My CSS Menu is one of the coolest websites I've been to in a while. If you are in need of a nice looking CSS menu but don't know where or how to get started, or maybe just don't want to start from scratch then you are in luck; My CSS Menu is your answer.

You can currently choose from 22 different already designed for you CSS menus (I'm sure there are more on the way). They have very basic menus and very advanced menus and everything in between to meet all your needs. While all of these options are great to have it is not by far the best part of the site though. Once you decide on a menu type you have the ability to customize it to meet your exact needs including size, colors, animation effects, and more. This customization turns 22 options into an almost endless amount of different menus.

The CSS editor (see screenshot above) is very fast and easy to use. The GUI is well designed and intuitive. You can preview your changes, save changes, and import saved menus. You can use a designer mode, CSS mode, and HTML mode which feel and look a lot like Adobe Dreamweaver for those of you that are familiar with the product.

Open Flash Chart is a free project that allows you to integrate flash graphs in you website. There is support for all of the commonly used graphs like bar charts, line charts, area charts, and scatter plots. The flash component allows the user to hover over points of the graph and view labels explaining the point (see screenshot above). This feature is what sets Open Flash Chart apart from other chart/graph apps. Check out the website for tutorials and examples. There are other static graphing libraries like Google Charts that are clean and useful but static.

You can download Open Flash Chart and use it under the GNU General Public License. If you need help with implementing it or customizing or using the different libraries you can check the forums.

If you have been using MySQL for your database choice, you'll probably find this cheatsheet to be pretty useful. Whether you are new to MySQL or advanced, this is pretty handy to have around. A help page on help.scibit.com offers a great breakdown of the different datatypes that are available for use in MySQL. They cheatsheet lists the data type, the reasons for use, and the size of the data type. This is a quick and easy reference that will hopefully help out.

MySQL Field Types [via dzone]

For those of you using PHP to develop your web pages, I'm sure that you have used the date function at some point. There are so many cases that I have used this to show a date on a page, like using date("Y") in the copyright section of the footer to always reflect the current year. Here are a few tips & tricks to help you save some time.

Formatting

Predefined Constants

This is a trick that I really wish I had known about earlier. PHP 5.1.1 and forward offers date formatting constants. So when I was looking for examples on how to get the date in the correct format when creating my RSS feed, I could have simply used the DATE_RSS constant.

Example

Use:

<? echo date(DATE_RSS); ?>
Output: Thu, 24 Nov 2008 12:29:09 -0500

Instead of:

<? echo date('D, d M Y G:i:s O'); ?>
Output: Thu, 24 Nov 2008 12:29:09 -0500

There are eleven total predefined constants available including DATE_RSS, DATE_ATOM, DATE_COOKIE, and DATE_W3C.

User Defined Constants

Building on this same idea of constants, you could easily create your own date format constants to use. All you would need to do is define a constant with the string value of the date format and then call it within the date function. I have included a simple example below.

Example

<? define(DATE_SCOTT,'m/d/Y'); ?>
<? echo date(DATE_SCOTT); ?>
Output: 11/24/2008

Relative Dates

This trick is one I use when I need to get a date like tomorrow or the day after tomorrow or yesterday. The function strtotime allows you to easily calculate dates like tomorrow and yesterday. You can turn any GNU formatted date string into a PHP date. I have included a couplt of examples below that are based on a publish date of 11-24-2008.

Example

<? echo date('m-d-Y',strtotime('yesterday')); ?>
Output: 11-23-2008

<? echo date('m-d-Y',strtotime('+4 days')); ?>
Output: 11-28-2008

Calculate Age

This trick is a fairly simple and straight forward one. All it does is find an age in years. Simply pass the year(s) you want to compare and it will return the age in year. This could easily be made into a function like getAge($yr1,$yr2);

<? echo floor(abs(strtotime('Y') - strtotime('1985'))/31536000
/*1 year in seconds*/); ?>
Output: 23

For those of you that are as hooked on phpMyAdmin as I am, you will be happy to know that there is a new version available. phpMyAdmin 3.1.0 includes a number of improvements and fixes.

The list of improvements includes security updates, language updates, export fixes, and general patches. The release notes highlight a few specific improvements: "this version has a new setup mechanism and supports BLOBstreaming and the Swekey hardware authentication" (release notes).

You can view the release notes for full details concerning the new release and download the new version from sourceforge.

Tablecloth is a small (6 KB) and simple JavaScript file that lets you add some styling and actions to your tables. As you see in the screenshot above, you can highlight the row and column you are looking at. As you hover over the table cells, the rows and columns are highlighted that correspond to the cell you are hovering over. Once you click a cell, Tablecloth will highlight, and keep highlighted, the row and column that make the intersection at the cell selected.

The script is fully customizable through a CSS file (1 KB). There is a default theme, or skin, that comes with the download but can be changed to match your website color scheme. The CSS and JavaScript file together are small and fast loading, adding very little overhead to your page load time.

I did not see any license information available; however, the website does list how to modify the code. This script is written by Alen Grakalic from Css Globe. You can see additional features, view demos, view usage examples, and download Tablecloth from the website.

Have you ever wondered if your skills are in demand? With so many different possibilities available for web development, it is tough to know if you should keep mastering a specific technology or start learning a new one. After reading an article about how PHP programming jobs are in high demand, I asked myself the follow-up question: what other skills do I have that are in high demand, and which skills do I have that are not?

The article linked to a great resource from oDesk that lists the current (monthly) trends for many of the development and design skills used for web development. There are 84 different trends with a wealth of useful information about the skill's demand including graphs, stats, and recent job postings. Although these stats are pulled from information specifically on oDesk, it represents demand from all around the world. I have listed links to some of the most in-demand skills right now.

• CSS
• Drupal
• FreeBSD
• Flash
• PHP
• Photoshop
• MySQL
• XML
• JavaScript
• Ajax

As a side note, this site is a fantastic example of how great the Google Chart API is.

There is a sample usage, a demo, and source code (download and view) available from the website. I have included a sample demo below as well.

Demo

Print Table

There are many cases that require a streaming music solution for your website. If you are in need of a free and simple flash mp3 player for your website then you should check out flash-mp3-player.net. This website offers multiple flash mp3 players that may provide you with just what you need. The available players have very few bells and whistles, but they are easy to use, customize, and set up.

There are a total of five different players to choose from: mini, normal, maxi, multi, and js. They all provide customization options like colors and auto play. One of the my favorite features is the built in keyboard shortcuts for controlling playback. You can preview the players, read the documentation, use a generator to create your player, download the player, and view the license agreement for each of the five players. The website states that "[t]he player is under the Creative Commons BY SA and MPL 1.1 license. You can use the player without citing the author" (flash-mp3-player.net).

If you are in need of a background pattern for your website, PatternCooler is likely to have what you want. There are thousands of backgrounds available for download and are freely available for your use: "All artworks on this site can be used freely on blogs, MySpace profiles, Twitter, mobile phone wallpapers, and non-commercial web projects" (PatternCooler).

The website offers the ability to customize the patterns and backgrounds to your liking using the Seamless Pattern Color Editor (example). This editor, as shown below, allows you to pick a pattern and change the colors using a color picker or hex codes.

Along with the available patterns for editing, there are over 20,000 prebuilt patterns available for download from the User-Colored Seamless Pattern Background Library. Technically you can edit these as well, but they probably have a pattern you like in this collection. Once you have decided on a pattern, you have the option to download and/or view the pattern.

You can get a glimpse of what the backgrounds that are offered will look like simply by viewing the front page. The front page uses one of their patterns as the background and changes with each refresh of the page. Along with the automatic loading of their patterns, you can change the background to whatever pattern you want to see. The view option allows you to see it on as the background on the current page or on a blank page.

Be sure to check out all of the patterns they have to offer. Chances are you will find one, probably multiple, that you like. If you like the service offered, consider donating to help out.