Author Archive
Email Integration with a Project Management System
While many people feel it is important to have your email hook directly into your project management system, I strongly disagree. I feel it is much more effective to have them separate, even if that means adding an extra step when creating new tasks. I’ve found that by creating tasks manually I take and manipulate [...]
Gmail Preview Pane Extend (v0.4.2)
Gmail’s latest feature, the Preview Pane, allows you to simultaneously preview emails while reading or replying to others. After several hours of use I’ve found this to be one of the best improvements to Gmail in years. The only issue I found with Preview Pane was how the “People” widget and advertisements on the right of [...]
SCRIPT438: Object doesn’t support property or method ‘getElementsByTagName’
It was recently brought to my attention that one of my websites was not functioning correctly in Internet Explorer 9. Parts of the page and javascript would load, however the AJAX portions of the site failed to load. Using the F12 Developer tools package with IE9 I was able to find the error: The solution [...]
Generate Random 10 Digit Number in PHP
The application I’m developing requires a random 10 digit number as a bar code on season pass. A simple way to create a unique number is to use the following code: Here’s whats happening with the code: The outer portion “substr” is used to chop down the random number we create to 10 characters. You [...]
Legend HTML Tag Word Wrapping Problem
There is an issue with the way Firefox 3 and 4 handles a long string of text in the HTML form tag “Legend”. With a long string of text in the legend, the element will completely ignore any width property associated with it. The only way to break a line in the legend element is [...]
jQuery Validation Word Count Custom Method
The jQuery Validation plugin is one of the best ways to validate your forms client side. It has built in functions to check the maximum amount of characters allowed in each form field, which works great in many situations. However for a project I am currently working on the client requires text areas to have [...]
Chinese Characters Showing as Blocks on Windows 7
I recently ran into the issue with my development machine where all Chinese characters displayed as blocks. I tried restarting the computer to fix the issue, however it only fixed several Chinese characters. The solution to fixing this issue is to delete your system’s font cache file. Deleting your Font Cache File Delete the file [...]
Grand Haven Social Media Workshop: Friday 2E
Chad Huntley will be presenting at the next Friday 2E session in Grand Haven, MI. Using his experience in the advertising field, he will discuss basic psychological principles that can be used in your social media, website, and physical advertising. Understanding how your customers process information is a very important step to increasing leads. This [...]
Ajax Page Loading & Google Analytics Tracking
I recently completed a website that handled all page loading through Ajax. Even when using an Ajax Bookmarking script (jQuery BBQ) the entire site was still only considered one page. This became an issue in Google Analytics, since as people browsed the site, it only counted the first time they hit the site and not [...]
jQuery UI Autocomplete: One Field Searching for First and Last Names
In the application I’m working on, jQuery UI Autocomplete is used to search for people using their first and last names. The MySQL statement for retrieving names based on an input value was as follows: This worked fine until I did some usability testing. I found that a lot of users typed in the first AND last [...]
