mikebernat.com Web-Development, Design, Usability

Most people who use MySQL know that MyISAM and InnoDB are the two most-common database engines available with the popular opensource datbase provider. I would be that most of those people don't even take the time to select a storage-engine and just accept the database default. Those of you who are left probably heard from a friend who saw something online that said one of the two is better than the other. Those of you who are left will still probably learn a thing or two here :)

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I had an issue lately where image styles that I inputted through TinyMCE weren't working. For example, my images would not align right or left, my borders weren't appearing, and even padding wasn't working. I checked the HTML source and found that no styles at all were making it from the popup Image Dialog to the editor!

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Coding Horror has a pretty amusing article on the infinite number of names programmers give common ascii symbols. $, %, &, |, etc are seen across a lot of languages but somehow they have accumulated more names than the entire ascii library combined.

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A lot of the gripes about PHP as a language come down to the fact that there are a million ways to accomplish the same task, but only a couple are truely 'correct' - as in significantly better for one reason or another. Out of all those reasons script efficiency and speed are the driving force behind all experienced programmers.  That being said it's hard to know what the right way to do things are. Sure there are 100 ways to do something but all but 2 or 3 of those take an obscene amount of time. Normally, during development, you won't notice long load times because it's not getting hammered by thousands of users requesting the same page.

Chris Vincent has set up The PHP Benchmark to help visually show how some methods are more effecient than others.

PHPBench.com was constructed as a way to open people's eyes to the fact that not every PHP code snippet will run at the same speed.

A few highlights:

<?php
foreach($aHash as $val);
// VS
while(list(,$val) = each($aHash));
?>

• foreach($array as $value) is the fastest way to loop through an array.
• foreach($array as $key => $value) is slightly slower by about 10-15% so use it only when necassary.
• Using while() and for() loops dramatically increases the server load especially when used in conjuction with list() and each().

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Richard O'Neill has written a short article on improving user-interface by polishing-up your grids and tables. By making a few simple modifications your information can be easily read and understood.

"It's not hard making interfaces look professional. I've found that some good looking icons and a bit of cell padding makes all the difference.
Using the example below, we can apply small changes to the design which will improve usability and make this ugly interface look a lot better."

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Creating a way to show how many users are currently visiting your website has become a fad amongst webmasters. It's a cool way to show off your skills has a coder and to show your visitors how many other people are looking at the same thing they are. You don't want to miss the bandwagon again do you? This script is also an excuse to brush up on some mildly advanced MySQL queries.

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