Any site that generates income or is mission critical should have a development site, a review site, and a production site to facilitate design and review without affecting the production site until changes have been reviewed and approved. This includes WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and many other open source PHP/MySQL based sites. Sunrise Resources LLC has developed PHP scripts that perform the following functions:
- Copy all MySQL tables from one domain and/or server to another via FTP, and perform a find and replace function for domain names, links, and credentials.
- Recursely copy all site files from one domain and/or server to another via FTP, and perform a find and replace function for domain names, links, and credentials on filetypes such as .php, .js, and .html, with a choice of all files or only those files that are new or changed.
- Make a snapshot of all MySQL tables, both automatically via a cron job and on-demand, identified by date and time.
- Restore all MySQL tables from a particular snapshot identified by date and time.
- Make a snapshop of all site files, both automatically via a cron job and on-demand, identified by date and time.
- Restore all site files from a particular snapshot identified by date and time.
This methodology protects your site from problems that can occur during software development, and makes sure that your customers only see a production site that has been carefully reviewed and approved.
The development site and review site can be password protected or hosted on non-public accessible servers.
Sunrise Resources LLC has extensive experience in developing PHP scripts for development, review, and production sites. For more information, please contact us.
May
QR codes can be generated via the PHP Image_QRCode class. QR codes can contain any text, up to about 4,000 alphanumeric characters in English.
The Sunrise Resources LLC contact information is provided in a QR code.
The most common uses are:
- URL
- Email address
- Telephone number
- Contact information (e.g. Me Card or vCard)
- MMS address
- Geographic data (e.g. latitude/longitude)
Sunrise Resources LLC has extensive experience in developing PHP applications for QR codes. For more information, please contact us.
May
The Mobile Joomla! extension automatically detects the user device and loads HTML for a properly sized mobile or desktop webpage. This allows you to quickly build a mobile compatible CMS based site and to create different code for Android and iPhone, for example.
Sunrise Resources LLC has extensive experience in custom functions for Joomla, WordPress, and Drupal. For more information, please contact us.
An Internet radio station can be streamed using SHOUTcast on a Linux server. There are also many SHOUTcast hosting companies that provide SHOUTcast as a monthly service.
There are many good audio mixers available that run on the PC and Mac that can upload the audio stream to the SHOUTcast server. A very good free PC program to upload an audio stream is Winamp and their Source DSP plug-in.
When building an Internet radio station it is important to select the proper streaming audio players to support mobile devices such as the iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry. In PHP you can detect the user’s device and browser which allows you to provide the best streaming audio player. For example, an iPhone can use the image/x-quicktime audio player with the embed tag and the audio stream can be specified as a .pls playlist.
The JW Player is a very good audio and video player that has a small license fee.
Sunrise Resources LLC has extensive experience in developing SHOUTcast Internet radio stations and HTML5 mobile compatible websites. For more information, please contact us.
Softufacture.com is a HTML5 mobile compatible demonstration site that automatically recognizes the connected device and formats the screen size accordingly. The user can change the screen size and CSS color scheme through the use of drop-down menus. A Google Maps page, Twitter feed page, HTML5 carousel page, and AJAX loaded Google Adsense ads are also displayed.
In order to build a mobile compatible website it is important to consider the factors below:
- Screen size, with narrow screens using vertical stacking of blocks
- HTML5 rendering (not all devices and browsers render HTML identically)
- JavaScript differences (not all mobile devices and browsers execute all JavaScript instructions identically)
- Video playback, such as HTML5 video for iOS instead of Flash
- Audio playback, such as using the iOS embed element versus other players for Android
- CSS differences, which can be controlled in a PHP driven CSS file
Sunrise Resources LLC has extensive experience in developing HTML5 mobile compatible websites. For more information, please contact us.
May
One method to build a screen scraper is to read a webpage as a string with PHP, and then to parse the string as required. A sample screen scraper can be seen at Sunrise-Resources.com that performs the following functions:
- In PHP, read in a Craigslist page as a string.
- Find the links on the page.
- Read in the pages referred to by the links.
- Display the content from the links.
Sunrise Resources LLC has extensive experience in developing PHP based screen scrapers. For more information, please contact us.
By using the Google Maps API in conjunction with a proprietary routing algorithm from Sunrise Resources LLC, you can map the least time route and calculate the estimated route time and determine whether an address is within your defined delivery area.
Sunrise Resources LLC has extensive experience in developing PHP and JavaScript custom scripts for the Google Maps API. For more information, please contact us.
Nov
The HTML5 video tag is intended to simplify playing videos across all browsers and platforms. However it is not yet fully supported by all the most popular browsers (e.g. IE, FF, Mobile Safari, Chrome, iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, Droid). This means that some users may be able to view the video, but other users would not if they do not have the most current revision and the required plug-ins.
For the immediate future I would recommend the following:
1. Identify what browsers you want to support.
2. Detect the browser on the server with PHP.
3. Insert the best video player in the downloaded page for the browser (e.g. Flash when supported or the native player for iPhone or BlackBerry).
4. Stream the appropriate video file for the downloaded video player.
5. If necessary, video format conversion can be performed as required on the server. However, it is recommended to create a video upload script that will convert from a standard video format (such as Flash) to the other required video formats (such as h.264 for iPhone and BlackBerry) and then store the required formats (http://ffmpeg.org/index.html).
Various technical articles about the HTML5 video tag indicate that there is still a lot of work to be done before the HTML5 video tag is widely supported (http://theturninggate.net/tutorials/tutorial-ttg-stage-ce-html5-video/).
A demonstration of a JavaScript and PHP based solution that only requires one line of web page code is here. By updating the MySQL table, new media playback technologies are supported without changing the web page code.
Sunrise Resources LLC has extensive experience in designing browser specific video web applications for desktop and mobile platforms. For more information, please contact us.
Designing browser compatible HTML, CSS, and JavaScript typically requires a significant portion of a project schedule. Unfortunately the differences between browsers seem to be increasing especially in the area of video media players for both desktop and mobile applications.
A server-side language such as PHP can detect the client browser and then build the appropriate HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Scripts for commonly used functions, such as video media players, can be stored in MySQL and inserted.
JavaScript support and design requirements vary significantly between desktop browsers, and vary even more between mobile browsers. A task as simple as starting a JavaScript function on page load may require different code for Internet Explorer (“IE”) and Firefox (“FF”) when using a Content Management System (“CMS”) such as Drupal or WordPress, since a CMS typically generates the “body onload=’javascript: do_something()’” tag when the page header is built and not when the page content is generated.
For example, in order to detect when a web page is fully loaded, FF allows a JavaScript “window.addEventListener” inside the “body” and “/body” tags which will detect page load. IE, however, uses “document.onreadystatechange”, which can be used to write a function to detect the existence of some condition or variable that will indicate if the page has been loaded.
Media players, such as Flash, BlackBerry, iPhone, and IPad, require different HTML and JavaScript for different desktop and mobile browsers. Building a library of verified scripts and CSS files which are inserted by PHP from a MySQL database, reduces development time and browser compatibility testing time significantly.
This methodology allows a clean separation of HTML web design and programming skills. A HTML and graphic web designer, for example, can insert a complex function with a single line of PHP code within HTML such as “insert_video_player()”, and the programmer can focus on functionality issues.
Not only does the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript often vary, but the format of the media served may also need to vary. In some cases, PHP may be used to create or convert media files on the fly.
In many applications it may be advantageous to use AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) to send and receive data without reloading the page. AJAX can be used to load browser specific data, which can also be retrieved from a MySQL database.
Designing browser compatible HTML, CSS, and JavaScript can be streamlined through the use of a server-side language such as PHP with a library of scripts in a database, and design responsibilities can be partitioned between HTML/graphics design and programming.
Sunrise Resources LLC has extensive experience in designing browser compatible HTML, CSS, and JavaScript using PHP and MySQL for mobile devices and desktop browsers. For more information, please contact us.
In order to support streaming video for mobile devices and desktop browsers, it is recommended to create a compatibility table that defines all supported mobile devices and desktop browsers, formats, screen sizes, and bit rates, and media players.
Different Blackberry models, for example, have different screen sizes. According to BlackBerry, the Tour 9630 screen size is 480×360 pixels and supports .mp4, .3pg, .3pg2, .avi, .asf, and .wmv formats. BlackBerry has its own media player, which embeds similar to other media players.
According to Apple, the iPhone screen size is 640×480 pixels and supports .m4v, .mp4, and .mov formats. The iPhone also has its own media player which embeds similar to other media players. The iPad architecture is based on the iPhone, and the iPad screen size is 1024×768 pixels.
When loading a web page with video, a server-side script in PHP can determine what HTML, media player, and JavaScript to load to support the connected mobile device or desktop browser. It is recommended to verify the proper operation on actual devices and desktop browsers with actual videos that will be used.
The web server may be able to convert videos on the fly if not all video format options have been created and stored in advance. Remember to upload the maximum supported screen size and bit rate if you plan to convert videos on the fly. In general, however, it may be advisable to write a server-side script to create and store all supported video versions when the video file is first uploaded to the server.
Sunrise Resources LLC has extensive experience in streaming web video for mobile devices and desktop browsers. For more information, please contact us.