Web Development

Javascript / jQuery / Web Development — 3 Comments
22
Feb 09

Thickbox, accessibility and search engine optimisation.

Recently I noticed that whilst my new project the Vietnam War Timeline was organically racing up the search engines, through virtue of being in a niche and growing daily in content, the bounce rate was exceptionally high. A lot of traffic was coming in but not venturing beyond the entry page.

After a very quick investigation it became apparent why this was: all links off the timeline fire a new Thickbox window with the relevant content. It’s a nice way to keep people within the timeline when they need to look at more content. Moreover, it’s unobtrusive, meaning the links can just be followed as normal by non-javascript enabled browsers. Continue reading →

MySQL — 2 Comments
6
Feb 09

Tips for Manipulating dates in MySQL.

Bypassing PHP to manipulate dates.

I despise working with dates in PHP. So much so that I now manipulate my dates using MySQL so I have everything I want in a php variable delivered by one SQL statement. Adding, subtracting, calculating differences and performing other date manipulations can be a pain in PHP. If you have a database connection running in your application it can be much quicker and easier to read if you work with dates in your SQL. The key to this is that you don’t need to work with tables and records in a database to use SQL. Many of the examples below don’t make queries against any record sets and yet they return valid results. Continue reading →

Ajax / Javascript / jQuery / PHP / User Interface / Web Development — 9 Comments
7
Dec 08

Drag and drop reordering of database fields (sortables) with jQuery

This tutorial explains how to display a list of items from a database that can be reordered in real time by dragging and dropping, using the jQuery library. Moreover, no page reload is required on every reorder. If you want a bigger introduction to why you may want to do this I suggest reading my tutorial on how to achieve the same functionality using scriptaculous.

Previously I have explained how to achieve this in Scriptaculous and Mootools.

Continue reading →

Javascript / jQuery / User Interface / Web Development — No Comments
12
Oct 08

jQuery table effects plugin – v1.0

See the demo here.

My first outing into producing a jQuery plugin is the limited, but useful “jQuery table effects”.

The current version defines the following features:

  1. Alternating row colours for readability (striping).
  2. onmouseover and onmouseout events for manipulating the background colour of the row.

Continue reading →

Ajax / Javascript / PHP / Scriptaculous / User Interface / Web Development — 80 Comments
9
Mar 08

Autocompletion with Scriptaculous and Ajax.

Demo here | Download sample files

This tutorial supercedes my previous turtorial on autocompletion by adding further tips and tricks to make your autocompletion a much better experience for your site users The tutorial is structured in the following way:

  1. Introduction: What is autocompletion and why use it?
  2. How it works.
  3. Getting scriptaculous and building the form.
  4. Building the autocomplete server.
  5. Passing back an id to our form.

Continue reading →

PHP / User Interface / Web Development — No Comments
9
Mar 06

Alternating table row colours in PHP.

Recently I have been tinkering with Ruby on Rails and I came across a rather nice method of alternating row colours using only two lines of code and a couple of CSS rules. I have been using this method in my PHP ever since and never looked back. This is a neat trick to alternate row colors on a table using PHP.

Continue reading →

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