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The popular twitter client twhirl has released a new version that now allows you to upload photos to TwitPic directly from the twhirl client. We recently released an API for TwitPic.

Once the photo has been uploaded, a short URL to access the photo is automatically added to your tweet. Check out the screenshots below to see how it works.

Screenshots

You can now integrate TwitPic into your application. The API was just released this week. You can read more about the api at: http://twitpic.com/api.do

A popular twitter client has already integrated photo functionality into their beta version. I’ll release the name once, they’ve officially released their new version to the public.

I wrote a post about YouTube’s new API features. Here is an excerpt.

 

Yesterday my RSS reader lit up with posts about a “big announcement from YouTube tomorrow”. Many were hoping the announcement would be about live video streaming since Steve Chen made a comment about this at a YouTube party recently. But when the news broke today it was about a new API and many were disappointed, but I was thrilled.

Now with these new APIs you can literally make your own interface to YouTube and have access to all their data and even customize the YouTube player to match your site’s design. I already have a project in mind that I’d like to use some of this functionality for.

Read the entire article here

I’m looking for an SDK or API that I can use on a *nix box to convert XLS/DOC/PPT to PDF or SWF. Sites like Docstoc and Scribd are doing this and I am wondering how they are doing it. I’ve exhausted my google searching skills.

If anyone has any information on this please leave a comment. I would greatly appreciate it.

The biggest feature request for TwitPic has been the ability to post pictures from your phone to Twitter. Well as of yesterday, you now have that ability.

Just login to TwitPic, click on Settings and you are presented with your own unique TwitPic email address that you can post images to from your phone or from any capable email client.

Traffic and image posts have spiked and already this new feature has been a great success.

TwitPic is a service that allows you to share & comment on photos with the increasingly popular service, Twitter.

How it works
From TwitPic’s interface you can login to your Twitter account, upload an image, & post a status update to twitter with a link to the photo, along with a description.

Another feature is the ability to comment on photos uploaded to TwitPic. The comment is also automatically added as a status update to your twitter profile like the screen shot below shows:

TwitPic was born out of my need to be able to share & comment on photos easily with twitter. I developed it over a weekend, from concept to working site. As always I’m open to feature suggestions.

Screenshots

Smashing Magazine has released a huge list of 100 free WordPress themes.

“High-quality WordPress themes always come in handy. Whether you are looking for some design inspiration or professional coding solutions — in both cases you can learn a lot, you can apply them and you can build customized designs upon them without reinventing the wheel all the time.

In this article we present 100 free high-quality WordPress themes. Together with hundreds of other designs, these themes have been manually selected, installed and tested over the last weeks. They all can be downloaded, customized and used for free in both personal and commercial projects. Links to demo-versions provide a direct preview of a theme.”

Check it out

Software frameworks have become very popular in the last few years, mainly due to the explosive popularity of Ruby on Rails, making frameworks the new hip thing to use for development and a great buzzword to throw around like its candy.

Personally, I don’t use frameworks for my projects. I find them too constricting and I feel that I lose control over my development process, but thats just me. Some people swear and live by frameworks. Maybe one day I will find one that suits me.

Model-View-Controller (MVC) Architecture

MVC is a software approach that separates application logic from presentation. In practice, it permits your web pages to contain minimal scripting since the presentation is separate from the PHP scripting.

• The Model represents your data structures. Typically your model classes will contain functions that help you retrieve, insert, and update information in your your database.
• The View is the information that is being presented to a user.
• The Controller serves as an intermediary between the Model, the View, and any other resources needed to process the HTTP request and generate a web page.

PHP Frameworks

• CakePHP is a PHP framework that works on the MVC architecture and offers caching, application scaffolding, validation of model data and even a presentation API. One of the most popular PHP frameworks.
  
• CodeIgniter is a PHP framework that also uses the MVC platform, has classes for data access, e-mail, FTP, and XML-RPC. Also, CodeIgniter has an exciting community and thorough documentation to get you started.
  
• The Zend Framework is the self-proclaimed “leading open-source PHP framework.” Services included in the API include Ajax (JSON), search, syndication, web services, and a fully object oriented PHP class library.
  
• Symfony - A feature packed framework, but has a reputation for being server-intensive.
• Prado - A component framework for PHP5 that has similar event based web apps similar to ASP.NET.
• BareBones - a one-file, no-configuration, MVC framework for PHP5.

Source @ SmashingMagazine.com

Deziner Folio posted this PHP snippet for creating a simple back link that will take you to the previous page you were on.

Code:

Please note that first we assign the previous session variable to the anchor tag and only then re-assign the current URL to the session variable which will be read when you move on to the next page.

This being a simple PHP snippet can be used in almost every CMS (PHP based) and sure is a good addon to the accessibility of your site.

You can view the original article here

Shaun Inman has posted a great function that will salvage all the data that it can in a serialized array that has been truncated. PHP's unserialize() function will fail if it encounters a malformed string. This is where repairSerializedArray() function comes in to save the day.

PHP’s native serialization text format is the simplest way to store an arbitrary array in a database without losing the types of its many values or their structure within the array. However, you might occasionally run into problems when the serialized string is longer than the database column that houses it. The resulting truncated string cannot be unserialized by PHP. The majority of the data might still be intact but PHP doesn’t know what to do with it; so I wrote a function, two actually, that does. (While PHP’s serialize() and unserialize() functions also work with objects this recovery function does not.)

Because the recursive function operates on and whittles down the actual serialized string while it attempts its recovery, a second function duplicates and prepares the string leaving the original unchanged.

Code Example

You can read the full post and download the code here