Few Thoughts on Web Video

Posted on January 27, 2011 by Stoimen

On Air


It’s really full of video sharing websites out there, but in fact almost all of them use Flash player to display their video files. This is the reality now, but with the coming of HTML5, perhaps the things are changing a bit!

First of all if you start dealing with video sharing platforms the first thing to do maybe is to find a good Flash (.flv) player and to convert all your video content in FLV.

Few things to know with Flash video players:

  1. The user can play those videos only after installing the Flash Plugin to his browser;
  2. The video must be encoded either in FLV (or FLash Video) or in MPEG-4 with h.264 codec. Only than the Flash player can play it;

The HTML5, which can be described as variety of new “things” in the HTML comes with a native <video> tag. Something like the <img> tag where you can just point the source of the image in the src attribute. Continue reading →

Posted in micro tutorial, web development | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Google Analytics for Nokia … and Mobiles

Posted on January 21, 2011 by Stoimen

Is There an Analytics Interface for Mobile?

The last few months I was searching about some kind of mobile interface of Google Analytics for my Nokia e71. However I did not find one?! Please correct me if I’m wrong.

In the same time I knew there is a GA API, which is free to use, so finally I wrote a tiny web app allowing the reading of basic information about your Google Analytics accounts.

Note that your username and password are NOT SAVED! However it’s up to you to try.

An important note is that the API has a limitation in requests so yet again, it’s possible to be unavailable in case of too many requests.

Visit with Your Mobile Browser

this link:

http://www.stoimen.com/ga/

Note that I made it primary about my Nokia, so any screenshots will be welcomed as well.

It is still beta so be careful. In fact any suggestions are welcome. Either for improving the security and error handling as well as new data exports.

There are lots of things to be done, but this is really basic.

Posted in web development | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Download Images with PHP

Posted on January 18, 2011 by Stoimen

As it seems one possible solution while trying to download images with PHP is to write a “client” to do so. Will it be with cURL, Zend Framework or some other tool – it doesn’t matter.

However one of the most used approaches is simply with file_get_contents and file_put_contents. I’m not sure whether I wrote already about this or not, but this solution simply looks something like this.

 
file_put_contents('/path/to/file', 
                  file_get_contents('http://www.example.com/source.image');

In fact a client will give you more control over the process, to handle errors, etc. So maybe this is a better solution.

Posted in micro tutorial, PHP, web development | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

A Memcached Zend_Cache

Posted on January 17, 2011 by Stoimen

Zend_Cache

Usually Zend_Cache is used to store cache files on the file system, which can be really fast and useful in most of the cases. However there’s a faster cache mechanism and hopefully it’s supported by Zend_Cache as well. This is the Memcached backend.

A Faster Cache

Memcached is a really powerful tool to cache directly into the RAM. First, this tool has nothing to do primary with Zend Framework. It’s a server, usually started on some port, that can be called to store and get things from the memory. This of course is very fast, way faster than the cache in the hard drives.

Zend_Cache and Memcached

Zend_Cache has an interface to work with Memcached which is great as usual. The PHP example of Memcache (note that there are two things Memcache and Memcached, which are slight different) can be found here and as it says:

$memcache = new Memcache;
$memcache->connect('localhost', 11211) or die ("Could not connect");
 
$version = $memcache->getVersion();
echo "Server's version: ".$version."<br/>\n";
 
$tmp_object = new stdClass;
$tmp_object->str_attr = 'test';
$tmp_object->int_attr = 123;
 
$memcache->set('key', $tmp_object, false, 10) or die ("Failed to save data at the server");
echo "Store data in the cache (data will expire in 10 seconds)<br/>\n";
 
$get_result = $memcache->get('key');
echo "Data from the cache:<br/>\n";
 
var_dump($get_result);

However this can be coded into a Zend Framework style like that:

$frontend = array('caching' => true, 'lifetime' => 1800, 'automatic_serialization' => true);
 
$backend = array(
    'servers' =>array(
        array('host' => '127.0.0.1', 'port' => 11211)
    ),
    'compression' => false
);
 
$cache = Zend_Cache::factory('Core', 'Memcached', $frontend, $backend);

Note that you don’t have the typical “cache_dir”, just because everything’s cached into the memory.

Now you can call the cache as it’s called with the “File” backend interface:

$key = 'mykey';
 
if (($result = $cache->load($key)) === false) {
	// call the slow database query here ...
	// save in $result
 
	$cache->save($result, $key);	
}
 
echo $result
Posted in micro tutorial, PHP, zend framework | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

More on CSS Optimization

Posted on January 7, 2011 by Stoimen

As CSS files are first downloaded to the client and then executed, the main optimization is to make those files smaller. But that doesn’t mean only minifing!

CSS

The Minification Process

While with minification you can strip all the symbols that only take space, but are useless when the browser parses the file, there are some other techniques, which in fact aren’t so simple, to speed up the loading process. By minification you get rid of the white spaces, tabs, new lines, etc., but the file may remain too large.

Useless Rules

Yes, sadly the browser doesn’t need all those white spaces, actually web developers need them. Just because this makes the file more readable, or readable at all. However most of the web applications have one large CSS file, typically named layout.css, main.css or whatever, that contains all the rules for the entire application. In many of the cases one page of a site doesn’t need all the rules for the site, so a possible solution is to remove all of the rules that aren’t used.

There are tools that may help you do the job. Such a tool, that I’m using is the Firefox add-on – Dust-Me Selectors. Of course there are a lot other tools doing the same job, so it’s up to you to pick up one.

After removing all those useless rules you’ll see that the size of the file can be something like 20% of the size of the source file. This is interesting to note, because most of the time the minification cannot give you such performance benefit. In fact this comes with some issues.

One Request or What?

This is the dilemma of the web programming, isn’t it? However thus you can split the main CSS file to few smaller files, but they are named differently so you cannot expect the browser to cache them when the user visits the site for the first time.

The case must be, of course, tested against various situations, so you can decide what suits you. However the typical scenario is to optimize only few of the pages, as they might be the most visited – as for example the homepage. If two of the pages are mainly visited, than you can make custom, small, CSS files for them with only the necessary rules, and let the other pages with the main CSS file. If you’ve a lot of returning visitors, you can be sure the custom files will be cached (if the client cache is turned on) and the second time somebody visits the “homepage” for example the page will load faster.

Posted in css, micro tutorial | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment