Responsive tables

Tabular data is an often used layout component that imposes some tricky decisions in a responsive environment. If the table is wider than the viewport, we can enable horizontal scrolling, hide some columns, show a sum up of the table with a link to the full version of it, or we can make other decisions as well.

Online Advertising (MOOC)

The Online Advertising course I will talk about is a MOOC offered by the open2study.com website. Its lecturer is Patty Keegan, who knows her subject first-hand, and does a great job at introducing it while not being too technical.

Principles of Project Management (MOOC)

MOOCs (which stands for Massive Open Online Courses) are offered by schools and universities from all over the world in as diverse fields as anthropology, mathematics, marketing, or information technologies. The course we are interested in is entitled Principles of Project Management. It is delivered by the Polytechnic of Western Australia, often shortened as Polytechnic West, a technical and further education institution based in Perth.

It's time to relax

The relaxing sounds of nature have that great way of making us forget all the stress within a few minutes of listening. Here is a selection of sites offering you a deep relaxation.

Social share buttons are useless

Social share buttons are about everywhere. Ubiquitous on the web, they invite you to like, share or plus the most insignificant page to help its content being seen by hundreds or, why not, even millions of potential visitors. But are they as necessary as they want to make believe?

Windows 8 touch gesture translation

With the advent of touch screens and their matching interface documentations, it may be difficult to know how to translate the different gestures names (to tap, to swipe, to pinch…). Windows 8 offers us a translation for each action in its on-line documentation when we compare its different localizations.

Some news on the RWD front

The responsive design world is constantly evolving, and with it the W3C recommendations and working drafts, in particular concerning the CSS standards evolution. Typography has its word too, and web font usage brings its share of solutions. This articles brings out a series of relevant links and articles to pursue a longstanding discussion.

Nursery rhymes and counting

Learning by repeating is a very common useful way of both entertain young children and teach them a bit of arithmetics. Nursery rhymes, or Mother Goose Rhymes, can be aimed at counting, but also addition, subtraction, and multiplication.

Internationalization with FuelPHP

FuelPHP is a free open-source PHP framework, based on PHP 5.3+. It implements a HMVC architecture (Hierarchical Model–View–Controller) where the controller plays a central part in the architecture, the view and the model being completely separated (hence they can't communicate which each other). It also offers many other features like a RESTful implementation, template parsing, an Object Relational Mapper, an authentication package and a caching system among other things. We will focus here on the way it handles internationalization in its version 1.5.1 from January 2013. The new 2.0 codebase development has already started but it should treat i18n the same way.

What are the hardest languages to learn for an English-speaking student?

This infographic compares the learning difficulty of many languages depending on the minimal time to achieve language proficiency for native English speakers. If languages like Spanish, French or Dutch should need about 600 hours to reach that level, Hindi, Russian, Thai or Greek would need about the double time to get there, and Arabic, Chinese, Korean and Japanese would double agin this time with 2,200 hours of class hours.

Scarcity by design, not by definition

As we have seen in the previous post of this series, there has never been a real scarcity of domain name extensions, but a carefully planned creation of new ones to feed the market throughout the years, with the exception of the country code TLDs and their international character set support. Beside the mere cost of a domain name, whether it is a regular one, an internationalized domain, or one of the nearly 2,000 soon-to-be launched over-priced extensions, there are still hidden costs to be aware of, most of them being external ones.

Handling plurals with the Yii PHP framework

Yii (which stands for Yes, it is) is a free, open-source PHP framework started by Qiang Xue in 2008. Aimed at performance, based on MVC architecture, and following the event-driven programming paradigm, it also supports message translation, date and time formatting, number formatting, and interface localization. We will focus here on the way Yii handles the plural form format in its message translation feature in its current release (1.1.13).

CodeIgniter tutorial: how to extend a helper

CodeIgniter helpers are toolkits of functions created to ease your coder life. You can find them in the system/helpers/ directory. Among them, we get arrays, captchas, cookies, emails, and forms helpers to cite just a few.

The inflector helper (inflector_helper.php) defines the functions singular (which returns the singular form of the word given as parameter) and plural (which returns the plural form of the word given as parameter), but only for the English language. We will see in this tutorial how to add the support of another language (here, French) to the plural function, and thus enabling the pluralization of French.

CodeIgniter: SEO-friendly localized URLs

After having seen how to internationalize CodeIgniter by using language files, we will see in this post how to create localized SEO-friendly URLs, i.e. understandable URLs for both search engines and users.