I’ve probably said it before, but in my current job I get to learn a lot of new things all the time, as a web developer I’ve self-taught myself a lot of my current skill set. One of which is MySQL. I had a pretty basic understanding of SQL and simplistic queries. I’ve never really pushed myself into going further into bigger and nastier queries. Though, I did pick up a good piece of advice at an open source conference I attended. The speaker mentioned that independent of whatever language you are programming in, your database engine (he was speaking of MySQL) will do it better every time. Well the more I dig into it, the more I realize just how correct that statement is. I’ve been living under the impression that I can deal with data better outside of the database engine versus generating a better query to get the right data. I know that makes me sound lazy or dumb – but I think a lot of web developers fall into this when there’s no real reason to push the limits. I mean I could probably catch a lot of you selecting * in your statements huh?

Continue Reading »

This is merely a heads-up, reminder, cautionary tale, whatever you want to call it – but I seem to forget about it until something breaks and then after a few it dons on me that this is probably the problem. See I get so use to the servers I use at my day job, the ones that are custom built with CentOs running php5 and all the good stuff. I never have this problem.

So, and this applies to more than just 1and1 I’m sure. I’ve run into this on other hosting services – and I guess their are other ways to resolve this, but I’m going to start with my way.

So like I said, I’m use to what I have at work, PHP5. I base everything off that and this of course spills over into my contract work. So tonight I’m working on a project and I’m uploading it and trying to get it running. All I see if a odd error from adodb, missing a ending “}”. So I recopied it to the server, same thing, so I erase the entire adodb dir and try again. Still the error. So I start back tracking and spitting out all the errors I can to try and track this down. Because it’s sure as heck not a problem on my local machine.

Continue Reading »

The Project

In one of my projects, I thought it would be cool to have a drop down select box trigger a slide down for the results, then slide up and slide back down when a new choice was selected. Seemed pretty easy, but when I got into it, it wasn’t as easy as I thought at first. But in all reality it turned out to be super easy.

I did some digging around to figure out how to tell if my div container (the one that would hold all the results) was visible or not, maybe I should just read the entire JQuery documentation – HA! Instead I turned to google and found that you can check for :hidden.

$("#div-id").is(":hidden");

So I can base my logic on that, if it’s hidden do this or if it’s not do this…

That was perfect, now it was just a matter of having it do exactly what I wanted. So if the div wasn’t hidden, I needed to hide then show it again with the new results. Or if it was hidden, show the results. Continue Reading »