Zend Certified

Recently I received my certificate after passing Zend PHP 5.3 exam. I am glad I passed it, there were some stuff I didn’t know very well about before preparation, like namespaces, late static binding, etc. The study guide that goes with exam purchase is pretty decent. I liked its minimalistic approach, so it just tells you the main points and what topics are covered on exam. All other information and detailed explanations should be looked on php.net. I got many questions about “final”, “static” keywords, object inheritance. There are many questions with code examples, where you should guess the output.

Here is a good article about what is covered on exam: http://devzone.zend.com/article/12647

Apartment hunting

Searching for apartment in bay area. Padmapper.com helps a lot.

Happy 101010!

Happy 101010 (42) - the answer to life, the Universe and everything!

Got iPhone today!

Wordpress plugin Related Posts Thumbnails

Today my Wordpress plugin “Related Posts Thumbnails” has been approved and released.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/related-posts-thumbnails/

Read more information about this plugin here:

http://wordpress.shaldybina.com/plugins/related-posts-thumbnails/

This plugin has been successfully used for several months in one of my blogs. Visitors tend to click on the related posts teasers, increasing page views significantly.

I was initially inspired by LinkWithin widget, which I installed on my blog first. LinkWithin is a Javascript widget that collects all post images, resizes them, stores them on its own servers and displays them when you scroll down to the end of the post. Overall, it is a great widget that can be installed on every platform and supports externally stored images. However, there were several issues I couldn’t fix. Here are the few:

• I experienced an increased page latency due to the loading of this Javascript and external images, It slowed down my site performance in a browser (in addition to Google FriendConnect, AddThis widget, ads and featured posts slideshow).
• Its dynamic HTML rendering provided some unwanted “flickering” effect below every post.
• It kept showing links and thumbnails of deleted posts.
• Relation is based on post titles — not tags or categories.
• For several of my posts it skipped the first image and displayed the second one as a thumbnail.
• Even when I changed my post images completely it kept displaying the old ones.
• It was actually hard to get response from their support.
• I couldn’t change the colors and size of my thumbnails.

So here is my plugin for Wordpress:

• It uses built-in Wordpress taxonomy — categories and tags.
• It generates static page HTML, so search engines can actually see it.
• Colors, font preferences and default image can be customized.
• Only published posts are displayed.
• It is based on built-in Wordpress post thumbnails feature, that allows to customize thumbnails size hosted on server.

Bookmark on Delicious on iPad

When I see something on web I want to save I add it to my Delicious. As I browse more often using my iPad I needed a way to bookmark on Delicious. The process of adding this bookmarking is similar as described for Instappaper but different javascript. 

- Click on + to add current page to Bookmarks. Change the title to “Bookmark on Delicious”. Click Save.

- Select All and copy the following javascript:

- Open Bookmarks list, click on Edit. Select Delicious bookmark. In the link field remove text and paste the code from clipboard.

- Click on Done. And now you will be able to bookmark websites faster on Delicious while browsing in Safari on iPad.