Phil Taylor - Joomla Expert & PHP Developer » Fun

Amazing google results – still confused!

Phil Taylor — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 16:33:20 +0000

I am working on a huge application at the moment that requires a whole load of replacements in a text string (Think replacing TLA with Three Letter Abbrev’s)

I googled to see if there was a faster PHP method than str_replace(). The results on the first page gave me a chuckle and a headache.

Here is the link to the search result page

So – Is str_replace faster than preg_replace? or is it that preg_replace is faster than str_replace???

Who knows? Google certainly doesnt…

How to create small toolbars

Phil Taylor — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 16:30:10 +0000

Since the launch of the new template on our site we have had a surprising number or requests for information on how we made that floating menu toolbar on the right of your screen.

It really is nothing special in code, and there are many tutorials on the internet about this.

I have put together a bare HTML page with the CSS and HTML minimum required, you can take a look of the source of this page and disect what you need to replicate the menu system on your site.

You can see the page here:

http://www.phil-taylor.com/toolbar.html

Keep up to date with Joomla Related News

Phil Taylor — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 20:30:57 +0000

I was asked today how I manage to keep up with the huge amount of new news about Joomla from the official source and other peoples blogs about Joomla – simple – RSS Feeds and Google Alerts!

Google Alerts:

The google alerts system allows anyone to subscribe to alerts for any keyword, We have several alerts set up with them, keywords for “Joomla”, all our product names and all our competitors names, along with some terms relevant to hacking and security in Joomla. When Google spots a blog post, news item or new web page containing these terms Google emails an update direct to my mailbox. Useful for finding new blogs too!

RSS:

I think most people know what RSS is by now, I’m not going to go too much into it, infact this blog post was more about Google than RSS – just know this, RSS is useful for looking for changes on a small number of websites, I have over 250 RSS feeds and I find filtering out the noise and finding keywords relavant to me and my company very difficult. (We use the sage plugin for firefox since we left behind our windows days and became 100% linux based. On windows we recommend FeedDemon)

No affiliate links in this post – just wanted to help you find relevant information about Joomla.

Ho Ho Ho – Sometimes we take ourselves too seriously!

Phil Taylor — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 21:25:23 +0000

Viral marketing approaches (not to be confused with computer viruses) take clever little online ideas and try to make them spread by online “word of mouth” which usually means friends emailing other friends.

This year’s big viral winner may be ElfYourself, which is showing nothing less than stunning traffic over the past few weeks – looks like it’s beating out many major sites and might even approach the top 100 sites this week as it spreads. [nope - looks like it peaked near Christmas at about site 250 per Alexa measures].

Click here to see me make an Elf of myself