So you have a website with some contact info on it, name, email, phone number, address, etc. In most cases, clicking the email address will open up the default email application to let the user write and send an email right on there spot. But what if the same user is viewing the site on his mobile device (which happens to be a phone), why wouldn’t you let the same user have the ability to click that phone number and make the call?

The first and most common standard which started in the Japanese i-Mode technology, is the use of the tel: scheme. You can look at RFC 5341 where is was proposed as an official standard, but be warned, most of the parameters proposals are not supported by some or most devices, better stay with the basics. The basic tel: URI-scheme is supported by almost mobile devices, including: iOS, Android, webOS, Symbian, Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile and Windows Phone 7, Opera Mini and even some of the low-end devices.

The basic format of the tel: URI-scheme is:

<a href="tel:+1800800800">Call us at 1-800-800800</a>

When a user clicks the call link, a confirmation alert with the full number will show up on the screen asking whether to place the call. This is a prevention method aimed at avoiding fraudulent links tricking users into calling premium pay by minute numbers.

As in the example above, it is recommended using a full international phone number format that includes the plus sign (+), the country code, the local area code, and the local number. The international format will work regardless of the callers location. They can call form a different country or from the same local area, the number will reach you in the same manner.

In case the user is using a non phone mobile device like iPod Touch, wifi enabled readers, or others, call links will prompt the user to add the phone number to the address book instead of making a call.

Another good function is the ability to send DMTF tones after the call has been answered. This is useful for all sorts of call routing systems or other tone-controlled services. By formatting numbers and characters after the main call number, the you can pre-route the call to the intended destination, this include pressing numbers or having the phone wait for 2 seconds before “pressing” another number. You can do this using the “postd” parameter after the number. Use numbers, *, # (using the URL-encoded %23 value), as well as p for a one-second pause and w for a wait-for-tone pause.

A URI-scheme with postd parameters will look like this:

<a href="tel:+1800800800;postd=pp22">Call us at 1-800-800800</a>

In this case, the phone will wait for 2 seconds and dial the number 22.

It is important to remember that while this function will work on most modern devices, it might not be supported by others. However, devices that don’t understand it, will still call the primary telephone number and do nothing afterwards.

A proposal to continue the development of the Google’s Wave platform has been posted to the Apache Incubator wiki by Google and Novell employees, as well as some other independent developers. Community interest in continuing the development of Google’s Wave platform has led to a proposal to migrate portions of the code base to the Apache Software Foundation. The Apache Incubator is the place where potential future Apache projects can be submitted to the open source organization for consideration.

In 2009 Low adoption rates and a poor reception from end users had lead Google to close down the Google Wave project, which was started in beginning of the same year. Not long after Google’s decision, Some of the project leaders announced plans to release the Wave client and Server as an open source application called “Wave in a Box” (WIAB) under the Apache licence.

Wave in a Box (WIAB) is now the basis of the project proposal posted to the Incubator wiki. While it doesn’t include all the features of the original Wave released by Google, it does allow users to set up their own Wave servers and continue the development of the project. The developers also plan to create APIs and a Web 2.0 client.

The proposal submitted to the Incubator states that the project’s goals are to migrate the code base from Google code to the Apache infrastructure, to reach a state where it is possible to continue the development of Wave In a Box by developers working outside of Google, and to find new developers to continue the project. The developers also anticipate that future participants will join the project from such vendors as Novell, SAP, other small companies and independent developers.

As described by the devlopers themselves the project will include:

• An application bundle including a server and web client supporting real-time collaboration using the same structured conversations as the Google Wave system.
• A fast and fully-featured wave panel in the web client with complete support for threaded conversations.
• A persistent wave store and search implementation for the server (building on contributed patches to implement a MongoDB store).
• Refinements to the client-server protocols.
• Gadget, robot and data API support.
• Support for importing wave data from wave.google.com
• The ability to federate across other Wave in a Box instances, with some additional configuration.

More technical details of the plan can be found on the Wave Protocol Forum, which is the best place to keep up with the latest progress on the open source project and learn how you can contribute.

When you need to spice up your PowerPoint presentation, website or any other document with images, free stock photography websites or archives are your first bet. Here are a few good places to start with. The websites here are presented in a random order, their location on the list does not reflect high quality or larger archives.

FreePhotosBank is a free stock photography site, full with many high quality, high resolution images, neatly categorized by subject. You can pick images by category, choose the “Hot List” or use the smart search to find the most fitting image for your needs. All downloads available as a JPG file or in a zipped format. The sites has many unique features like sending photos to friends, ranking images, direct printing and more.

stock.xchng is another successful free stock photography site with a huge catalog of categorized photos. In order to use and download images from this site you must have a user and be logged in. When using stock.xchng you must notice the specified restrictions concerning each photo you are about to use. Each photo in the catalog may present different use permissions.

MorgueFile supplies free images for your inspiration, reference and use in your creative work, be it commercial or not. It has a decent archive with a variety of images. It might not be as easy to navigate as some of the other sites and might be a bit pushy on it’s commercial side, but still a valuable resource for images. MorgueFile license allows you to adapt the work, use it for commercial purposes without attributing the original creator. You may not sell, license, sublicense, rent, transfer, distribute or claim ownership of the image.

FreeFoto.com is one of the largest free photographs collection websites on the net. It’s images collection is comprehensive and easy to navigate in the most part and offers free images for online use. While it offers higher quality versions for sale, it’s rules for free use are very strict; The use is allowed only in online setting, and than the user must provide attribution and a link back to FreeFoto, among other restrictions.

StockVault.net is a place to share and download high quality stock photos of all types. The site features categorized images and a clean and easy to navigate interface. While StockVault can’t compete in share volumes, it has top quality images and some works by Indy and private photographers. Along with stock photos it also has video, tutorials, articles and other sections, all related to photography.

freedigitalphotos.net holds thousands of royalty free photos for websites, newspapers, magazines, video and TV productions, PowerPoint presentations, school work and more. All the photos are free for corporate and personal use. Every image is free, with an option to buy high resolution versions for use in print or graphic design. When using a photo from this site you must must credit FreeDigitalPhotos.net and you may not use it on products where the image is the sole reason someone would buy the product.

Open Designs is a new portal for free Open Source web design templates. It just opened and not very active, currently housing 195 different website templates. The designs are very versatile and most are very beautiful and professional.

From the website: “The Open Design Community (TODC) is a group of Open Source Website Designers providing free web design templates helping to make the global internet a prettier place.

OpenDesigns.org is owned and operated by The Open Design Community, a nonprofit organization headed by a board of 3 administrators and 10 moderators.”

At the moment seems like the discussion section is broken and non operational, but I’m sure it will be fixed momentarily.

Sometimes when designing an HTML form, you need to have the focus on a specific item in your form, which is not necessarily the first item in the form. This can be achieved very easily. You cannot do this with HTML. However, you can include a tiny JavaScript after the form that sets the focus to the appropriate field. This is how it’s done:

The HTML:

<form id="someform" name="someform" action=...>
<input type="text" id="theinput" name="theinput" .../>
</form>


The JavaScript should be placed after the form is complete:

<script type="text/javascript">
document.someform.theinput.focus();
</script>

Dan Saffer writes about the importance of documentation to the development process. A lot of time

I’ve seen good and wholesome designs go to waste simply because they were never documented properly and when it came down to execution, the developers where left cold on their own. When puzzling several big pieces together trusting “the team” to work it through is not always enough. In opposite to the new hype, a good document will most likely save time.

Knowing this subject intimately I can certify that good documentation prior to starting a project is the best guide to the whole process. When did documentation and methodology become bad words?

PHP 5.1.3 was released only a few days ago and now we have PHP 5.1.4 release.

Whats leading to this release? A critical bug with $_POST array handling as well as the FastCGI sapi have been discovered in PHP 5.1.3.

A new PHP release 5.1.4 is now available to address these issues. All users who installed 5.1.3 are encouraged to upgrade to this release as soon as possible.

See the PHP 5.1.4, see the ChangeLog or download it.

PHP 5.1.3 has been released, not many additions, but many important bug fixes.

This release combines small number of feature enhancements with a significant amount of bug fixes and resolves a number of security issues. All PHP users are encouraged to upgrade to this release as soon as possible.
Some of the key changes of PHP 5.1.3 include:

* Disallow certain characters in session names.
* Fixed a buffer overflow inside the wordwrap() function.
* Prevent jumps to parent directory via the 2nd parameter of the tempnam() function.
* Enforce safe_mode for the source parameter of the copy() function.
* Fixed cross-site scripting inside the phpinfo() function.
* Fixed offset/length parameter validation inside the substr_compare() function.
* Fixed a heap corruption inside the session extension.
* Fixed a bug that would allow variable to survive unset().
* Fixed a number of crashes in the DOM, SOAP and PDO extensions.
* Upgraded bunbled PCRE library to version 6.6
* The use of the var keyword to declare properties no longer raises a deprecation E_STRICT.
* FastCGI interface was completely reimplemented.
* Multitude of improvements to the SPL, SimpleXML, GD, CURL and Reflection extensions.
* Over 120 various bug fixes.

The PHP 5.1.2 release combines small feature enhancements with a fair number of bug fixes and addresses three security issues. All PHP 5 users are encouraged to upgrade to this release. Some of the key changes of PHP 5.1.2 include: HTTP Response Splitting has been addressed in ext/session and in the header() function. Fixed format string vulnerability in ext/mysqli. Fixed possible cross-site scripting problems in certain error conditions. Hash & XMLWriter extensions added and enabled by default. Upgraded OCI8 extension. Over 85 various bug fixes.

The PHP 4.4.2 release address a few small security issues, and also corrects some regressions that occurred in PHP 4.4.1. All PHP 4 users are encouraged to upgrade to this release. Some of the key changes of PHP 4.4.2 include: HTTP Response Splitting has been addressed in the header() function. An XSS problem inside the error reporting functionality has been removed. Apache 2 regression with sub-request handling on non-Linux systems has been fixed. A regression with the key() and current() functions have been fixed. Over 30 various bug fixes.

Check PHP download page for binaries, sources and other info.

PHP 4.4.1 is now available for download. This version is a maintenance release, that contains numerous bug fixes, including a number of security fixes related to the overwriting of the GLOBALS array.

Available to download here.

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