Web Development Archive

I’m developing a simple news CMS for a client and decided to try TinyMCE since it looked good and I hadn’t tried it before. I downloaded it, uploaded it the server and put the code into the CMS. I tested it by adding a news item and it worked great!

The problem was when I did the edit script – the same form put with PHP echoing the news contents in to the textarea. When TinyMCE loaded there was no content there – I could briefly see the code in the textarea before it got transformed into the WYSIWYG window.

I turns out that it was the Firefox plugin Firebug causing it to disappear – I uninstalled this and it worked fine!

So the website I’m working on at the moment has four boxes across the bottom. One of the designers suggested that when you move your mouse over them, the fade between a series of images. You can see what I mean on the Richmond Retreats website.

My first thought was to use Innerfade with mouseover to fade in the div and start the fading. Turns out it wasn’t as simple as I thought it would be and there’s not much in the way of help on the net either. What I ended up doing was having four static images and then four hidden divs with all the images to to run using innerfade. This means I can use the hover call to fadeOut the static div, fadeIn the other div and then start innerfade. I just then fadeOut one and fadeIn the other when the mouse is moved away again. The main bit of code you’ll want is:


$(document).ready(function()
{
$("#box-a").hover(function()
{
$("#box-a-h").fadeIn('fast');
$("#box-a-h").innerfade({
speed: 2000,
timeout: 3000,
});
},function()
{
$("#box-a-h").fadeOut("slow");
});
});


Hope someone finds this useful.

I’ve got a huge report for the Medicology MTI that has been running extremely slow due to the amount of data and queries. I’ve been trying to speed it up to make accessing and analysing the results easier.

The users have to answer 56 questions to complete the survey. This means that most for the calculations there’s currently an “if” statement to check they completed all 56 questions and then skip the row of the mysql result set if they haven’t.

I haven’t checked if it will make it quicker but surely checking the amount of answers completed in the SQL query will result in less data and a speed increase. The problem is that the COUNT(*) I’m using to get the number of answers is in the SELECT part of the statement which is executed after the WHERE clause, which is where it needs to be:

SELECT id, COUNT(id) AS cnt FROM answers WHERE cnt>=56 GROUP BY id

The above returns an error. What you need to do is modify the query as follows:

SELECT id, COUNT(id) AS cnt FROM answers WHERE cnt>=56 GROUP BY id HAVING cnt>=56

That will return the required result set.

I just went to our main company website, Medicology, and there was a large white semi-transparent block over the top of the entire screen. Since I use something like this for displaying AJAX content I panicked a bit and then dived into my JS and CSS files to see what was going on.

After finding nothing out of the ordinary I searched the entire set of source files for “alpha” hoping to to find a snippet of CSS that was causing my woes. Unfortunately it came back with nothing. I then decided to do the same with the source from one of the pages in Firefox and came back with a div at the bottom of the page with the ID “ga_shade”.

A quick Google led me to find that it is Google Analytics placing it there as part of the whole “content overlay” thing they do. Problem is that I wasn’t using content overlay and as such the menu bar for it wasn’t available and I couldn’t turn it off, let alone click on any links. Not happy. And suprised that Google can make slip-ups of this kind.

Sort yourselves out boys. Don’t just assume that because it works in IE6 it works in everything – try testing stuff in FF for us.

We have several sites we’ve been developing for a range of conferences we are running (Safeguarding and Q, G & E being two) and to help reduce the development time, our designer used a few PNGs so that we could use a standard layout template and then alter a CSS sheet to create a new site. This plan was working well until I finally found some time to do a bit of housekeeping and checked Google Analytics.

I was quite shocked to find that almost half of our users are still visiting us with the rediculous IE6, complete with it’s security flaws, lack of compatibility and other problems. The main problem in this instance is the lack of proper support for PNGs and in particular, alpha transparency. This was causing our nice design with the rounded corners to be displayed as big blocks of light grey all over the place.

Apart from the slight anoyance that the only reason these people are still on IE6 is because they are ignoring or not using Windows Update, and are therefore probably part of a Botnet, it means that IE’s awful legacy is still with us and is likely to be so for some years to come until these PCs finally die. We therefore STILL need to code all our new sites for IE with all the hacks and tweaks we’ve been using in the past.

In this case I found an off the shelf solution that worked quite well for us in the excellent SuperSleight that for us, allowed us to keep most our PNGs with the transparency enabled and just change a few of the core images. I never did look two hard at why all the PNGs weren’t fixed (we replaced the logo with a JPEG) but maybe your site will be fixed without a hitch.

I use a lot of business style reporting in our companies website where displaying figures by month is important. However, at certain points in the year using the PHP date and strtotime functions to pull data from our DB works incorrectly. For example, today and tomorrow (30th & 31st March), using “last month” in the strtotime function will actually return the timestamp for 2nd & 3rd March, not the 27th & 28th February that the developer may have been expecting.

The reason for this? It’s because the Romans were superstitious of even numbers and thus we have a very disorganised calendar system that doesn’t always match up with the decimal and binary way we now work in.

If you do want to get the timestamp of a date that falls in the previous month, the below code should help:

$last = strtotime(date(‘Y-m-01′).’ -1 month’);

This will (at the moment) return the 1st February.