Devblog

As mentioned previously we were working on a Valentines version of Planet Derby. Well it was ready for valentines day and you can have a go at Planet Derby : Valentines

It’s much better if you’ve got a webcam

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.