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In this tutorial, I’m using the Thematic theme framework, a GPL licenced theme brought to you by Ian Stewart. Thematic is in my opinion very powerful and optimized. Therefore, you may be interested in taking a look at other WordPress frameworks as well, such as Hybrid, Headway, Thesis or WP Framework.

Creating the child theme

Right now, you should know what a Theme Framework is and why you should use them. But enough theory for now, let’s get ready to create our own child theme for Thematic.

Download Thematic

Of course, the first thing to do is to download the Thematic Theme Framework. Once finished, unzip the file on your hard drive.

If you want, you can activate Thematic and take a look at your blog. Thematic can be used as a parent theme, or in standalone mode. Without a child theme, Thematic is ready to use and features a really gorgeous typography. There’s no images or even colors, so that you can create your child theme and make Thematic fit your needs, either in its look or functionality.

Link To Full Story: net.tutsplus.com

Author: Burak Guzel

Burak Guzel is a full time PHP Web Developer living in Arizona, originally from Istanbul, Turkey. He has a bachelors degree in Computer Science and Engineering from The Ohio State University. He has over 8 years of experience with PHP and MySQL. You can read more of his articles on his website at PHPandStuff.com and follow him on Twitter here.

Definitions

First let's familiarize ourselves with the terms related to this subject.

"Cron" is a time-based job scheduler in Unix-like operating systems (Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS etc...). And these jobs or tasks are referred to as "Cron Jobs".

There is a cron "daemon" that runs on these systems. A daemon is a program that runs in the background all the time, usually initiated by the system. This cron daemon is responsible for launching these cron jobs on schedule.

The schedule resides in a configuration file named "crontab". That's where all the tasks and their timers are listed.

Why Use Cron Jobs?

Server admins have been using cron jobs for a long time. But since the target audience of this article is web developers, let's look at a few use cases of cron jobs that are relevant in this area:

• If you have a membership site, where accounts have expiration dates, you can schedule cron jobs to regularly deactivate or delete accounts that are past their expiration dates.
• You can send out daily newsletter e-mails.
• If you have summary tables (or materialized views) in your database, they can be regularly updated with a cron job. For example you may store every web page hit in a table, but another summary table may contain daily traffic summaries.
• You can expire and erase cached data files in a certain interval.
• You can auto-check your website content for broken links and have a report e-mailed to yourself regularly.
• You can schedule long-running tasks to run from a command line script, rather than running it from a web script. Like encoding videos, or sending out mass e-mails.
• You can even perform something as simple as fetching your most recent Tweets, to be cached in a text file.

Link To Full Story: java.dzone.com

With all the buzz around Twitter these days, it's no surprise that we see new clients popping up everywhere - on our desktops, the web and as mobile applications. While some applications are done quite well, it can be difficult to find the one that has the features that you want. But like all software developers, you have a choice - you can go ahead and build one of your own. That's where  Twitter4J fits in.

I first became aware of Twitter4J as I was working on my Twitter client using ECF.  No matter what feature I needed from Twitter, it was supported in Twitter4J. Of course, you can integrate into any Java application from version 1.4.2, and there's also support for the Android platform. In this article i'm going to give a brief overview of how to use the framework to connect to, and use, Twitter.  With the basic building blocks that the library provides, you can create your own rich Twitter interface.

Getting Started

It couldn't be easier to get going with this library - simply download the latest version, and add the core library to your classpath.

Link To Full Story: www.wait-till-i.com

Here’s how this works:

You can guess the location of a user by their IP and Rasmus Lerdorf wrote a nice API to do that at http://geoip.pidgets.com/. Using that, you can read the IP in PHP and call the API with cURL:

if ($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARD_FOR']) {
    $ip = $_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARD_FOR'];
  } else {
    $ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
  }
  $url = 'http://geoip.pidgets.com/?ip='.$ip.'&format=json';
  $ch = curl_init(); 
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url); 
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); 
  $output = curl_exec($ch); 
  curl_close($ch);
  $data = json_decode($output);
  $lat = $data->latitude;
  $lon = $data->longitude;

Link To Full Story: net.tutsplus.com

What is YQL?

Web apps and web services multiply like rabbits. They’re all fun to play with (like rabbits) and fun to integrate into other projects (unlike rabbits). But learning a new API every other day isn’t feasible or fun. And that’s the problem the Yahoo Query Language (YQL) is out to solve.

Think of YQL as the API for the web, the one API to rule them all. It’s not a hard one to learn, so let’s get you up to speed right now!

How do I use it?

Yahoo has put together a pretty nice console for us to flex our muscles with YQL. Load up that console, and let’s explore it.

In the right sidebar, you can choose a “table” in the “database”; a sample query will show up in the statement box at the top. To the right of the statement box, you can see what the corresponsing REST query would. Below, you have the data returned from the query; you can receive data in either XML or JSON.

So, let’s try a query!