Displaying a location marker on a Google Map

Thursday, December 23rd, 2010

One of the most popular features on websites today is a marker pinpointing a location on Google Maps. It’s incredibly easy to add such a map to a website and I’m going to show you how.

I said it was easy, and with the recent release of version 3 of the Google Maps JavaScript API, it’s become even easier. With the previous version of this API, you had to register your map to receive an API key, but that’s now no longer necessary.

Naturally Google provide a comprehensive guide to the Maps API, but I will run through the basics here.

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How to store website data with HTML5

Monday, September 27th, 2010

Throughout your web browsing careers I’m sure you’ve come across the notion of cookies, pieces of text stored by the browser to be retrieved and used at a later date. These vary from simply remembering your name to welcome you personally next time you visit, to more complicated storage of authentication and shopping-cart contents.

Cookies generally work well but can be fiddly to implement, as they are set to be deleted by default once the browser is closed. If a website owner needs the data to be stored for a longer period, a cookie can be given an expiry date. Again this isn’t as clean as it could be: how far into the future do you set the date, for example? And what happens when a user flushes out their cookies?

HTML5 attempts to clean this up with the introduction of web storage.

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Adding your Twitter feed to your website with jQuery

Monday, September 13th, 2010

If you or your company has a Twitter account, chances are you’d like to promote it and display your latest tweets from your website. Since many websites – both personal and increasingly business – are built on blogging software such as WordPress, this is usually achieved via a plugin, of which there are many out there.

But what if you simply want to add your live Twitter feed to a “normal” web page? Twitter itself provides a number of HTML widgets, but in this article I’ll show you how easy it is to achieve with a little bit of JavaScript, CSS, and jQuery.

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Google App Inventor: is drag and drop a flop?

Tuesday, September 7th, 2010

Confession time: I have never learnt to program in Java. Swoon, gasp.

It’s not that I haven’t wanted to. In particular, I’ve always loved the idea of creating my own mobile phone apps; but I’ve never seemed to find the time. So I was excited to discover at the weekend that Google has finally given me access to App Inventor — a visual development environment that lets you create Android applications via a drag-and-drop interface, with no Java skills required. (more…)

The hard facts: what languages web developers should learn

Thursday, May 6th, 2010

When I first started learning programming, choices were limited to machine code or a version of BASIC. But then I am ancient.

In many ways, the newcomer to programming who’s aiming at web or mobile development has a much better time of it today. This is because whilst there are many, many languages to choose from, they have much more in common than languages of the past. Learn ActionScript, for example, and you’re half way there with C#, PHP and JavaScript, as their basic constructs are identical.

But the real value you, as a web developer, can bring to a project is specialist skill. Whilst every good PHP developer understands the basics of C#, no web project can be completed without in-depth knowledge, and this takes time and lots and lots of practice to develop. It’s a huge investment so the choice of which language to specialise in is also critical, at least in the short- to medium-term. (more…)

Google says it can keep Chrome on top

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

Chrome may have impressed with its speedy rendering and JavaScript performance, but there’s more where that came from says a Google developer.

Kevin Millikin, one of the team which worked on the V8 JavaScript rendering engine that underpins Chrome, gave a talk at the Google Developers Conference today where he explained that although the code is already pretty unique, there are plenty more avenues they can explore to eke out more performance. (more…)