Simply download it, and extract “modifier.timeSpan.php” into your Smarty/plugins/ directory. To use it, simply add the “timeSpan” modifier to any smarty date variable. For example… {$postDate|timeSpan}

It takes advantage of PHP’s strtotime() function, so just about any date format you input should work just fine, but it works best with the YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS format.

Possible outputs are…
Just now // less than 3 minutes ago
5 minutes ago // less than an hour ago
9 hours ago // less than 24 hours ago
Yesterday at 10:15pm // yesterday
Tuesday at 2:45pm // less than 5 days go
October 8 at 1:30am // more than 5 days ago this year
August 18 2007 at 5:32pm // not this year or in the future

Checkout PHP Image Resize

Yesterday was the first day of the Google I/O 2010 Developers conference. During the keynote speech, Vic Gundotra (VP of Engineering for Google) was talking about HTML5 and how there are APIs to allow developers to create better web applications. A graph was then displayed showing past, present, and future adoption of these APIs by the common web browsers.

Vic Gundotra goes on to say “So where do we expect to be by the end of this year? As you can see all the major APIs are going to be present in all modern browsers”.  As you can see in the slide, IE doesn’t appear to be one of those modern browsers.

Watch the video yourself

“New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.”

I read this story today, and as much as I am not a Apple fan – I agree 100% with this. Adobe has refused to accept change and are shooting themselves in the foot.

Adobe Flash has never ran decently on Mac or any mobile device, much like it has never ran decently on Linux. Why? Because they are proprietary and for whatever reason – not adopting. If it was open, this wouldn’t be a problem.

Other companies such as Google (YouTube), Vimeo, Netflix, Facebook, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ESPN, NPR, Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, People, National Geographic and many others are already supporting HTML5 video (H.264 video format) – showing their support for open standards and waving goodbye to Flash.

Read Steve Jobs full post here.
Thoughts on Flash

Please feel free to download it and give it a try! Let me know what you think.

Phoenix Framework

However with all this technology, there is still the time consuming task of finding and downloading or copying all your music onto your portable device – keeping it synced and so on. Also, you end up listening to the same songs over and over, until you get sick of it and download more. The problem with this is that you will be listening to music you already know and will never discover new songs or bands that you may love. However, you dont want to listen to the radio because they never play anything you like – and you have to listen to commercials.

The solution? Pandora.

Pandora is a website that only plays music you like. You simple tell it a few bands or songs you like, and it plays them along with other similar songs and bands. If a song comes on that you don’t like – give it a thumbs down. Pandora will remember that you didn’t like that song and wont play it again – it will also base future song selections off other songs or bands you may have given a thumbs down or up to. Simply put – Pandora learns the type of music you like, and plays it just for you. You can even create up to 100 stations. For example, I have my “alternative rock” station, and a “classic rock” station setup depending on my mood.

The best thing about Pandora is that its completely free. So, whats the catch? For one, you can only skip a certain number of songs per day. Second, you can only listen to 40 hours of music per month. Also, there are commercials played between songs on occasion. However, most people won’t listen to 40 hours of music per month, and the commercials are short.


If you do listen to more than 40 hours per month, you can upgrade to a paid membership for a mere $36.00 per year. Paid members don’t have to listen to commercials, can skip more songs, and theres no limit to how many hours per month you can listen. Way cheaper than satellite radio which plays music you don’t want, but is also commercial free.

There are a few downsides to Pandora. For one, you cannot replay or rewind a song – however you can pause and resume. Also – it plays what it wants based on your feedback, you can’t listen to a specific song on demand.

Pandora is also available on the iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Palm Pre, and Windows Mobile. There is even a desktop application for paid members for Mac, Windows, and Linux (via Adobe Air).

I use Pandora at work, and in my car on my phone every day. Its a great service, and I believe its the future of radio.

I’d like to know other peoples thoughts on the future of music and what they think about Pandora. Leave your input in the comments!

It was already snowing when I woke up at 7:30am, and it hasn’t stopped since (currently 1:30pm). We’re at 4 inches of snow, with some surrounding counties at 6-8 inches.

Traffic / Travel Time – Tells you the travel time and traffic for your current route.

Alternate Routes – You can easily view and select alternate routes for your trip, incase of traffic or unwanted toll-roads.

Street View – Once you reach your destination, it displays a street view image of the address you are navigating to.

Also, using an Android shortcut, you can create an icon on your phones desktop that automatically navigates you to an address. For example, I’ve setup a icon called ‘Go Home’, and it automatically launches Google Maps and navigates me to my home address – with a single touch.

Checkout the video about it

If you have a product for sale, and that product has images, prices, categories, weight, etc…. In the user-interface, when someone is setting up a new product, the price and weight is filled out by the user while creating the product. This makes perfect sense for a user interface, however – not for a database schema. In the database, the weight and price should be based off of combinations of options for that product – and not tied directly to the product.

Say you have a Playstation3 for sale. The price shouldn’t be tied to the product “Playstation3″. Instead, the price should be tied to an inventory record for this product. Such as Playstation3 – 60GB. The size of the hard drive is an option for this product, which effects the price – thus, the price on the product level is now useless. Your database should reflect this, however the user-interface needs to be designed so that this logic is hidden from the user. (I’ll leave that task to a designer, don’t ask me how).