Servage Magazine

Automatically-updating timestamps is a feature found on many popular websites, especially on social networks. With Timeago, a JavaScript timestamp library, these special timestamps are created using the HTML5 <time> tag. What makes them special is their automated ability to update themselves as time goes by without having to reload the page. How Timeago works? When Timeago loads, it starts looking for HTML <time> tags with a class of “timeago” and changes how they are displayed to the visitor, such as “4 hours ago”. Timeago also requires the <time> tags to use a specific time format; otherwise it cannot read the dates correctly. More specifically, all <time> tags must use the ISO 8601 specification, ...

Managing ZIP archives became easier when the ZipArchive class was introduced in PHP 5.2. ZipArchive allows you to read, extract and create your own compressed archives. In this article we will go through two of these operations: reading and extracting ZIP archives. This is useful for websites where you offer downloads of data that may benefit from being packaged. I.e. a collection of images or other files, to aggregated dynamically and downloaded as a single archive. Reading ZIP files Whether reading or extracting a ZIP archive, the first thing is to create a new ZipArchive object. This can be done as follows: $zip = new ZipArchive(). After you have a new ZipArchive object, ...

HTML5 is a change towards a more semantic web which is a phrase used to describe a more machine-readable web. But HTML5 is not only that. It also includes new concrete features for web designers to take advantage of. One of these features is a batch of new HTML5 tags. Let’s go through some of the latest and most commonly used HTML5 tags so you can start using them in your own designs. <main> The <main> tag is used to identify the main content of a web page. For example, the “About Us” section of a corporate website, the <div> that has a description of the company could be inside a <main> tag. ...

Typer.js is a JavaScript library that allows you to create animated typing effects for any kind of text. Animated typing is often found on product landing pages to impress visitors with features of a product. In addition to a nice visual experience, libraries like Typer.js allow you to have many sentences that erase the previous one, resulting in less screen space required for text. Getting started Setting up Typer.js on your website is simple: Just download the JavaScript file from www.steven.codes/typejs and include it on your website using a <script> tag and you are ready to go! Unlike many other JavaScript libraries, Typer.js does not depend on jQuery or any other libraries. It ...

New and junior PHP developers like to ask what PHP framework to learn and use. What are the pros and cons of each framework? This article gives an insight into what are the latest trends in PHP development and what frameworks are top notch in 2016. Let’s jump straight into action and have a look into the latest and greatest PHP frameworks of this year. CodeIgniter CodeIgniter is a framework from 2006. Although being old, as of writing, it is the second most popular PHP framework. CodeIgniter is a fast and lightweight framework for dynamic applications. Many frameworks have been losing their popularity in the past years to a relatively new framework called Laravel. However, ...