CodeDiesel : Resources, tutorials and articles for the Web Developer and Designer

Downloading Gmail attachments using PHP

7 May 2012

Automatically extracting attachments from Gmail can be important for reasons where you need to process the attached files periodically with a CRON job. Also it can be useful for automatically archiving important attachments. Below is a simple proof-of-concept plain PHP code, devoid of any object-oriented features that extracts attachments from your Gmail account. It uses PHPs imap extension to access the inbox.

Auto Saving your web form data

Posted in: javascript,web | ( 3 ) Comments

2 May 2012

There is nothing more frustrating than filling a complex web form and just as you are ready to submit it, you accidentally hit refresh, close your window tab or the browser just crashes on you. Only if you could add some kind of auto-save feature to the form to mitigate this problem. Applications like Gmail, WordPress both support the auto-save feature, albeit in a technically different way.

Protocol Relative URLs

Posted in: html | Add comment

18 Apr 2012

One little gem I recently encountered is protocol-relative URLs. This solves the headaches of the age-old problem of creating URLs which work whether you’re in SSL mode or normal http. For example take the following image :

PHP 5.4.0 in a nutshell

Posted in: php | ( 4 ) Comments

6 Apr 2012

Although purists have always sneered upon PHP for being a “patched” language; the evolution of PHP over the years, with new features added in every version, has only increased its popularity. The latest 5.4 release has followed the trend with some major feature additions. The following post describes some important changes in PHP 5.4.

Printing selective DOM elements on a page

Posted in: browser,design,html | Add comment

19 Mar 2012

Printing web pages from JavaScript, although not a common scenario, can be easily accomplished with some simple code. On the other hand, selectively printing some elements from a web page – like a div or a paragraph, can be challenging. Fortunately there are libraries available that can make the task easier. One such useful jQuery plugin is jQuery PrintElement, which allows you to selectively print a DOM element. Usage is extremely easy; just select any element from a webpage and fire the ‘printElement’ method.

Build a nice sliding help section using jQuery

Posted in: design,interface,javascript | ( 2 ) Comments

6 Mar 2012

For any moderately complex web application a help section is mandatory. Most of us rely on displaying the help in a popup or a different window. One other interesting way is to display the help section beneath the main window, which then slides to display the help section below.

Migrating WordPress domains quickly

Posted in: tools,wordpress | ( 1 ) Comment

5 Mar 2012

Changing the domain name or URL of a WordPress site, whether from local server to a live or vice versa, can be a frustrating and time consuming task. One nice script I found helps ease that process considerately. WordPress-Domain-Changer is a simple PHP script that lets you quickly change domains of your WordPress installation.

The script basically works by replacing the old domain name strings in the ‘wp_options’ table with the new values. It will also replace any references to the old domain name in post content with the new domain name. Upload paths will also be changed.

Rendering PDF in HTML5 Canvas

Posted in: html,javascript | Add comment

19 Feb 2012

pdf.js is an HTML5 technology experiment from Mozilla that explores building a faithful and efficient Portable Document Format (PDF) renderer using Canvas without any native code support. The goal of the project is to create a general-purpose, web standards-based platform for parsing and rendering PDFs, and eventually to release a PDF reader extension powered by pdf.js. Integration with Firefox is a possibility if the experiment proves successful.

Building a adjacency matrix of a graph

Posted in: algorithms | ( 2 ) Comments

17 Feb 2012

In the last post we constructed a graph structure using the Structure_Graph Pear library. But building a graph is not enough; we also need the ability to search through it. To make it easier to build search algorithms, it is useful if we can represent the graph and its connections in a different way; adjacency matrix being one such representation.

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