Xml Tag | Jacob Emerick's Blog

Web Development Goals

I've always been a bit of a goal- and task- orientated person. The only thing I enjoy more than making a long to do list at the beginning of a week is crossing the items off of the list one at a time. Now that I'm a 'real adult' with a full time job and puppy, I decided to create a list of goals to aim for over the next five years. Most of these goals are under the realm of self-improvement; financial security, physical fitness, etc. I wanted to post about some of the web development related goals, both to give readers an idea of where I'm expecting my web skills (and, directly, personal web sites) to head in the future and to place additional pressure on myself to continually progress on the goals.

Learn new programming languages

Over the last couple of years I've managed to teach myself most of what I know of xHTML, CSS, SQL, PHP, and Javascript. However, there are a few languages that I want to learn that I've dabbled in the past. I use some XML, mostly in the form of KML and RSS, but I don't know much about XSL and XSLT. I'd like to be able to create my own XML schemas and parsing templates to the point where I can create entire xHTML web sites using clean XML data. Another...

• Tags:
• my site
• xml

Dynamic Template Methods

Ever since I started working on websites during the summer of 2006 I made sure to keep dynamic and static information separate on my projects. Certain things in the website's content should remain the same, or similar, on separate pages: header, footer, navigation, etc. (I'll refer to these similar pieces as 'static' and the content that is unique to each page as 'dynamic'). However, when you work on a website with multiple pages, it becomes difficult to update the static information the same on all pages. This is where a templating system comes in handy.

A templating system allows the developer to separate the content to ease updating. When I first started with websites, I used Dreamweaver templates for this, which is a classic example of a templating system. You create a document in Dreamweaver with the header, footer, and any other information you want to remain the same across all the pages on your site and save it as a template. You can create new pages based on the template and Dreamweaver will 'lock' the template structure and only allow you to edit the dynamic, or unique, area of the page. If you want to change the static information, you can open the template separately, edit it, and save it. All of the pages created with the template will automatically update...

• Tags:
• php
• template
• ajax
• xml
• mvc

Using XSL for Websites

Throughout the course of my web development learning, I've always had a central problem to deal with. On a typical website, multiple pages have some sort of general, non-changing bits that stay constant throughout the site: headers, footers, and navigational bars are great examples. The only piece that changes regularly, and is arguably the most important piece of a web page, is the central container. How do you keep these two pieces separate on both the frontend and backend of the site? Also, if there are non-changing or simple pieces of a website that do not change from page to page, is there a way to keep them on the client side to keep bandwidth low?

There are several options to this problem, the most obvious one being AJAX. When a user clicks on a new link, a request is sent for an XML document that would be parsed out and displayed within the container. The XML would be much smaller than an entire xHTML document and would be easy to setup and send from a server. It would be a truly clean separation of data v presentation. The main fall is with the URL - an AJAX request does not refresh the address bar. A user would have difficulty linking to a specific page from a browser, and search engine robots would only see a single address for an entire site. Non-Javascript...

• Tags:
• template
• ajax
• javascript
• xml

Cross Site Status Updater

This post assumes semi-advanced understanding of PHP scripting as well as basic understanding of Twitter and Facebook.

When I started working on launching my personal website, an interesting problem came up. I wanted to have a feature that showed a current status on my site, similar to a Facebook status. Also, since I also have a Twitter and Facebook account, it only made sense to have a single place to update my Twitter, Facebook, and personal site status.

After doing a bit of research, I decided to use Twitter as the central updater. Twitter has many nice applications built into it, including the ability to update from a desktop or phone. Once my Twitter status was updated, the change would get carried down to my Facebook account and personal site through the Twitter feed.

The first step was with Facebook, and ended up being quite easy. There is already an application built for this that works quite well. Once you agree to use the application, all you need to do is sign into your Twitter account through Facebook and change a few settings, and every tweet you make is imported to your Facebook status.

The next step was updating my own site. I chose to use a PHP script for this, utilizing...

• Tags:
• my site
• php
• twitter api
• xml