I think we can all agree that URL shortening services are great and are very handy to tidy up those long and obnoxious links. However, a lot of the time people simply forget to use them, or often don’t know about them in the first place. I’ve noticed this in a blog system I wrote using Zend Framework. On one hand I love that people post messages, but on the other it annoys me that they may supply a link that is so long it breaks the formatting of the page, or looks just plain ugly.
So what are my options? I could train everyone who posts blogs on the system to use a url shortening service or I could manually tweak all the links myself. As solutions they are not very practical at all; I don’t have the time to change any/all links myself, and I certainly don’t have enough patience to train everyone! So an automatic way of doing things is needed, and the filtering in Zend Framework comes to the rescue!
Continue reading ‘Shorten urls automatically with a Zend Framework filter’
Tonight at 11:31 and 30 seconds (GMT) it will be exactly 1234567890 in unix time. Cool, eh? 
I came across a jQuery plug-in the other day to sort tables, and it works great and is exceptionally simple to implement (and as anyone who’s flicked through this blog knows, I like the simple things in life… Don’t need any more gray hairs popping up, you know!).
The plug-in is called tablesorter (found at tablesorter.com), by Christian Bach.
Continue reading ‘Easy table sorting with jQuery’
A little while ago I posted a quick jQuery plug-in that allows you to easily indicate an external link. Then I posted an updated version that had a few optimizations. Well, it turns out that I had missed out a rather important portion of the code when I posted it up. D’oh! So here’s the full and working version.
Continue reading ‘Highlight external links with jQuery’
Somethings it’s the simple things in life that make you really happy. For me yesterday, that was thanks to jQuery. Have you ever wanted to have a check box that, when the user checks it it also checks a lot of other checkboxes? Yeah, of course you have! I wanted to do that yesterday. Now, it’s not the first time I’ve had to do that kind of functionality, but it always came with a bunch of javascript that seemed over the top for what was wanted. With jQuery it just took a line or two of code!
$(document).ready(function() {
$('#selectall').click(function() {
$(":checkbox", $('#checkboxlist')).attr('checked', $(this).is(':checked'));
});
});
And with that, on and off go the other checkboxes.
Marvelous!
Published on
January 1, 2009 in
General.
Hope everyone has a wonderful new year!
Published on
December 9, 2008 in
General.
Screen shot of an error message I got from a popular MySQL interface.
?!
Published on
November 23, 2008 in
General.
You know how sometimes you have those awesome productive days? Well, mine has been one of those… Got up at 6:45am (yeah, thank my little boy for that one! 
) and figured I might as well stay up, so unloaded the dishwasher, put in another load, cleaned the house from top to bottom, entertained friends for lunch, wrote my first jQuery plug-in, wrote my first set of PHPUnit test cases for a new app I’m working on, write two blog posts (OK; so one of them is this one, but it counts, damn it!), and posted my first proper twitter message!
Now if I can squeeze in a little tv watching or Overload playing, I’ll be golden!
I’m pretty new to the whole jQuery game, having really only started to look at in a number of weeks ago. Until then I have been happily using Prototype and Scriptaculous, and as I knew them I didn’t see a point to move to another library. However, the more examples I saw of jQuery the more elegant I thought it was, and so now am in the process of learning it more, converting some code over and trying my hand at plug-ins. So here’s introducing my first jQuery plug-in!
This plug-in allows you to automatically append a class and title to any external resources. You can pass in multiple domains that are thought of as ‘local’, and anything else with a protocol that doesn’t belong on the passed local domains will be flagged as external. If no domains are passed then the current domain in the url will be used as-is (with the www., etc., if present).
That probably doesn’t make much sense, but I’m sure it will when using it…
So here’s the code:
Continue reading ‘jQuery plug-in – highlight external links’
Here’s a quick and easy view helper for Zend Framework that will encode an email address. It will encode just an email address or return a whole mailto link. The encoding is basically the same as in the Smarty template engine.
Obviously there’s a lot of room for improvement; javascript encoding, representation as an image, and so on… but then it wouldn’t be quick an easy – it’d be slightly longer and just a little more complex. 
Continue reading ‘Quick and easy email encoding view helper’
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