In an effort to improve usability and reduce server calls on a complex form, I've been implementing jQuery's validation plugin.  jQuery makes it extremely easy to validate a form with minimal code.  I wasn't happy with the default style of error message, I  didn't want a large line of error text disrupting the structure of my form. I wanted a simple icon to indicate there was an error and when the user hovers over the icon I wanted to utilise jQueries tooltip plugin to explain the error. I had a good search on the internet but couldn’t find a solution. What I did find was lots of other people in the same situation.

Now I've successfully managed to combine jQuery validation with the tooltip plugin I thought I had better share it.
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I’ve noticed a few blog posts recently regarding the reliability of the relatively new canonical element. This element or meta tag can be used to resolve duplicate content issues where web based content can be accessed from a variety of URL’s.

For instance your website homepage could possibly be viewed by navigating to www.site.com/ or www.site.com/default.php or even www.site.com/default.php?action=home. Internal and external links could point to all variations making it difficult for search engines to determine the primary document. This can lead to a fragmented internal link profile and possible penalties for duplicate content.

Implementing the canonical element in the offending page allows you to indicate the primary document.

I tested this on a clients site, where the homepage was indexed in Google under two different URL’s. It was a great success; within 24 hours of the homepage being spidered the duplicate page was dropped!

The other day I did a quick tweet (post on twitter.com) about an e-commerce site that I'm marketing. Today I looked at the back links to the e-commerce site and the twitter link is being recognised by Google (from my Twitter profile page).

I expected to get the odd link from syndicators of twitter but I thought twitter added nofollow to outbound links.

Nowadays mobiles don't seem to be getting any smaller, instead they are becoming more powerful, almost like tiny laptops. With mobile download speeds improving massively and networks including unlimited data on some tariffs, internet usage on mobile devices is only going to increase. GPS, high resolution cameras, accelerometers, 8GB + memory, wifi, permanent internet connectivity; the application potential is enormous.

Mobile applications will see explosive growth in the next few years.

I created a web statistics application a few years back, it was quite a big application and sometimes needed certain functionality on another server. To request this functionality I would use the PHP require() function to execute the remote file

require("http://www.remoteurl.com/generateStatsSummary.php?accountID=$ID&useDate=2007-11-20");

Then a few days back the main server this application is hosted on got hacked into and had to be rebuilt with new versions of MySQL and PHP installed. The application then decided to stop working, in the end I worked out that the more recent versions of PHP don’t allow you to pass query strings to remote files using the require() or include() functions; you must use file_get_contents() instead!

Here is the PHP function I used to collect email addresses from my Outlook express sent items data file. You pass it text and it will return an array of all email addresses that are in the text. Enjoy!

function extract_emails_from($string){
preg_match_all("/[._a-zA-Z0-9-]+@[._a-zA-Z0-9-]+/i", $string, $matches);
return $matches[0];
}

2 large MySQL databases (3 gigabytes worth of data and 2,600 tables) somehow managed to corrupt last week and could not be repaired. It should have been a straight forward task for the outsourced Indian server administrators to restore a backup from a previous day but it wasn't!

In the end they managed to restore a backup of both databases but for some reason they restarted the MySQL server with skip-innodb, so rather than using the desired InnoDB storage engine the databases were restored using the MyISAM storage engine. The application that needs to use this database is a high usage web statistics application that cannot run using MyISAM without 20% of the tables corrupting every other day. So MyISAM just isn't acceptable.

You cannot just issue an alter database command and change the storage engine database-wide, the only option you have is alter table. With 2,600 tables that just isn't practical so I created a PHP script to change the engine type for all tables in a MySQL database. Read the rest of this entry »

The Webpronews.com newsletter is always very informative and this morning was no exception. It was all about social networking and micro-blogging. Twitter seemed to be the main focus of the article so I thought I would give it the once over.

The Twitter site seemed very basic in design and uncluttered. I would say overall Twitter is more like a cut down version of Facebook than a mini blog. It's got the social element of Facebook and the posting functionality of a blog, only you're limited to 140 characters for your posts. So it's more like a status update than a blog post. Read the rest of this entry »

Initially I tried to install Dean's code highlighter from the Wordpress plug-in directory but I couldn't get it to work and it didn't seem to highlight my code at all. So instead I installed the other code highlighter that was available. It seemed to work without any problems until I noticed that it was adding a random bit of PHP code </odbc_num_fields($result);++$i)>. Read the rest of this entry »