Safari has a tendency to hang when uploading files, and it turns out there’s an easy fix. (more…)
January 10, 2010
November 9, 2009
Triggering File Downloads with jQuery
I previously posted this method for Mootools, and now here it is for jQuery.
Clients often ask to have a sorted list exportable via a link to a CSV file that they can open in Excel or whatever spreadsheet software they use. I could find two jQuery plugins for exporting table data to Excel, but I wasn’t comfortable with their reliance on producing popups (that could easily be blocked), or sending data as a querystring to a javascript function that sorts and formats the CSV. Here is a simple, plugin free way of asynchronously generating a .csv file using jQuery and PHP.
August 19, 2009
Microsoft Extends IE6 Support to 2014
Is IE6 Dead Yet? It was being circled by vultures until Microsoft recently announced support for the browser would continue into 2014, the BBC reports. What does this mean for web developers and clients? (more…)
July 13, 2009
The 3D future of CSS?
Apple is well known for their innovative thinking in just about everything they do. Now they’re making a bid to add rich 3D effects to CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), potentially rivaling (or replacing?) Flash as the de-facto animation tool for websites. (more…)
July 10, 2009
Validating a URI with PHP
If you find yourself needing to validate a URI, not just checking that it’s well formed with a regular expression like this:
/^(http|https|ftp):\/\/([A-Z0-9][A-Z0-9_-]*(?:\.[A-Z0-9][A-Z0-9_-]*)+):?(\d+)?\/?/i
…but actually verifying that the URI points to a functioning web page, the following code will do the trick. (more…)
June 7, 2009
Does Server Location Matter to Search Engines?
I recently posted a question in a forum looking for web hosting companies in my community of Vancouver, Canada. I, like most people shopping for web hosting, was looking for good value for money with reliability, service and price, but there was one other key thing I was looking for (more…)
June 5, 2009
Secure Javascript Form Validation with Mootools
Did I get you with the title? That’s right, it’s not possible to securely validate a form with Javascript. That is, you can’t prevent invalid data from being submitted to the server by using Javascript for validation. We’ve all seen Javascript-based form validation classes (and classes for Javascript libraries like Mootools, which is my favourite, so I’ll be making reference to it here), but it’s all too often not made clear enough to those who might use such classes that javascript validation alone provides no security against invalid data being sent to your back-end processing script and making it into your database.
May 12, 2009
Is IE6 Dead Yet?
Floating around forums I’ve noticed this question still being asked a lot: “Do I still have to support IE6?” and often the the answer you see is that it represents such and such percent of web users, and that’s too many to ignore. The truth is, the number of IE6 users varies greatly from site to site. Some of my sites still have as much as 20% IE6 users, and others less than 1%. So, on some I ignore IE6 altogether, and others I try to accommodate it as much as possible without going to extreme lengths, while with a few I’m fully shackled to it. Unfortunately there’s no getting around the fact that IE6 still exists.
May 1, 2009
Getting Time Zone from Latitude & Longitude
The problem:
I was recently tasked with building an application that relied heavily on accurate time zone conversions. I, like many people I soon found out, thought there were just a handful of timezones and the usual select list would suffice:
Triggering File Downloads with Mootools
Creating a javascript links that uses AJAX (or, more accurately, an asynchronous http request) to trigger a file download, usually results in disappointment. Headers returned by a PHP script called asynchronously do not trigger a download in the browser.