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Development Blog (21)

Friday, 26 March 2010 10:08

Images and Databases

Written by Miguel

We store all sorts of information in a database table, so why not store your images in the same manner? Well, the reality is that storing images in a database table is messy and the disadvantages convincingly outweigh any possible advantage.

An image cannot be stored in a database table in it’s original format. Instead, it is stored as a binary large object, or a blob. Not every database supports blobs, and if you ever decide to migrate to a different platform, you might find yourself facing a major obstacle.

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Monday, 12 April 2010 06:43

Pagination with PHP, MySQL and Ajax

Written by Miguel

When creating pagination for your website content, there a few factors to consider such as the size and source of the content, the load speed and ease of navigation.

To better explain, I have chosen to write about retrieving data from a SQL database, using PHP. Consider a database table containing information relating to football players in a specific league. The database table could include numerous columns for name, surname, image, player profile, present club, etc. You can see how the database table can easily hold lots of information, especially if you wish to include statistics data for each player.

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Sunday, 28 February 2010 12:10

Video Optimization for Websites

Written by Chris Jacoby

Pros of having video content on your website:

If you have a blog or website with articles or posts, you can add a video to be unique and set yourself apart from other websites and from your competitor’s websites. More and more people love to watch video as compared to reading text. YouTube is great example of this. Adding videos to your website can greatly increase your target audience and increase traffic to your website.

Video explains better and it’s easier to understand the concepts you are trying to portray. It will attract many visitors to your site. For example if you have launched a new product or service, you can run you own little video advert on your website easily allowing visitors to watch and learn about it. With videos on your site, you are able interact with your visitors in a much stronger, more direct way. Secondly, if you want to develop your personal brand, video could help with that.

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Tuesday, 26 January 2010 07:43

PHP Excel Reader

Written by Miguel

PHP Excel Reader Web Development PHP and Excel

I recently had a request to setup a payment gateway on a website, so that visitors can purchase online. The website was built using MS Publisher and the products were spread across multiple static html pages. Unlike eCommerce websites, this website had no database populating the product catalogue and no shopping cart. My initial thought was to completely scrap the existing website and develop a database driven website from scratch.

As the cost of development proved to be a key factor, the challenge was clear. Find a cost effective solution for visitors to purchase the available products on the website, without redesigning and redeveloping the website, and still provide an easy "no-knowledge-of-code" way, for the client to update his product list and prices.

The first step was to determine the medium in which the client would provide the product list, secondly, the purchasing process and thirdly, how to populate the form posting to the payment gateway for transaction.

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Tuesday, 26 January 2010 07:36

Web Designing Curvy Corners

Written by Miguel Da Silva

CurvyCorners

There is a growing trend with most new websites to use rounded corners for block elements i.e DIVs. I have come across a very powerful Javascript library that does just that, CurvyCorners.

By simple adjustments to your CSS class, you can create neat rounded corners for your DIVs with borders and even image backgrounds. I am currently using this Javascript library in a few websites and it works well across multiple browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome). Web Design Experts

I did however, find some Javascript conflicts when implementing CurvyCorners on a website that already uses other Javascript libraries. This is common in most CMS websites (such as Joomla), that use a combination of PHP and Javascript libraries. For each component, module or plugin that is called when the page loads, the appropriate libraries are loaded.

The conflict occurs because many JavaScript libraries use $ as a function or variable name. While JQuery uses $ as an alias for JQuery, all functionality is still available without it. To use another Javascript library alongside JQuery, simply call to $.noconflict(). This returns control of $ back to other Javascript libraries.More on JQuery.noconflict() can be found here: http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.noConflict/

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Thursday, 21 January 2010 08:46

Creating a PDF document from HTML using asp.net and php

Written by Adrian Fitchet

I have always struggled to find a simple and easy solution to generate PDF documents in ASP.net. pdf_image

There certainly are solutions out there but at a cost. There are also the open source developments of iTextSharp. However, the PDF generation is not simple and comes with a learning curve. I was in search of a solution that would take HTML I had already generated to a produce a PDF document.

I found a simple and easy solution, dompdf. However, it used the server technology php. Now there have always been debates between myself and my php developers as to which is the better server side technology, asp.net or php. When it comes to simple and inexpensive PDF generation I must give it to the php world, they have the better solution. dompdf is a style-driven renderer; thus it takes in the html and CSS stylesheets and passes the PDF rendering to another library called PDFlib. So what can I do since I want to program in asp.net? Combine the two? That is exactly what I did…

I had already generated the HTML code. Now all I wanted to do is generate an easy and simple PDF document. dompdf was the perfect solution. It was easy to use (no learning curves) and generates a PDF document from simple HTML.

This is what I did (download solution here):