Creating website tours using jQuery
Posted in: javascript,libraries | ( 4 ) Comments
27 Dec 2010One of the important tasks when creating a new site for clients is to create a written site documentation or a site tour video. The first part is a little tedious and sometimes confusing for the client or user and video requires some desktop software. Tympanus.net provide a nice jQuery tool to create site tours using JavaScript and css.
One of the main advantages of this approach is that you do not have to create a separate documentation or video tour for the site, but can integrate the tour right into the application and activate it as and when required through JavaScript.
Creating SQL schemas with Doctrine DBAL
Posted in: mysql | ( 3 ) Comments
20 Dec 2010A tedious task during web development is that of database schema creation. A schema containing a few tables comprising of a small set of rows is quick, while that containing dozens of tables and large numbers of columns is a tedious process. I usually resort to a small php script with some regular expression tossed in to automatically create a schema from a text file definition. But that is a little buggy as I’ve to manually add the indexes and other small things. Now that Doctrine has released a DBAL library, this will provide a nice ability to automatically create sql schemas.
Encode your email links to prevent spam
Posted in: html,security | ( 3 ) Comments
15 Dec 2010One of the popular ways to hide your email on a web page from spam bots is to display the email as an image or to use the ‘[at]‘ word instead of the ‘@’ sign. The code given here is yet another way to fight spam. The below function will let you to encode email or other links to their equivalent HTML entity encoded syntax. This will enable you to hide your web-page emails from spam bots. As the browser converts and displays the appropriate string from the encoding the user will be able to correctly see the email id, but a spam bot will have a difficult time to decode the encoded string. Of course we now have quite sophisticated crawlers that can work around this types of encoding, but for other crawlers that rely on regular expressions or other such simple methods, they will find it difficult to grab the email links from the page.
Peeking inside FireFox using MozRepl
Posted in: browser,tools | ( 3 ) Comments
6 Dec 2010I usually use Selenium for testing web applications or some quick screen scraping jobs. It is more than adequate for my purpose as most of the time I work on the back-end code. But if you spend most of your time working on Ajax, scraping and other JavaScript jobs, then you need more powerful tools at your disposal. The one I think you will find useful is MozRepl. With it you can connect to Firefox and other Mozilla apps, explore and modify them from the inside, execute Javascript, peek into HTML pages, examine functions and variables, all while FireFox is running.
Attractive HTML Email templates
Posted in: design | ( 3 ) Comments
2 Dec 2010
Although my primary interests lie in software development, good design is something I cannot ignore. I quite often need to send HTML emails to clients but have to settle for simple designs due to lack of good templates; and getting someone else to design it ends up taking a lot of time with unsatisfactory results.
How not to create a Random string
Posted in: php,software | ( 5 ) Comments
25 Nov 2010It is surprising to see how after all the code floating around people still find it hard to create random numbers. In a recent piece of code I encountered, the following was used to generate a string of random numbers. The code was written to provide a random string to be passed to a email verifier system – the type wherein a new user when he subscribes to a website needs to verify his email by clicking on a provided link.
Face detection using jQuery
Posted in: javascript | ( 6 ) Comments
22 Nov 2010
Face detection is a common feature in most digital cameras today; the white or red square that pops around someones face when we are focusing the camera on that person. Face detection algorithms enables the software to pinpoint the locations and sizes of human faces in digital images, whatever the surrounding objects may be.
Admin themes for your websites
Posted in: design,themes | ( 3 ) Comments
12 Nov 2010
The admin section is an integral part of most websites, particularly CMS sites. Creating one can be time consuming, unless you have some ready-made templates for the same. Below are a few admin templates that I personally like, which will help you in developing your admin section quickly. Although some of them are not free, the price is negligible compared to the development time it will reduce.
Sign your web forms with your signatures
Posted in: html,javascript,libraries | ( 1 ) Comment
10 Nov 2010
It is rare that one sees some innovative jQuery plugins. Signature Pad is one of them. It is a jQuery plugin that lets you create your personal signatures using your mouse or a touch device. The signature is drawn on a canvas element and serialized as a JSON array, which can then be stored and used to reproduce the signature again.
