The typical solution to avoiding spam bots from abusing your online forms is to use a CAPTCHA test. You know – the hard to read, wavy text that you must type in correctly to prove to the web page that you are human and capable of making sense out of the non-sense. Well, spammers have used OCR (optical character recognition) algorithms to have their bots read the messy text and complete the test. Since then, there have been lots of alternatives to the text CAPTCHA test. Some involve selecting an image from a list given its name or description, or answering simple math problems. However, I didn’t find one that I really liked. So we started to build our own on the assumption that spam bots don’t use mice. (more…)
First, you’ll need to set up a database. I’ll assume you have access to a web server and know how to create a database, tables, and code to access it. I use MySQL and PHP.
You’ll also need a Chumby widget.
And to connect the two, you’ll need a crossdomain.xml file. (more…)
We here at Zoom Creates love giving people the option to maintain their own websites once we are done building them. One of our favorite CMS platforms is MODx. It’s based on PHP, is open source, and is extremely flexible. Today I’m going to talk to you about the basics of building a HTML based template.
I’ve written before about how great it is to work with a service that has a great API. Twitter was one of the tools that I talked about in that post and today I’m going to show you the basics of working with their API.
PHP is a great language for web applications, and it’s available with just about any web host. If you aren’t familiar with how PHP works, this tutorial will probably be a poor place to start. Today we are going to talk about how to work with the Twitter API and PHP, and you’ll need to know a few things about how PHP works to keep up. For a good refresher course on PHP, click here.
On a recent project (which will be revealed later this week) we needed to save an image created in a Flash application, using AS3 and PHP. It turned out to be really easy. Here’s how we did it…
We have an intern coming in next week to hang out with us nerds. He’s a highschool student that would like to see what the day to day tasks of a web programmer are. I’ve talked to him about what he will be doing and what to brush up on. Here are a list of sites that I recommended him click through to brush up on some of the basics of the tools that we use. These are in no particular order.
HTML Goodies – This site was one of the first that I used to help me understand HTML and JavaScript. A little outdated, but still great for fundamental learning.
Tizag PHP Tutorial – Basics of PHP. This website does an amazing job of putting complex concepts into words that everyone can understand.
W3Schools – Straight from the people who make the standards we love and use, you can learn a bunch on their site about the RIGHT way to do things. Topics in PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, jQuery, CSS and XHTML are where you can learn the tools we use.
PHP Screncasts – Some good free video screencasts that show you some of the basic aspects of PHP. Buy it for the advanced videos.
There are more places online that can teach you our toolset. Google is great if you know what you are searching for. The internet is a great thing, and can teach you just about anything you want, especially if it relates to computers and programming.
We developers love a good API. If you aren’t sure what an API is, be sure to check out this lovely page on wikipedia about them. API stands for application programming interface, and it allows developers like us to tie our code to different services that are already built.
This means that we can build programs that interact with other platforms so that they can start to do some amazing things. Some of our favorite APIs are the Google Maps API, which lets us plot and map virtually any data to points on a map, and the Twitter API, which lets us control every aspect of a Twitter account. In this blog post I’ll give you a quick example of working with the Twitter API, to show you just how easy it is to work with.
In my earlier posts, I’ve writen about 
We here at Zoom Creates love giving people the option to maintain their own websites once we are done building them. One of our favorite CMS platforms is MODx. It’s based on PHP, is open source, and is extremely flexible. Today I’m going to talk to you about the basics of building a HTML based template.
I’ve written before about how great it is to work with a service that has a great API. Twitter was one of the tools that I talked about in that post and today I’m going to show you the basics of working with their API.
We developers love a good API. If you aren’t sure what an API is, be sure to check out 
