This morning I stumbled upon this set of CSS-Only menus. Since I don’t claim to be a CSS guru, I like to find these kinds of sites. It helps me to learn good CSS coding. Firebug allows me to check out the CSS and change things to see what would happen. I like having CSS […]
I have a script that I run every night. This script reads an XML feed which pulls from a MS SQL database and then updates a MySQL database. The XML feed is rather large and the server where the XML feed comes from is rather slow. I’m not the only one who thinks so –
The Disappearing Database! 'MySQL server has gone away' Read More »
PHP Data Objects or PDO is an extension for PHP that gives a consistent interface for accessing databases. Each database will have it’s own driver that must be installed or enabled in your PHP installation. It gives me a data-access abstraction layer which allows me to change the underlying database type without changing my code.
PHP Data Objects (PDO) Read More »
My new favorite jQuery pop-up plugin is facebox. It gives a Facebook style pop-up box and it’s REALLY easy to use. Basically, just include the CSS and JS files in your web page and one or two lines of jQuery code at load, then any anchor tag can create a pop-up box. The jQuery code:
jQuery Pop-up – Facebox Read More »
An SSL Certificate is a security measure for websites that gather sensitive information from it’s visitors. SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer. If you are going to gather sensitive information such as Social Security numbers, credit card information, or any other information that your visitors may deem private and want to keep secure, then you
What is an SSL Certificate and Do I Need One? Read More »
Combining two strings into one string is easy with both PHP and JavaScript. In PHP: $string1 = ‘Hello’; $string2 = ‘World!’; $string3 = $string1.’ ‘.$string2; echo $string3; // prints – Hello World! In JavaScript: string1 = ‘Hello’ string2 = ‘World!’ string3 = string1 + ‘ ‘ + string2 alert(string3) // prints – Hello World! in
Concatenating Strings in PHP and JavaScript Read More »
Your browser does not recognize white space (tabs, spaces, line feeds, etc.). It recognizes the first space that is typed between words or tags, but otherwise, white space is ignored by your browser. Sometimes we want white space to show in our browser. For this reason, HTML has included some special characters – or special
HTML Special Characters Read More »
Yesterday I was working with a site that allowed multiple levels of categories. A category could have subcategories, and that subcategory could have subcategories and so on and so on. I needed a way to print a drop-down menu from the category structure. I won’t go into the database structure for this today – I’ll
Recur-Recur-Recursion-sion-sion Read More »
Here’s a tip I can’t really explain. Since I’m on the road and quality programming time is in shorter supply, I don’t have a lot of time to figure it out, so I’m hoping someone will read this and tell me why this works. I’m just glad it does! The problem is that sometimes it’s
Getting Values from SimpleXML – A Mystery! Read More »
