These days, just about everyone is on Facebook. Many people not only have their own personal profile, but have created "Pages" for their various interests, groups and businesses. Last summer Facebook opened up Username registration to their users. This allowed you to get a vanity URL for Facebook similar to this: http://facebook.com/patrick.hiller. That's the link to my personal profile on Facebook. You can do the same thing for Pages you have created.

The URL for my t-shirt shop fan page is http://facebook.com/WheeDesign for instance.

As with Usernames for Facebook users, Facebook has set up a few rules for choosing a username for your Facebook Pages:

• The names are available on a first-come, first-serve basis.
  
• Once a name is chosen, it can never be changed or transferred – it will be your Facebook Page’s username and URL forever.
• Usernames must be at least 5 characters long, and will only be able to contain Roman characters.
• Facebook has restricted a lot of generic and trademarked usernames – so you won’t be able to pick things like “flowers” or “travel.”

In order to get your vanity URL, you will need to have over 25 fans for your Page according to Facebook. Though I recently saw that this number was actually 100. This is presumably being done to stop people from squatting on the names. The process is very similar to gettting your personal name.

First, go to http://www.facebook.com/username/ while you are logged into your account.

Then, you can click the link to Set a username for your Pages. Select the page you want to name from the dropdown menu and enter your new Username. Make sure you spell it correctly and it appears EXACTLY the way you want it to appear. You WILL NOT be able to change it later. Once everything is set, click Confirm.

That's it. Now you can access your Facebook page with your new vanity URL.

I recently installed PHP Sitemap Generator to manage the sitemaps for my web sites and I have to say I am very impressed. I've been looking for a decent sitemap generator for a while that would handle the large number of dynamically generated pages at my t-shirt shop, WheeDesign.com. Previous products would stop running after a couple of thousand pages because of time out or memory issues.

PHP Sitemap Generator from http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ took maybe 5 minutes to download and install and I had a complete site map a couple of hours later. It took a couple of hours because there are about 150,000 pages on the site. The site map for this site took all of 10 seconds to generate.

I like that the software will split up your sitemap into multiple files if it gets too large. This way Google is sure to read the whole thing. The generator also pings Google, Yahoo, Live.com and numerous other search engines to let them know there is a new sitemap to download.

There were a couple of options that I set differently from the default to make it work better for me.

1. I know that the final product item pages at WheeDesign.com don't need to be parsed. They are essentially the end of the line for the site. So I included the 'item/' string in the Do not parse URLs: setting. That way those pages are listed in the sitemap but not followed any further, saving time and memory.
2. I had memory problems the first time I ran the generator, mostly because of the previous issue, but to save on memory usage, i choose to let the generator take a little more time and turned on the use temporary files to store crawling progress setting under Advanced Settings.

After those couple of tweaks, I've got the generator running smoothly. So if you;re a web developer and you're looking for a simple,yet powerful way to build and maintain your XML site maps, this is the PHP XML Sitemap Generator is for you.

As it sometimes happens, I needed to reinstall Windows Vista on my laptop the other day. One of the things I forgot to back up was my custom color coding for Adobe Dreamweaver. One of the big things that bugs me about the color coding is that it doesn't recognise PHP's heredoc string literal set up.

A good example of this for PHP is from the Wikipedia entry on Here Document. The PHP documentation for it can be found under PHP Manual>Strings.

<?php
 
$name       = "Joe Smith";
$occupation = "Programmer";
echo <<<EOF
 
This is a heredoc section.
For more information talk to $name, your local $occupation.
 
Thanks!
 
EOF;
 
$toprint = <<<EOF
 
Hey $name! You can actually assign the heredoc section to a variable!
 
EOF;
echo strtolower($toprint);
 
?>

In this case the string '<<<EOF' starts the block and 'EOF;' ends it. You can actually use just about any text in place of the EOF. For some reason, I've always used EOM (for end of mark maybe?)

The problem is that Dreamweaver thinks this is an HTML tag of some sort and the color coding gets royally messed up especially when there are quotes in the text.

The solution is to change the PHP.xml file in the ColorCoding configuration folder for Dreamweaver and force it to recognize the new block of code.

Here's how to do that.

Open the file: Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Dreamweaver CS4\configuration\CodeColoring\PHP.xml

Note: depending on your operating system (I use Windows Vista) you may need to save the new file somewhere else and then move it into the correct folder. There are permissions issues sometimes in editting the file directly.

Find the line (around line number 18) that reads:

<blockend><!--[CDATA[</script>]]--></blockend>

Add the follow lines below it:

<blockStart doctypes="PHP_MySQL" scheme="customText"><![CDATA[<?php\s]]></blockStart>
<blockEnd><![CDATA[<<<EOF]]></blockEnd>
<blockStart doctypes="PHP_MySQL" scheme="customText"><![CDATA[<?php\n]]></blockStart>
<blockEnd><![CDATA[<<<EOF]]></blockEnd>
<blockStart doctypes="PHP_MySQL" scheme="customText"><![CDATA[EOF;]]></blockStart>
<blockEnd><![CDATA[?>]]></blockEnd>

Note that this example uses EOF as the block delimiter. If you are using something else, you need to replace the 3 references to it in the above code block.

Save the editted PHP.xml file and restart Dreamweaver. Your code should look the way you expect it to. Javascript and HTML within the heredoc text will be correctly colored.

I've used this trick in version of Dreamweaver since 8 all the way up to CS4. The file location may change and there may be some slightly different formats for the block starts and stops, but this should get you headed in the right direction.

Valadors Studios is getting a make over. Some of it will happen right before your eyes and some of it will be behind the scenes. The basic look isn't going to change all that much, but we are finally adding more content, portfolios and more. So stay tuned for a bigger and better Valador Studios.