you do not understand this JSON malarkey yet; as we work Premium Members: Download this Video ( Must be logged in)
through the rest of the tutorial, it should start to piece together.

Step 5: Preparing It All
Normally, when you submit a form, the browser is redirected to the action of the form. We don’t want this to happen, as we want to submit data in the form using AJAX. The first thing we need to do is stop the form from redirecting us when the submit button is clicked.
```
$(document).ready(function(){
   $('#newsletter-signup').submit(function(){

        //do our ajax stuff here

        //prevent form from submitting
        return false;
    })
})
```
Here, we are saying, “when document is ready and the submit event is triggered for any element with an id of newsletter-signup (which just happens to be our form), execute the code inside the function.” This is where we will be inserting the AJAX call, the JSON response handler, and anything else needed to make our form function the way we wish. The only code in this function at the moment is return false. This will stop the form from submitting, which in turn stops it from redirecting us. The next thing we need to do is set up the variables that we are going to be using.
```
var form = $(this),
    formData = form.serialize(),
    formUrl = form.attr('action'),
    formMethod = form.attr('method'),
    responseMsg = $('#signup-response')
```
Here we are declaring multiple variables all at once. It just saves writing the var keyword five times. Good times. Anyhow, here is what each variable is for:
- form – We use the this keyword wrapped in the jQuery object. this refers to the actual form element. We want to wrap it in the jQuery object so we can use other jQuery DOM functions.
- formdata – We are using the jQuery serialize() function to get all the form data. In its simplest form serialize() gets all the form fields and all their values and puts them in key-value pairs inside a string. We will then send this string of data to the server.
- formUrl – This is the URL we want to send our data to.
- formMethod – This is the method we want to use to send our data.
- responseMsg – This is the element that we are going to use to display our message to the user.
We get the form URL and form method this way so we don’t have to change the JavaScript if we decide to change where and how we send the data to the server in the HTML. We store the response message element in a variable so we only have to search the DOM for it once. To continuously query the DOM for an element is wasteful.

As we are going to be using AJAX to submit the form, we should provide the end user an indication that we are doing some work behind the scenes, so to speak. To do so, we will set the response message holders text to ‘Please Wait…’ and give it a class of ‘response-waiting’. This will give it a cool loading gif .
```
//show response message - waiting
responseMsg.hide()
           .addClass('response-waiting')
           .text('Please Wait...')
           .fadeIn(200);
```
We hide the response message holder first so that when we set the text, it does not show straight away. Next, we add the class ‘response-waiting’. After that, we set the text to ‘Please Wait…’ and finally fade it in. All we are doing here is chaining together jQuery functions. The responseMsg code could be wrote on one line; I’ve just split it up to make it easier to read.
```
responseMsg.hide().addClass('response-waiting').text('Please Wait...').fadeIn(200);
```
Step 6: Submitting To The Server
Okay, it’s time to get to the juicy bit. Now that we have our data, and have provided some visual feedback to the visitor, we’ll use a jQuery function to submit the data to the server.
```
$(document).ready(function(){
    $('#newsletter-signup').submit(function(){

        //setup variables
        var form = $(this),
        formData = form.serialize(),
        formUrl = form.attr('action'),
        formMethod = form.attr('method'),
        responseMsg = $('#signup-response')

        //show response message - waiting
        responseMsg.hide()
                   .addClass('response-waiting')
                   .text('Please Wait...')
                   .fadeIn(200);

        //send data to server
        $.ajax({
            url: formUrl,
            type: formMethod,
            data: formData,
            success:function(data){
                //do something when ajax call is complete
            }
        })

        //prevent form from submitting
        return false;
    })
})
```
The magic happens here:
```
$.ajax({
    url: formUrl,
    type: formMethod,
    data: formData,
    success:function(data){
        //do something we ajax call is complete
    }
})
```
We are using the jQuery function $.ajax() to submit the data to the server. This function handles all the complicated cross browser XML">[http.asp">XML] HTTP Request stuff that we’re not really interested in. Notice something here? Looks a lot like a JSON object…

We need to pass some information to the $.ajax() function so it knows what to do and how to do it. You can pass multiple parameters to the $.ajax() function, but for the sake of this tutorial, we only need to pass it the url, type, data and success parameters.
- url – This is the url we want to send our data to. We saved this in a variable called formURL earlier.
- type – This is the method we want use to send our data to the server. We saved this in a variable called formMethod earlier.
- data – This is the data we want to send to the server. We saved this in a variable called code>formDataearlier
- success - This is a callback function. It is called if the AJAX call is successful. In this function we will process the JSON response we get from the server.
Step 7: The Success Function
Once we have submitted the data to the server, it will send us a response message back. The message will be a well formatted JSON string. Luckily for us, jQuery has a neat function to parse JSON.
```
success:function(data){

    //setup variables
    var responseData = jQuery.parseJSON(data),
        klass = '';
}
```
The argument data that is passed to the success function is our JSON response returned from the server. Within this function, the first thing we want to do is setup two variables:
- responseData - This will hold the parsed JSON response. The $.parseJSON() function will turn our JSON response into a JavaScript object.
- klass - This will be a variable that we will set later. It will contain the name of the class we want to apply to the response message holder, based on the response we receive from the server. If you are wondering why we are calling the class variable klass, it is because the word 'class' is a reserved word in JavaScript and can not be used as a variable name.
The next thing must do is determine which CSS class we should apply to the response message holder. The class will be based on what status the server returns. If the status is 'success,' we want to give it a class of 'response-success,' and if the status is 'error,' we'll give it a class of 'response-error'
```
//response conditional
switch(responseData.status){
    case 'error':
        klass = 'response-error';
    break;
    case 'success':
        klass = 'response-success';
    break;
}
```
The CSS classes that will be applied to the status messages will look like:

The first one is the loading message (.response-loading), the second is the success message (.response-success) and the third is the error message (.response-error).

We are using a switch statement to determine which class to use based on the status. I could have used if statements, but this is a better way of doing it. The condition we want to compare against is responseData.status. responseData is an object and status is a property of that object. This object was created by the $.parseJSON() function and is based on our JSON response. This response will return two members: status and message. These will be converted into properties of the responseData object. In this switch, we have two cases to compare responseData.status against. If responseData.status is equal to the string 'error', then the klass variable will be set to 'response-error'. If responseData.status is equal to the string 'success' , then the klass variable will be set to 'response-success'. Now all that is left to do is actually show the message to the user.
```
//show reponse message
responseMsg.fadeOut(200,function(){
    $(this).removeClass('response-waiting')
           .addClass(klass)
           .text(responseData.message)
           .fadeIn(200,function(){
               //set timeout to hide response message
               setTimeout(function(){
                   responseMsg.fadeOut(200,function(){
                       $(this).removeClass(klass);
                   });
               },3000)
            })
})
```
The first task we do is fade out the response message holder, as it is currently set to 'Please Wait...'. Once this has been completed, we remove the class 'response-waiting', add either the 'error' or 'success' class, set the text to be the message sent back from the server, and then finally fade it back in. All of this is done from the callback of the fadeOut() function. Once the message has faded in, we don't want it to stick around forever so we set a timeout to fade the message out again after three seconds. This is all done from the callback of the fadeIn() function.

As you can see, we are making good use of jQuery's callback functions. These ensure that everything is executed in the correct order, at the correct time. If we did not use the callback functions, we would end up in a situation where we fade the message in and immediately tell it the fade out even though it has not finished fading in. Finally, when the response message holder has faded out we want to remove any classes we assigned to it. That's it for the success function!

And that's it for the JavaScript, too. We have set up our variables, set our status message, submitted the data via AJAX, got a JSON response, parsed the JSON, and returned the status of the submission back to the user. Your completed JavaScript code should look like so:
```
$(document).ready(function(){
    $('#newsletter-signup').submit(function(){

        //setup variables
        var form = $(this),
        formData = form.serialize(),
        formUrl = form.attr('action'),
        formMethod = form.attr('method'),
        responseMsg = $('#signup-response');

        //show response message - waiting
        responseMsg.hide()
                   .addClass('response-waiting')
                   .text('Please Wait...')
                   .fadeIn(200);

        //send data to server for validation
        $.ajax({
            url: formUrl,
            type: formMethod,
            data: formData,
            success:function(data){

                //setup variables
                var responseData = jQuery.parseJSON(data),
                    klass = '';

                //response conditional
                switch(responseData.status){
                    case 'error':
                        klass = 'response-error';
                    break;
                    case 'success':
                        klass = 'response-success';
                    break;
                }

                //show reponse message
                responseMsg.fadeOut(200,function(){
                    $(this).removeClass('response-waiting')
                           .addClass(klass)
                           .text(responseData.message)
                           .fadeIn(200,function(){
                               //set timeout to hide response message
                               setTimeout(function(){
                                   responseMsg.fadeOut(200,function(){
                                       $(this).removeClass(klass);
                                   });
                               },3000);
                            });
                 });
              }
        });

        //prevent form from submitting
        return false;
    });
});
```
Step 8: Server Side Validation
Now that we have the HTML prepared, and the JavaScript ready to send and receive data, we need to write our server side code to process the data it's given, and send a JSON response back to the JavaScript. For this tutorial, PHP will be our server-side language of choice.
```
if($_GET['action'] == 'signup'){
    mysql_connect('localhost','YOUR DB USERNAME','YOUR DB PASSWORD');
    mysql_select_db('YOUR DATABASE THAT CONTAINS THE SIGNUPS TABLE');
    $email = mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['signup-email']);

    //do some stuff

    exit;
}
```
Here we are saying that if, in the querystring, (as we are using the $_GET array) the parameter action is equal to 'signup,' then execute this code. This is a good way to encapsulate our AJAX call. Firstly we define our MySQL connection using PHP's built in mysql_connect() function. To get this connected to our database we need to give it the host, the database user username, and the database user password. We don't have to do any error checking here, as we are going to do that later in the script. Next, we select the database we want to access using mysql_select_db().

Now that we have got our database access code set up, we can use the mysql_real_escape_string() function to sanitize the data we are sending to the server. This makes the data safe for inserting into the database by escaping certain characters that are classed as unsafe. Because we are posting the data to the server, we use the $_POST array to access our email address. $_POST['signup-email'] will get our email address and we will store it in a variable called $email. The last line of code is the exit statement. This will stop the rest of the script from executing. This is useful if we had lots of code in here, as we only want to run the bit we need and ignore the rest. This is important to keep our AJAX calls nice and speedy. The next thing we are going to need to do is validate the data to make sure that we are not inserting any old junk into the database.
```
//validate email address - check if input was empty
if(empty($email)){
    $status = 'error';
    $message = 'You did not enter an email address!';
}
else if(!preg_match($emailRegex, $email)){ //validate email address - check if is a valid email address
    $status = 'error';
    $message = 'You have entered an invalid email address!';
}
else {
    $existingSignup = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM signups WHERE signup_email_address='$email'");
    if(mysql_num_rows($existingSignup) < 1){

        //database insert code

    }
    else {
        $status = 'error';
        $message = 'This email address has already been registered!';
    }
}
```
We only need to do three checks on our data:
1. Make sure the user actually submitted an email address
2. Make sure the email address submitted is a valid email address
3. Make sure the email address submitted has not already been used to sign up
We are using a series of if statements to achieve this. The first if uses the PHP function empty() to check if the $email variable actually contains anything. If the variable is equal to an empty string, 0, '0', false or null, it will return true (meaning that we have an empty variable). If we have an empty variable, we set a variable called $status to 'error' and a variable called $message to 'You did not enter an email address!'. If our variable is not empty we can proceed to check that it is a valid email address. To do so, we use a PHP function called preg_match(). We give this function a regular expression (the long string full of weird characters) and our email address. If the email address matches the regular expression, the function returns 1 (which equates to true). If it does not match, it returns 0 (which equates to false). In our case if preg_match() returns false, we know the email address is invalid; so we set our $status variable to equal 'error' and our $message variable to equal 'You have entered an invalid email address!'. Otherwise if preg_match() returns true, we can move on to the next check which requires us querying the database to see if our email address has already been signed up. We can use the PHP function mysql_query(), which accepts a SQL query, queries the database, and returns a resource. We do not need to know anything about the data that mysql_query() returns; we only need to know how many records is returned. If it returns more than 0, this email address has been used to sign up before so we set our $status and $message variables accordingly. If no records are returned, we are good to insert our data into the database.

We use the PHP function mysql_num_rows() to find out how many records the query returned. All we need to do is pass it the resource which we saved in a variable called $existingSignup and it will return a number. We then use an if statement to check that the number is less than 1.

Step 9: Insert Into Database
We have verified our data is OK to be put in the database, so we are going to use the following code to so:
```
$date = date('Y-m-d');
$time = date('H:i:s');

$insertSignup = mysql_query("INSERT INTO signups (signup_email_address, signup_date, signup_time) VALUES ('$email','$date','$time')");
if($insertSignup){
    $status = 'success';
    $message = 'you have been signed up!';
}
else {
    $status = 'error';
    $message = 'Oops, there's been a technical error! You have not been signed up.';
}
```
The date and time variables are PHP functions that return the date and time in a specified format. Because we set the signup_date field in the database to be a date field and the signup_time field to be a time field, I am formatting my date and time to suit them. The next thing to do is insert the data into the database. This, again, is done by using the mysql_query() function and passing it an SQL statement. Because this is an INSERT SQL statement, the function will return true on success and false on failure. It will not return a resource as there is no resource to return because we were just executing a statement. We then check if the query was successful or not. If it was, we set our $status variable to 'success' and our $message variable to 'you have been signed up!'. Otherwise, if the query failed, we set $status to 'error' and $message to 'Oops, There's been a technical error! You have not been signed up.' We don't need to tell the user what the error was, just that there's been a problem and they have not been signed up. This will also catch any error caused by the initial connection code (like could not connect to database or could not find table, etc).

Step 10: Send The Response Back
The previous step defined two variables: $status and $message. This is the data we want to encode as JSON to send back to the user. We are going to put these two variables into an associative array, so we can provide meaningful names to the keys of the JSON members.
```
$data = array(
    'status' => $status,
    'message' => $message
);
```
You don't have to write your associative array like this; though I personally find it easier to read. All we need to do now is pass this array to a PHP function called json_encode(). This turns our associative array into a well formatted JSON string. Once it has been encoded as JSON, we need to return it back to the clients browser. We do this with a simple echo statement.
```
echo json_encode($data);
```
And that's it. That's all the server side code needed. You should have ended up with this:
```
if($_GET['action'] == 'signup'){
    mysql_connect('localhost','YOUR DB USERNAME','YOUR DB PASSWORD');
    mysql_select_db('YOUR DATABASE THAT CONTAINS THE SIGNUPS TABLE');

    //sanitize data
    $email = mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['signup-email']);

    //validate email address - check if input was empty
    if(empty($email)){
        $status = "error";
        $message = "You did not enter an email address!";
    }
    else if(!preg_match('/^[^\W][a-zA-Z0-9_]+(\.[a-zA-Z0-9_]+)*\@[a-zA-Z0-9_]+(\.[a-zA-Z0-9_]+)*\.[a-zA-Z]{2,4}$/', $email)){ //validate email address - check if is a valid email address
        $status = "error";
        $message = "You have entered an invalid email address!";
    }
    else {
       $existingSignup = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM signups WHERE signup_email_address='$email'");
       if(mysql_num_rows($existingSignup) < 1){

           $date = date('Y-m-d');
           $time = date('H:i:s');

           $insertSignup = mysql_query("INSERT INTO signups (signup_email_address, signup_date, signup_time) VALUES ('$email','$date','$time')");
           if($insertSignup){
               $status = "success";
               $message = "You have been signed up!";
           }
           else {
               $status = "error";
               $message = "Ooops, Theres been a technical error!";
           }
        }
        else {
            $status = "error";
            $message = "This email address has already been registered!";
        }
    }

    //return json response
    $data = array(
        'status' => $status,
        'message' => $message
    );

    echo json_encode($data);

    exit;
}
```
That is all the code we need for the email signup form to work. Hopefully, if you followed this tutorial step by step you, should be recording email signups now. Although our code works and our form does what it should, there is one last thing that will improve the form.

If the user clicks the submit button more than once before the AJAX call has finished, we are going to get some pretty weird results. The message results holder will fade in and fade out again, but the timeout won't reset. This will look daft, as well as causing unnecessary calls to the server. Really, we should stop the user from submitting the form whilst a submission is currently in progress.

Step 11: Stopping Multiple Form Submissions
Stopping multiple form submissions is actually pretty easy to accomplish. All we need to do is check what the form's status is when it is submitted. If it is currently submitting, we don't want to re-submit the form until it has finished. To do this, we'll store the status of the form, on the form, using jQuery's data() function. This function lets us store and retrieve arbitrary data associated with the matched element in key value format. We will use a key called 'formstatus' and its value will either be 'submitting' or 'idle'. If 'formstatus' equals 'submitting,' the form will not be submitted. If it equals 'idle', it will submit. Once the form is submitted, we will need to set 'formstatus' to 'submitting'. And, when ithas finished submitting, we set 'formstatus' to 'idle'. Here's our final JavaScript.
```
$(document).ready(function(){
    $('#newsletter-signup').submit(function(){

    //check the form is not currently submitting
    if($(this).data('formstatus') !== 'submitting'){

         //setup variables
         var form = $(this),
         formData = form.serialize(),
         formUrl = form.attr('action'),
         formMethod = form.attr('method'),
         responseMsg = $('#signup-response');

         //add status data to form
         form.data('formstatus','submitting');

         //show response message - waiting
         responseMsg.hide()
                    .addClass('response-waiting')
                    .text('Please Wait...')
                    .fadeIn(200);

         //send data to server for validation
         $.ajax({
             url: formUrl,
             type: formMethod,
             data: formData,
             success:function(data){

                //setup variables
                var responseData = jQuery.parseJSON(data),
                    klass = '';

                //response conditional
                switch(responseData.status){
                    case 'error':
                        klass = 'response-error';
                    break;
                    case 'success':
                        klass = 'response-success';
                    break;
                }

                //show reponse message
                responseMsg.fadeOut(200,function(){
                   $(this).removeClass('response-waiting')
                          .addClass(klass)
                          .text(responseData.message)
                          .fadeIn(200,function(){
                              //set timeout to hide response message
                              setTimeout(function(){
                                  responseMsg.fadeOut(200,function(){
                                      $(this).removeClass(klass);
                                      form.data('formstatus','idle');
                                  });
                               },3000)
                           });
                });
           }
      });
    }

    //prevent form from submitting
    return false;

    });
})
```
Conclusion
Hopefully, you can apply the techniques you've learned in this tutorial to create more complex projects in the future. Thanks for reading, and, if you have any questions or comments, don't hesitate to leave a comment below.

Dev Articles - Programming Help and Tutorials for all development technologies

Styling HTML Lists with CSS: Resetting Padding and Margins

Posted: August 30th, 2010, 7:00am MDT

In this first part of the series on styling HTML lists with CSS I explain how to reset their padding and margins. The entire styling process is very easy to follow....
Charter">[https:] Business Bundle ® Switch & Save 20% or More on Internet & Phone + Get TV for Free for 12 months!

Planet PHP

Creating PDF Documents with Zend Framework

Posted: August 30th, 2010, 7:00am MDT by Zend Developer Zone

PHP comes with a number of options to help developers dynamically generate PDF files from within their applications. The Haru and PDF lib extensions offer a complete API for dynamic PDF generation, and there also exist a number of open-source PHP components that can be used for the same purpose. This article will introduce you to one such component, the Zend_Pdf component that ships as part of the Zend Framework, and illustrate how it can be used to perform sophisticated PDF operations from within a PHP application.
JSClasses, JSMag, PHP Alpha 1, PHP strict typing, IndieConf - Lately in PHP podcast episode 4

Posted: August 30th, 2010, 2:18am MDT by PHP Classes

JSClasses, JSMag, PHP Alpha 1, PHP strict typing, IndieConf - Lately in PHP podcast episode 4 By Manuel Lemos On this episode of the Lately in PHP podcast, Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert interview Michael Kimsal from the WebDev publishing company.

They talked about JSClasses, the just launched PHPClasses brother site for JavaScript components.

They also commented on the OpenID based single sign-on system that was implemented to reuse PHPClasses accounts on the JSClasses site to avoid making current PHPClasses users to creating new accounts on the JSClasses site.

It was also discussed about the latest developments for the eventual PHP 5.4 Alpha 1 version, such as the support type hinting of scalar arguments versus strict typing.

Also covered are some initiatives of Michael's company, the JSMag JavaScript magazine (promotion coupon included) and IndieConf, a conference for independent Web professionals.

Nettuts+

JavaScript from Null: Cross-Browser Event Binding

Posted: August 27th, 2010, 1:29pm MDT by Jeffrey Way
In chapter five of this series, we jumped into the muddy world of event listeners. In that episode, we only got our feet wet; however, today, we’ll take things a step further as we implement a far more efficient solution. Along the way, we’ll learn a plethora of new techniques.

As with every JavaScript from Null screencast, it’s not essential that you view the previous entries in the series before watching.

Catch Up
Chapter 6: Cross-Browser Event Binding
Premium Members: Download this Video ( Must be logged in) Our Final Code
```
var addEvent = (function( window, document ) {
	if ( document.addEventListener ) {
		return function( elem, type, cb ) {
			if ( (elem && !elem.length) || elem === window ) {
				elem.addEventListener(type, cb, false );
			}
			else if ( elem && elem.length ) {
				var len = elem.length;
				for ( var i = 0; i 
Please note that this code is slightly revised, based upon some excellent feedback in the comments section. 

    
	
```

Quick Tip: Quick and Easy JavaScript Testing with “Assert”

Posted: August 25th, 2010, 11:54am MDT by Jeffrey Way

Years ago, I learned a deceptively simple “assert” function from John Resig, for testing your JavaScript. Amazingly, at barely five or six lines, this code provides a great level of power and control over your code, when testing. I’ll show you how to use it in today’s video quick tip.

Screencast

Premium Members: Download this Video ( Must be logged in)

Subscribe to our YouTube page to watch all of the video tutorials! “Assert” Code

<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html lang="en-US">
<head>
	<meta charset="UTF-8">
	<title>Easy JavaScript Testing </title>
	<style>
		.pass:before {
			content: 'PASS: ';
			color:  blue;
			font-weight: bold;
		}

		.fail:before {
			content: 'FAIL: ';
			color: red;
			font-weight: bold;

		}
	</style>
</head>
<body>

<ul id="output"></ul>

<script>
var output = document.getElementById('output');

function assert( outcome, description ) {
	var li = document.createElement('li');
	li.className = outcome ? 'pass' : 'fail';
	li.appendChild( document.createTextNode( description ) );

	output.appendChild(li);
};
</script>

That’s all you need for most basic testing! The assert function accepts two parameters:

outcome: A boolean, which references whether your test passed or failed
description: A short description of your test.

The assert function then simply creates a list item, applies a class of either “pass” or “fail,” dependent upon whether your test returned true or false, and then appends the description to the list item. Finally, that block of coded is added to the page. It’s crazy simple, but works perfectly.

Test 1: Your First Example

function add(num1, num2) {
	return num1 + num2;
}

var result = add(5, 20);
assert( result == 24, 'Checking the add function');

// OR
assert( add( 5, 20 ) == 24, 'Checking the add function');

Test 2: Closures

var someArray = [1,2,3,4,5],
	len = someArray.length,
	i = 0;

var count = 0;

for ( ; i 

Uh oh! What happened? 

This is a common issue, and the answer is to implement a closure, so that we can remember the value of "i." Otherwise, as we noticed above, the code will only render the final value in the sequence: 5. 
var someArray = [1,2,3,4,5],
	len = someArray.length,
	i = 0;

var count = 0;

for ( ; i 


Conclusion 

At first, it might appear as if only huge JavaScript libraries and such require some form of testing; however, that's far from the truth. As we've demonstrated, even a simple function, like Resig's "assert", can potentially save us from hours of debugging! So what do you personally use to test your code?

Dev Articles - Programming Help and Tutorials for all development technologies

Application Deployment with Capistrano

Posted: August 25th, 2010, 7:00am MDT

In this conclusion to a five-part series on application deployment with Ruby on Rails you ll learn how to create and use the Capistrano Deployment recipe. This article is excerpted from chapter 12 of the book em Practical Rails Projects em written by Eldon Alameda Apress ISBN 159 597818 ....
With Less, Do More Windows 7 Professional and the Windows Server 2008 Family

Nettuts+

Getting to Work with CSS3 Power Tools

Posted: August 24th, 2010, 2:43pm MDT by Devon Govett
CSS3 is one of the coolest new web technologies available to web developers right now. Using some of its many features, it is possible to reproduce the effects that you might have previously done in Photoshop, with CSS code that is more maintainable, faster to load, and hip with the latest trends. Read on to learn about the power tools available to you and how to combine them to produce the ultimate graphical effects.

CSS3 has many features, but some of them are imperative to learn if you are going to be reproducing Photoshop-like effects. I call these my “power tools.” They include the following:
1. Border Radii
2. Box Shadows
3. Text Shadows
4. Gradients
5. Multiple Backgrounds
Each of these features can help replace some of the images that you might have created in Photostop in the past. By doing this, you are making your website more maintainable since you can change a property just by changing your CSS file rather than editing an image in Photoshop. You are also making your website load faster since images use a lot of bandwidth. Let’s explore these features one by one.
Power Tool #1: Border Radius
Browser Support:
- Safari: 3.2+
- Firefox: 3.0+
- Chrome: 3.0+
- Opera: 10.5+
- Internet Explorer: 9.0+
By now, you’ve probably heard about border-radius a million times. It is super easy to use and is supported accross all modern browsers. If you don’t already know, border radius is a way to create rounded corners with CSS—no images necessary! Let’s take a look at the syntax.
```
-webkit-border-radius: size;
-moz-border-radius: size;
border-radius: size;
```
There are three syntaxes that you will need to use. The first is for Webkit-based browsers, like Safari and Chrome; the second is for Mozilla-based browsers, like Firefox; and the last is the un-prefixed version, for browsers that support it, including IE9, Opera, and Safari 5.

Applying a 10 pixel border radius to a div creates the following effect:

OK, easy! Let’s move on to the next power tool.
Power Tool #2: Box Shadows
Browser Support:
- Safari: 3.2+
- Firefox: 3.5+
- Chrome: 3.0+
- Opera: 10.5+
- Internet Explorer: 9.0+
Box shadows are another well supported feature. Their syntax looks like this:
```
-webkit-box-shadow: offset_x offset_y blur_radius color;
-moz-box-shadow: offset_x offset_y blur_radius color;
box-shadow: offset_x offset_y blur_radius color;
```
Once again we have to use the vendor prefixes for Webkit and Mozilla. The first and second parameters of the box-shadow property are the offset positions from the left and top coordinates of the element. Setting a positive value to these properties moves the shadow to the right and down from the element, and setting a negative value moves the shadow to the left and up from the element. The blur_radius is the amount of blur you want to add to your shadow (how hard or fuzzy you want it). Finally, the last parameter is the color that you want the shadow to be. Adding a shadow to our previously used rounded div will create a nice looking effect.
```
-webkit-box-shadow: 5px 5px 10px #555;
-moz-box-shadow: 5px 5px 10px #555;
box-shadow: 5px 5px 10px #555;
```
Another neat feature of CSS box shadows is the inset keyword. When the inset keyword is present, the shadow is rendered inside the box rather than outside. This can create a nice depressed look especially for buttons. Here is what our div would look like with an inset shadow.
```
-webkit-box-shadow: 0 0 20px #333 inset;
-moz-box-shadow: 0 0 20px #333 inset;
box-shadow: 0 0 20px #333 inset;
```
The last feature of box shadows that is worth mentioning is the ability to have multiple shadows on the same element. This is very useful and can eliminate having extra markup in your HTML just to apply an additional shadow. All you have to do to create multiple shadows is separate them with commas. Here is an example:
```
-webkit-box-shadow: 0 0 20px #333 inset,
                    20px 15px 30px yellow,
                    -20px 15px 30px lime,
                    -20px -15px 30px blue,
                    20px -15px 30px red;

-moz-box-shadow: 0 0 20px #333 inset,
                 20px 15px 30px yellow,
                 -20px 15px 30px lime,
                 -20px -15px 30px blue,
                 20px -15px 30px red;

box-shadow: 0 0 20px #333 inset,
            20px 15px 30px yellow,
            -20px 15px 30px lime,
            -20px -15px 30px blue,
            20px -15px 30px red;
```
Power Tool #3: Text Shadows
Browser Support:
- Safari: 3.2+
- Firefox: 3.5+
- Chrome: 3.0+
- Opera: 10.1+
- Internet Explorer: Hopefully coming soon!
Text shadows are like box shadows except that they are shadows for text rather than the whole element. Luckily, there is no vendor prefix necessary for text shadow.
```
text-shadow: offset_x offset_y blur_radius color;
```
The options for text shadow are the same as for box-shadow except that there is no inset text shadow support. Here is a demo that makes otherwise-invisible text pop off the page.
```
color: #fff /* text color to white */
text-shadow: 0 0 50px #333;
```
This creates the following effect:

As with box shadows, it is possible to have multiple text shadows just by separating them with commas. Here is an example that creates a flaming text effect.
```
text-shadow: 0 0 4px #ccc,
             0 -5px 4px #ff3,
             2px -10px 6px #fd3,
             -2px -15px 11px #f80,
             2px -18px 18px #f20;
```
Text shadows can create some awesome effects, and can complement other effects very nicely.
Power Tool #4: Gradients
Browser Support:
- Safari: 4+
- Firefox: 3.6+
- Chrome: 5+
- Opera: Hopefully coming soon!
- Internet Explorer: Hopefully coming soon!
Gradients are one of the most powerful features available to you if you want to create these awesome effects. While full browser support is still not quite there, you can always provide fallback styling to browsers without support. Remember: Websites do not need to look the same in every browser. There are two types of gradients that you can create: linear gradients and radial gradients. As you might expect, linear gradients move along a straight line and radial gradients go around a circle. Gradients can be used anywhere you might have used an image in the past, such as for the background, border-image, or list bullets.

Unfortunately for web developers, there are two different syntaxes: one for Mozilla and another for Webkit.
Syntax for Webkit
Safari and Chrome both use the Webkit rendering engine, so they always use the same syntax. Their gradient syntax is pretty simple:
```
-webkit-gradient(<type>, <point> [, <radius>]?, <point> [, <radius>]? [, <stop>]*)
```
Webkit uses the same same syntax for both linear and radial gradients. Just change the type parameter to switch between them.
Syntax for Mozilla
Firefox uses separate syntaxes for linear and radial gradients, both of which are very different from their Webkit counterparts.
```
-moz-linear-gradient( [<point> || <angle>,]? <stop>, <stop> [, <stop>]*)
-moz-radial-gradient( [<position> || <angle>,]? [<shape> || <size>,]? <stop>, <stop>[, <stop>]*)
```
Let’s look at these syntaxes separately.
Linear Gradients
For simplicty, here is a Webkit’s syntax just for linear gradients.
```
-webkit-gradient(linear, start_x start_y, end_x end_y, stop, stop...)
```
Firefox’s syntax looks like this.
```
-moz-linear-gradient(angle start_x start_y, stop, stop...)
```
In the Webkit syntax start_x and start_y parameters specify the starting position of the gradient, and end_x and end_y specify the ending position of the gradient. You can use any of the standard CSS dimension values, including percentages, as well the keywords left, top, bottom, right, and center as values for these position parameters. Stops are a way for you to specify specific colors to be used at specific points along the gradient. You can have as many color stops as you want, but you must have at least two: a starting and ending color. For additional color stops, you can use the color-stop() function providing a position as a percentage or a decimal between 0 and 1 as well as a color. For example: color-stop(50%, black) would create a black color stop at exactly half way through the gradient. Rather than writing 0% and 100% for the starting and ending colors, the convenience functions from() and to() exist. All you have to provide to these is the color.

Firefox’s syntax is much less straight forward, and has many ways of accomplishing the same goal. The only thing that is static about the syntax are the color stops, which are just a color followed by a position as a percentage. For the starting and ending positions, you can leave off 0% and 100%, and if you leave the position off of any of the other color stops, they are distributed evenly throughout the gradient. Unlike the Webkit syntax, Firefox’s syntax does not have an ending position, only a starting position and an angle. The gradient will run out from the starting position at the specified angle. If you leave the angle out, it will run out perpendicularly from that point. If you leave out the starting point all together, the gradient will run from top to bottom. This syntax is kind of confusing and a bit less flexible than Webkit’s simple syntax, so it is best to learn by example.

Here is a simple example of CSS gradients in action. This gradient goes from the top left corner to the bottom left corner (in other words, from top to bottom) and from red to white.
```
-webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, from(red), to(white));
-moz-linear-gradient(red, white)
```
Setting this as the background property of a div, we get the following result:

By adding a color stop and changing the angle of the gradient, we can get a different effect.
```
-webkit-gradient(linear, left top, right bottom, from(red), color-stop(50%, white), to(red));
-moz-linear-gradient(left top, red, white, red);
```
Radial Gradients
Here is the syntax for radial gradients in Webkit.
```
-webkit-gradient(radial, inner_circle_center_x inner_circle_center_y, inner_circle_radius,
                         outer_circle_center_x outer_circle_center_y, outer_circle_radius,
                         stop, stop...)
```
Firefox’s syntax looks like this.
```
-moz-radial-gradient(center_x center_y, shape size, stop, stop...)
```
The Webkit syntax is a bit more complicated than the linear gradient syntax, but the same principles still apply. Radial gradients in Webkit have two circles: a starting circle and an ending circle. You specify the center X and Y positions for each of these circles along with their radii. Finally you specify the color stops the same way you did for linear gradients.

The Firefox syntax for radial gradients is similar to the syntax for linear gradients in that all of its parts except the color stops can be left out. You can specify the center X and Y positions of the gradient much like the inner circle’s coordinates in the Webkit syntax, but there is no outer circle in Firefox. Instead you can specify a shape and size of the gradient. The shape can be either a circle or an ellipse, the latter of which is not currently possible to create in Webkit. The size accepts many different keywords, but not a pixel size as you might have expected. You can read about what each of these constants do on the Mozilla Developer Center. For this tutorial, we will just use the defaults. Once again, if you leave the center X and Y positions out, they will be assumed to be the center of the object you are filling with a gradient. If you leave out the shape and size, the gradient will be assumed to be a circle that fills the entire box.
```
-webkit-gradient(radial, center center, 0, center center, 50, from(white), to(red));
-moz-radial-gradient(white, red)
```
If we apply this gradient to the background of a div, this is what we will get.
Power Tool #5: Multiple Backgrounds
Browser Support:
- Safari: 3.2+
- Firefox: 3.6+
- Chrome: 3.0+
- Opera: 10.5+
- Internet Explorer: 9.0+
Multiple backgrounds make it easy to create complex effects in CSS without needing to create additional markup in your HTML. Having support for this means that elements can have multiple gradients and image backgrounds along with the standard background color. There is no difference in the syntax of multiple backgrounds from single backgrounds – just comma separate them and off you go!

Here is an example of a div with a gradient background and a nice textured effect using an image:
```
background: url(noise.png), -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, from(#999), to(#333));
background: url(noise.png), -moz-linear-gradient(#999, #333);
```
We have to declare it twice since, as we’ve learned, there is a different gradient syntax for each browser. This creates the following effect:
Combining the Power: Building an Awesome CSS3 Button
Now that we have five great power tools at our disposal, let’s combine them to produce an even more awesome effect.

There are so many different types of buttons that you can choose to design. To be simple, let’s emulate something that already exists – the Mac OS X button style.

We will start off with our HTML code for this demo. It is really quite simple, just two DIVs and some text.
```
<div class="panel">
    <div class="button">Button</div>
</div>
```
Now we will start off with our basic CSS. First, let’s style the panel.
```
.panel {
    background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, from(#bbbcbb), to(#959695));
    background: -moz-linear-gradient(#bbbcbb, #959695);
    background-color: #b7b9b7;
    width: 100px;
}
```
The panel is just a nice container for our button. It has a gradient going from top to bottom between two nice grey colors. For those browsers that don’t support gradients, a fallback background-color is given.

Now, let’s look at the CSS for the actual button.
```
.button {
    display: inline-block;
    margin: 20px;

    padding: 3px 6px;
    font-family: 'Lucida Grande', Arial, sans-serif;
    font-size: 13px;

    -webkit-border-radius: 3px;
    -moz-border-radius: 3px;
    border-radius: 3px;

    border: 1px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6);

    background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, from(#fbfcfb), to(#9d9e9d));
    background: -moz-linear-gradient(#fbfcfb, #9d9e9d);
    background-color: #c0c2c0;

    text-shadow: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.4) 0px 1px;

    -webkit-box-shadow: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.4) 0 1px;
    -moz-box-shadow: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.4) 0 1px;
    box-shadow: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.4) 0 1px;

    -webkit-user-select: none;
    -moz-user-select: none;
    cursor: default;
}
```
There is a decent amount of code here, which uses all of the power tools that I described above, except for multiple backgrounds. There are several sections to this code, which we will take one by one. The first two lines are just some simple layout information. Setting the button to display: inline-block makes it automatically extend to fit the content, no matter how much text you put in the button. The next section gives some font information to the button. Finally, in the third section we get to use our first power tool: border radius. In the case of our lovely button, we give it a nice 3px radius. Next we give the button a border. Notice that we are using rgba as a color here. This allows us to make the color partially transparent as we do here, creating a nice grayish color. In the next section of code, we set up the background of the button. We give it a gradient background as well as a solid color for fallback in browsers that don’t support gradients yet. Next, we use text shadow to make the text look slightly engraved into the button. Once again we use rgba here to give a partially transparent white to the text shadow. The pen-ultimate section of code creates a box shadow. Now, this does not actually look like a shadow, it actually looks like a second border, but it gives a nice highlight to the bottom of the button to make it look engraved into the background and compliments the border color. This is a useful trick to know if you ever want something to look like it has multiple borders – I use it a lot. Finally, the last section of CSS code is a nice trick that prevents text selection in Webkit based browsers and Firefox, and sets the cursor to the default arrow rather than the text selection cursor.

So far, this code makes our button look like this:

OK, so not too bad yet! Let’s move on to the button’s depressed look.
```
.button:active {
    background: #B5B5B5;
    -webkit-box-shadow: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.4) 0 1px,
                        black 0px 1px 3px inset,
                        rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.4) 0px -5px 12px inset;

    -moz-box-shadow: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.4) 0 1px,
                     black 0px 1px 3px inset,
                     rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.4) 0px -5px 12px inset;

    box-shadow: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.4) 0 1px,
                black 0px 1px 3px inset,
                rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.4) 0px -5px 12px inset;

    text-shadow: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.3) 0px 1px;
}
```
When the button is pressed down, we change a number of things. First, we set the background to a plain color, removing the gradient that we had set eariler. This is because we will be creating the depressed look with a box shadow rather than a gradient. The next thing we do, is set that shadow—or rather multiple shadows. The first shadow in the list is the same one that we had in the normal state: the highlight on the bottom of the button. The second and third shadows are the ones that make our button look pressed. The first of these is a black inset shadow that is set down from the top 1 pixel and has 3 pixels of blur—a pretty dark looking shadow. The last shadow is also black but a slightly transparent black that is set up from the bottom 5 pixels with 12 pixels of blur. This creates the darkened look on the bottom of the button when it is pressed. The final thing that we need to do when this button is pressed down is just reduce the opacity of the text shadow by one notch so that it doesn’t stand out like a sore thumb.

That’s it! Our button is complete. Here is what the pressed down version looks like:
Conclusion
Replacing images with CSS3 has many benefits. It makes your job as a web developer easier since you don’t need to open Photoshop every time you need to make a change to your user interface. It makes your web site or web application load faster since it doesn’t need to download so many heavy images. And it allows you to create a more rich, interactive, and desireable experience for users such that they will keep coming back for more.

I will leave you with a bit of inspiration of things that you could do with CSS3. These aren’t necessarily the most real world examples, but they show what is possible with a bit of work.
iPhone Made With Pure CSS3
The first demo, created by Jeff Batterton, is an iPhone created with pure CSS3 – no images used. It is very impressive, utilizing CSS gradients, text shadows, box shadows, transitions and transforms. Unfortunately, it currently only looks correct in Webkit based browsers like Safari and Chrome. It can be your task to make the demo work in Firefox!
Pure CSS3 iOS Icons
Another demo, perhaps even more amazing was written by Louis Harboe. It is a recreation of some of the iOS icons in pure CSS, and very realistic recreations at that! This demo also only works in Webkit based browsers. If you want to learn about how some of these icons were reproduced, you can head over to Louis Harboe’s blog where he describes the process.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this article! Feel free to catch up with me on Twitter, or leave your thoughts in the comments!

Dev Articles - Programming Help and Tutorials for all development technologies

Deploying an Application to the Server

Posted: August 24th, 2010, 7:00am MDT

In this fourth part to a five-part series on deploying a Rails application you ll learn how to deploy an application manually create users and groups and more. This article is excerpted from chapter 12 of the book em Practical Rails Projects em written by Eldon Alameda Apress ISBN 159 597818 ....

Nettuts+

Why Net Premium Rocks

Posted: August 23rd, 2010, 1:28pm MDT by Jeffrey Way
You’re likely aware of the fact that Tuts+ offers a Premium membership for $9 a month. With this membership, in addition to smaller benefits, like the removal of all ads on our sites, you’ll gain access to the premium content for not only Nettuts+, but all of our tutorials sites which publish premium content – that’s 400 exclusively awesome tutorials, screencasts, and freebies, and 800 source file downloads — with more coming each week!

And, better than that, becoming a member really helps us out. This then allows us to continue providing you wish the best tutorials available around the web.

A Brief Sampling of our Amazing Content
- CSS: Noob to Ninja (12-Part Screencast Series)
  This exclusive premium video series will take you from a state of absolute CSS “noobness,” all the way up to ninja-status, capable of taking advantage of the latest CSS3 techniques. The series begins with the basics: the syntax, properties, etc. However, each new video expands upon the previous, as you work your way up and improve your skills. In this final week, you’ll complete the series, as you gain access to Parts 8-12: five new episodes.
  
  Sign Up to View
- The Beginner’s Guide to Web Design
  Throughout this three-part series, you will learn how to create a website using the latest in web design techniques (HTML5 & CSS3). This series is aimed at those with minimal knowledge of web design.
  
  Sign Up to View
- Build an Awesome Status Board
  When Panic unveiled their status panel to the world, I was both impressed and inspired. In today’s in depth Premium tutorial and screencast, I’ll show you how to built a similar status board!
  
  Sign Up to View
- Tumblr Theme Design: Start to Finish (Screencast Series)
  Tumblr’s popularity over the last year has increased exponentially. The reason why is quite simple: Tumblr is flexible, powerful, and, most importantly, a pleasure to work with. Unfortunately, there aren’t many training resources available for the platform yet. In this video series, we’ll go through the process of taking a Tumblr theme, designed in Photoshop, and converting it into a fully working theme – in just a few hours.
  
  Sign Up to View
- An In Depth Overview of File Operations in PHP
  We will learn how to work with file operations using PHP. This is one of the most fundamental subjects of server side programming in general. Files are used in web applications of all sizes. So let’s learn how to read, write, create, move, copy, delete files and more.
  
  Sign Up to View
- How to Code a Gorgeous Watercolor Website
  This tutorial is a useful guide for both expert and noob designers/developers who wants to learn more about how to convert complex designs to standards-compliant websites. We’ll learn the basics of slicing a PSD design, how to convert it into a 100% functional HTML+CSS+JavaScript mockup, and more.
  
  Sign Up to View
- Learn How to be a TextMate Champion
  TextMate is, by far, the preferred text-editor for most web developers on the Mac. In this Premium screencast, we’ll be taking a look at some of the features most developers simply don’t use; ones which can massively increase your productivity by allowing you to type less and code more.
  
  Sign Up to View
- Firebug – White to Black Belt
  Firebug is a Firefox extension that will streamline your developing process: it offers a plethora of tools for working with HTML, CSS, Javascript, and more. In this tutorial, I’m going to take you to a black belt level of Firebug usage that will karate chop your website woes!
  
  Sign Up to View
- Create a Jobs Board with with CodeIgniter
  In this two-part download, we’ll be creating a basic ‘Jobs Board’, similar to “FreelanceSwitch Jobs” and “Smashing Jobs”, using the CodeIgniter PHP framework.
  
  Sign Up to View
- How to Build a Newspaper Website with a Grid
  You’ll learn how to utilize a grid to create a simple newspaper-like website. Along the way, you’ll learn helpful techniques, such as easy ways to target IE7 and IE6 with only a single character, using the 960 grid system, and even using CSS3 to create columns! It’s an hour long; ready to dig in?
  
  Sign Up to View
- Combining Modern CSS3 and HTML5 Techniques
  Just because some techniques don’t work in decade old browsers doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be learning everything you can! Stay on the cutting edge, as we use everything from CSS shadows and animations, to HTML 5 mark-up and local storage, to utilizing jQuery to query the Picasa API. We’ll also take advantage of the excellent jQuery library, and review some best practices when coding.
  
  Sign Up to View
- Generating a Particle System with JavaScript
  If you’ve ever seen a fireworks effect, created in Flash, I’ll show you how to reproduce the effect using pure JavaScript! Why let the Flash developers have all the fun?
  
  Sign Up to View
- How to Create the New Trendy jQuery Sliders
  Query sliders are becoming more popular day by day; with more free and premium sliders pouring in regularly. Knowing how an advanced slider like this works is becoming a must. In this tutorial, we are going to create a full-fledged jQuery slider which supports inline comments. Let’s get started!
  
  Sign Up to View
- Working with Advanced 3D CSS
  CSS is capable of so much more than browsers can currently handle, namely when it comes to working in 3D spaces. In this week’s premium video tutorial, I’m going to teach you how to work with CSS transitions, animations, and specifically how to work with Webkit’s CSS 3D capabilities.
  
  Sign Up to View
- A Deeper Look at Advanced Select Queries
  o the SQL novice, joins can be intimidating and somewhat frustrating. Even when you think you have the query nailed, along comes an unexpected result which make you throw up your arms in surrender to the SQL gods. In this tutorial, we are going to build upon the excellent quick tip of working with MySQL and INNER JOIN recently posted and crack open the real power of a SELECT statement.
  
  Sign Up to View
Give it a Shot

If you’re already a member, thank you so much! We appreciate your support. If you’re not one just yet, but are considering it, why not give it a shot? You can pay monthly or yearly. So, if you’re on the edge, purchase a single month’s plan, take a look around, and then decide! And, of course, we’re confident enough to offer everyone a 100% guarantee.

Recent items

Skip to page: 1 2 3 ... 1067

dealnews - 20 most recent deals.

Hamburger Phone for $7 + free shipping

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 8:00am MDT

Meritline.com offers this corded Hamburger Land Line Telephone for $8.49. Coupon code "MLC413402090417AL1" cuts it to $6.99. With free shipping, that's the lowest total price we could find for a hamburger phone by a buck. It features plastic construction, flip-open design, and a circular touch-tone dial. Coupon ends September 5.
ProForm CrossWalk Sport Treadmill for $351 + pickup

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 7:57am MDT

Today only, Sears offers the ProForm CrossWalk Sport Treadmill (for both upper body and lower body), model no. 24813, for $369.99. Coupon code "5OFFFITNESS" cuts it to $351.49. Shipping adds a vicious $69.99, so choose in-store pickup. Even with shipping, that's a $44 drop since our May mention and the lowest total price we've seen. Sales tax is added where applicable. It features a powered incline control.
ASUS Eee PC Atom 1.6GHz 10" LED Netbook for $220 + $7 s&h

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 7:41am MDT

TigerDirect.com offers the 2.4-lb. ASUS Eee PC 1005HA Intel Atom 1.6GHz 10.1" Widescreen Netbook in Black, model no. 1005HA-EU2X-BK, for $239.99. Apply coupon code "EYQ5050" to drop it to $219.99. With $6.69 for shipping, it's the lowest total price we could find by $42. (We mentioned this deal last week; it was due to expire then but is in fact ongoing.) It features an Intel Atom N270 1.6GHz processor, 10.1" 1024x600 widescreen LED-backlit LCD, 1GB RAM, 160GB hard drive, media card reader, webcam, 802.11n wireless, 3-cell battery, Windows XP Home, and more.
Dell Vostro v13 Celeron M 1.3GHz 13" LED Linux Laptop for $399 + $8 s&h

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 7:37am MDT

Dell Small Business offers the 3.5-lb. Dell Vostro v13 Intel Celeron M 1.3GHz 13.3" LED-Backlit Widescreen Notebook with Linux for $399 plus $8 for shipping. That ties last week's mention and is $50 under the lowest total price we've seen for this laptop with Windows. Sales tax is added where applicable. It features an Intel Celeron M ULV 743 1.3GHz processor, 13.3" 1366x768 widescreen display, 2GB RAM, 250GB 5400 rpm hard drive, 802.11g wireless, Bluetooth, 6-cell battery, and Ubuntu Linux 9.04.
Note that this lightweight laptop does not include an optical drive.
Michelin Extreme Rubber Cargo Mat for $7, Floor Mat for $4 + pickup

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 7:33am MDT

Sears offers the Michelin Weatherwise 3x2-Foot Rubber Cargo Mat in Black, model no. 909-13, or Grey, model no. 909-43, for $7.49. Shipping adds $8.20, or choose in-store pickup. Even with shipping, that's $23 off and the lowest total price we could find for any such Michelin mat. Sales tax is added where applicable.
For in-store pickup only, the Michelin Extreme Rubber Floor Mat in Black or Grey costs $4.49. That's $13 off and the lowest total price we could find for a Michelin floor mat.
Logitech G9X Laser Gaming Mouse for $48 + free shipping

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 7:19am MDT

Logitech offers its Logitech G9X Laser Gaming Mouse, model no. 910-001152, for $99.99. Apply coupon code "logi_g9x_9310" to drop it to $47.99. With free shipping, that's $3 over an after-rebate price we saw two days ago, but it's the the lowest no-rebate price we've ever seen and a current price low by $30. It features interchangeable grips, 28 extra grams of adjustable weight, custom color LEDs, on board memory for five profiles, 5,700 dpi sensitivity, and USB connectivity. Coupon expires September 9.
Note: This is a "dented box" unit; although the box may be scratched or dented, the contents are new with a full Logitech warranty.
Rocky: The Undisputed Collection on Blu-ray for $33 + free shipping

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 7:10am MDT

Today only, Amazon.com offers Rocky: The Undisputed Collection on Blu-ray for $32.99 with free shipping. That's down $8 since our July mention and the lowest total price we could find now by $15. This 7-disc collection includes all six Rocky movies and a bonus disc.
A free $4 credit from Amazon Video On Demand is included with your purchase.
Dangle Flower Earrings for $6 + $5 s&h

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 6:19am MDT

Today only, JewelryUnder100.com offers these Dangle Flower Earrings for $5.99 with $4.95 for shipping. That's $24 off and the lowest total price we could find.
Samsung 40" 1080p LED-Backlit LCD HDTV for $749 + $22 s&h

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 6:09am MDT

Fry's Electronics offers the Samsung Series 6 40" 1080p Widescreen LED-Backlit LCD HD Television, model no. UN40C6300, for $1,295.00. At the final stage of checkout, it drops to $749. With $22.49 for shipping, that's $101 under our July mention and the lowest total price we've seen. (It's also a current price low by $207.) Sales tax is added where applicable. Features include a native resolution of 1920x1080 (1080p), 4,000,000:1 mega dynamic contrast ratio, 120Hz refresh rate, Samsung AllShare technology, Ethernet connectivity, light sensor (which automatically calibrates the screen's brightness), four HDMI inputs, and VGA, component, and other video inputs.
Vivitar 10x25 Monocular for 1 cent + $5 s&h

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 5:57am MDT

Today only, JustDeals.com offers the Vivitar 10x25 Monocular for one cent plus $5 for shipping. That's tied with our mention from last week ago as the lowest total price we could find for any 10x25 monocular by $9. It comes with a carrying case and strap.
Portable Electronic Can Opener for $3 + $5 s&h

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 5:52am MDT

Today only, DailyCheckout.com offers this Portable Electric Can Opener for $2.99 plus $4.99 for shipping. That's tied with our July mention and the lowest total price we could find for a can opener of this style. Features include a comfort grip, removable cutting lever, and automatic shut-off. It runs on two AA batteries, not included.
New Balance Women's Grin Through Fight T-Shirt for $6 + free shipping

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 5:47am MDT

Today only, Joe's New Balance Outlet offers the New Balance Women's Grin Through Fight T-Shirt, model no. RWGT9334ITP, for $5.99. With free shipping, that's $6 under our April mention and the lowest total price we've seen. It's available in sizes from S to XXL.

xpBargains.com

Meritline.com: Cute Hamburger Land Line Telephone with Cord $7 shipped

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 5:44am MDT

Meritline.com: Cute Hamburger Land Line Telephone with Cord $7 shipped

dealnews - 20 most recent deals.

Sharper Image TENS Back Pain Relief System for $30 + $5 shipping

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 5:39am MDT

Today only, Woot Sellout offers this Sharper Image TENS Back Pain Relief System, model no. MQ710, for $29.99. With $5 for shipping, that's $10 under our March mention and the lowest total price we could find by $4. This system temporarily relieves back pain through gentle electrical stimulation.

xpBargains.com

Tigerdirect: ASUS Eee PC 1005HA-EU2X-BK 10.1in Netbook N270 1GB 160GB 11n $220

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 5:30am MDT

Tigerdirect: ASUS Eee PC 1005HA-EU2X-BK 10.1in Netbook N270 1GB 160GB 11n $220

dealnews - 20 most recent deals.

Invicta Men's Pro Diver Stainless Steel Watch for $30 + free shipping

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 5:24am MDT

Today only, eWatches.com offers the Invicta Men's Pro Diver Stainless Steel Watch, model no. 5249W, for $29.99. With free shipping, that's the lowest total price we've ever seen for an Invicta 5249 watch. Features include a stainless steel case and band and water resistance to 330 feet.

xpBargains.com

Sears: Michelin 1 Pc. Rubber Cargo Mat $7

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 5:23am MDT

Sears: Michelin 1 Pc. Rubber Cargo Mat $7
Amazon: mens and womens watches on sale

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 5:20am MDT

Amazon: mens and womens watches on sale
Logitech: Logitech G9x Laser Mouse $48 shipped

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 5:05am MDT

Logitech: Logitech G9x Laser Mouse $48 shipped
Frys.com: SAMSUNG UN40C6300 40in 1080p 120Hz LED HDTV $749

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 5:00am MDT

Frys.com: SAMSUNG UN40C6300 40in 1080p 120Hz LED HDTV $749
Amazon: Rocky: The Undisputed Collection [Blu-ray] + $4 Credit $33 shipped

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 4:55am MDT

Amazon: Rocky: The Undisputed Collection [Blu-ray] + $4 Credit $33 shipped
NewEgg: HP TouchSmart 600-1055 All-In-One Desktop $975, LG M2762D-PM 27in LCD Monitor $320

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 4:54am MDT

NewEgg: HP TouchSmart 600-1055 All-In-One Desktop $975, LG M2762D-PM 27in LCD Monitor $320
HP: new offers

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 4:53am MDT

HP: new offers
HP Home: HP Pavilion dv8t 18.4in laptop Core i7-720QM 4GB 640GB Blu-ray 11n 1GB Video $1000 shipped

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 4:53am MDT

HP Home: HP Pavilion dv8t 18.4in laptop Core i7-720QM 4GB 640GB Blu-ray 11n 1GB Video $1000 shipped
6PM.COM: 40 - 75% off Ben Sherman mens and womens shoes apparel

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 4:53am MDT

6PM.COM: 40 - 75% off Ben Sherman mens and womens shoes apparel
HP: thin and light HP ENVY 14 series 14.5in laptop Core i3-370M 4GB 320GB 1GB video $950 shipped

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 4:53am MDT

HP: thin and light HP ENVY 14 series 14.5in laptop Core i3-370M 4GB 320GB 1GB video $950 shipped
Tigerdirect: new offers

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 4:52am MDT

Tigerdirect: new offers
Office Depot: new weekly offers

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 4:52am MDT

Office Depot: new weekly offers
NewEgg: up to 30% off with category-wide coupon codes

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 4:51am MDT

NewEgg: up to 30% off with category-wide coupon codes
Mac Mall: Apple iPod touch 8GB (4th Generation) MC540LL/A MP3 Player $224 shipped

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 4:51am MDT

Mac Mall: Apple iPod touch 8GB (4th Generation) MC540LL/A MP3 Player $224 shipped
Dell Business: new ultra thin ultra light Vostro V13 13.3in HD screen laptop $399

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 4:51am MDT

Dell Business: new ultra thin ultra light Vostro V13 13.3in HD screen laptop $399
6ave.com: new offers w/ HDTV

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 4:50am MDT

6ave.com: new offers w/ HDTV
Amazon: Parallels Desktop Upgrade to Windows 7 $30 shipped

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 4:50am MDT

Amazon: Parallels Desktop Upgrade to Windows 7 $30 shipped
REI.com: Cannondale F7 Bike - 2010 $500

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 4:50am MDT

REI.com: Cannondale F7 Bike - 2010 $500
Lenovo: Up to $600 off Lenovo Laptop w/ coupon

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 4:49am MDT

Lenovo: Up to $600 off Lenovo Laptop w/ coupon
NewEgg: Up to 30% off w/ your Category-wide coupon codes

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 4:49am MDT

NewEgg: Up to 30% off w/ your Category-wide coupon codes
NewEgg: new weekly offers

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 4:49am MDT

NewEgg: new weekly offers
Dell Outlet: 20% off any refurb Laptop or Desktop. limit 10000 uses

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 4:49am MDT

Dell Outlet: 20% off any refurb Laptop or Desktop. limit 10000 uses
Electronics Expo: new offers

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 4:48am MDT

Electronics Expo: new offers
Ultraportable laptops roundup

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 4:48am MDT

Ultraportable laptops roundup
Electronics Expo: new coupon offers

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 4:48am MDT

Electronics Expo: new coupon offers
Lenovo: Up to $420 off Lenovo Laptop and $200 off Desktop w/ coupon

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 4:48am MDT

Lenovo: Up to $420 off Lenovo Laptop and $200 off Desktop w/ coupon
HP: End of Summer Blow Out sale

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 4:48am MDT

HP: End of Summer Blow Out sale
Lenovo: Labor Day Sale, 5 - 15% off Lenovo ThinkPad Laptop

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 4:48am MDT

Lenovo: Labor Day Sale, 5 - 15% off Lenovo ThinkPad Laptop
Electronics Expo: up to 58% off Samsung LCD HDTV w/ coupon

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 4:48am MDT

Electronics Expo: up to 58% off Samsung LCD HDTV w/ coupon
HP: new offers

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 4:48am MDT

HP: new offers
softpedia: WinX DVD Author 5.5.8 full version Free Download

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 3:15am MDT

softpedia: WinX DVD Author 5.5.8 full version Free Download

Techbargains.com

TODAY ONLY Kodak Zi8 Pocket 1080p High Definition Video Camcorder $79.99 Free Shipping at Newegg

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 3:00am MDT

Newegg Coupon Codes

MSNBC.com: U.S. News

Calif. nuke meltdown site finally set for cleanup

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 2:32am MDT

More than five decades after a partial nuclear meltdown just outside Los Angeles, state and federal officials Friday announced agreements to remove all contamination.

Buy.com - Today's Deals