Design is important on any project. Anything from the user interface down to the button icons are an important part of the overall design. But when you are on the web, there is one design element that slacks big time when it comes to choices: fonts. Typefaces on the web have been a major complaint of web designers since the web began, and there is no real trend that shows there will be support for more than just web-safe fonts anytime soon. To make things worse, there is not much you can do about the issue. Images seem to be the most widely used and accepted medium for custom type-facing, but today we will discuss another choice: sIFR.

One of the neat things about World of Warcraft is the amount of data freely available. Between sources like Thottbot, Wowhead, and WoW Armory you can find information on just about anything in the game. The WoW Armory is even more interesting because it sends all of its data to the browser in xml. This makes it really easy to consume this data through web requests. This tutorial is about building a small application that searches the Armory for items.

Today, I am going to go over something a little different from my normal regiment. Lately, I have been messing around with creating IM bots, mainly for GTalk, but I have thrown in AIM also. I feel between those two I am covering a decent amount of instant messaging ground. In this tutorial I am going to show how to build an IM bot that will connect to GTalk and optionally multiple other services.

So far in our Cake tutorials, we have learned the basics of CakePHP, and used some pretty time saving and neat features. Thus far, most of these features we have implemented have been easy fixes to small issues, that save at most a few hundred of code. Today, we will be using a really neat view/controller combo that will make creating a paginated view as easy as.....well, cake!

In our last tutorial, we created a form that gave us the ability to add products to our product database. To save time, we just created the form in the main page. While this was fine then, now we are going to take that form and give it a page of its own. This will allow us to view products on one page and add products on another, plus it is more professional and user-friendly. So dig in and get started!

There's lots of reasons why you'd want to make XML documents using PHP. Maybe you're writing your own RSS feed or implementing a REST service. Whatever the reason, this tutorial will introduce you to the DOMDocument object and how to use it to create dynamic XML documents.

Over our last few Cake tutorials, we have done a lot with so little code. We built a local website, set up our first Cake site, then finally used helpers to organize and make things look a bit nicer. Up until now we have been working with 2 measly database records. This has worked just fine until now, but we are going to need some more data for the tutorials to come.

So I'm sitting here, trying to come up with something interesting to write about for a Silverlight tutorial, when an idea struck - go look at our old Flex tutorials! The Fattest spent a bunch of time coming up with great examples of how to accomplish various tasks in Flex - and supposedly anything that Flex can do, Silverlight can do too. I went and looked, and I didn't have to look very far. In the very first tutorial The Fattest wrote on Flex here at SOTC ( Flex & PHP Tutorial - Transmitting data using JSON), I ran into something I didn't know how to do in Silverlight - use JSON.

Last time we talked Cake, we went over the very basics of website building in CakePHP. All we did was grab some data, pass it to the view and crudely display it on the page. Today, we will be building on our code from the last tutorial. We will be using some cool features of Cake to streamline and style our code.

A couple weeks ago, in our first Cake tutorial, we went over how to setup a local development environment and configure CakePHP to work with our database. In this tutorial we will be covering the basics of a Cake application, resulting in our "Hello World" example.