brian dichiara

jQuery + JSON + AJAX = My own custom solution.

So. In an effort to come up with a solution to a very common AJAX problem (at least for me), I have put together a little tutorial for handling AJAX responses in a simple, yet effective manner. Here’s the problem:

AJAX is used sometimes for validation, sometimes for quick little updates to the database, and other times for the same old add/edit/delete functions. There’s an infinite ways AJAX can be used in your web application, so I’m pretty sure my solution will not work 100% of the time, but it may make things a little bit easier to handle 90% of the time.

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PHP MySQL Class

So it’s probably pretty late in “the game” to be posting this, however I thought I might do it anyway just for those that may want to get started using OOP in PHP. I’ve been using this for a while and improving it wherever I can, then I started using CodeIgniter which ended up having a very similar class built into it. So if you are wanting to learn OOP, this might help you a long and it will make for a good transition into an MVC if you decide to move forward from there.

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Updated qrayg Menus

A while back I found a modified version of the Suckerfish dropdown css menus from A List Apart that had the CSS written out for 4 submenus. For the longest time I continued to return to the site (formerly Solar Dream Studios) to download a fresh version of the menus and javascript. Well, it appears that as of April 15, the author Craig Erskine has ‘completely overhauled’ the CSS. The stylesheet looks to be about half the size and is much easier to manage than before.

Check out the update here!
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Dreamweaver Extensions

Here’s a list of Dreamweaver extensions I would like to keep track of:

PHP Coding tools for Dreamweaver
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/exchange/index.cfm?event=extensionDetail&extid=1747522

PHP Code Hints
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/exchange/index.cfm?event=extensionDetail&extid=1754023
or directly: http://www.xp-internet.com/en/DreamweaverExtensions/PHPCodeHints.php

Subweaver
http://code.google.com/p/subweaver/

Here’s a site with good ones:
http://www.xtnd.us/dreamweaver

Google Hacked?

Hmm. Not sure what's going on here, but the Google homepage is not loading. Out of curiousity, I checked out the source and found this:

Anyone else seeing this or am I just crazy?

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The distant future

When deciding on a Halloween costume this year, I was compelled to mock my favorite folk comedy duo Flight of the Conchords, and designed a pretty-decent clone of the robot costume from Season 1 Episode 1 of FOTC on HBO. This costume was featured in their debut music video called Robots (aka The Humans are Dead). You can view the video on HBO's website. Photos after the jump.
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Image Thumbnail Creator

Like many other people, I found Mike Lopez's image thumbnail script quite useful. He has taken the time to go through the brain-crunching algorithm to create image proportional image thumbnails when given a max height/width. Although this script is very handy, it was lacking in a few areas, such as transparent PNG and GIF support, as well as the un-needed resize if the image was smaller than the requested dimensions. I hope I have "helped" in this situation by modifying the script so that it handles such requests. Credit for the transparency support goes to Martin Schmidt (icheee).

One modification I made that is important to note is that the image is now fed through with the SRC variable, rather than the IMG variable. Thanks Mike for this script and I hope my updates really help.
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Download Code

This code is something i found that will force download, rather than opening in browser:
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Flight of the Conchords Show Premieres this month

After much long waiting, HBO has posted an episode of Flight of the Conchords on their website. Here it is: More »

50 US States with PHP Code

Here's some handy code to help you get starting if you are using PHP and need a 50-state drop down select box. It's already pre-built to maintain selected value after post.
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