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A dynamic scrolling HTML table With miniview using Mootools JavaScript

Posted 6th December 2011 | Category: Web Design |

Introduction

When developing a site, there are some rare occasions when a plain HTML table just isn't enough. Clients often ask "Can we have it scroll?", "Can we keep the row and column headings in sight?" and "Can we have a minimap with a scrollable window and a perfectly to scale tiny view of the main table that scrolls in sync with it, that the client can click or drag to view different sections?". Ok, that last one might be a bit of an exaggeration, but then that is the point of a client isn't it? To stretch your capabilities, ask for the impossible and then expect nothing less.

Luckily this tutorial will deliver all these things (!) and on the way, we can explore some of the functionality of the MooTools framework and the concept of progressive enhancement using JavaScript. So where do we start? Surprisingly, we'll start with the people who will benefit the least from your newly acquired expertise - people who somehow live with a browser that doesn't run JavaScript. These people will still need to see the table and understand its contents, as will search engines and people using screen readers or other accessibility software. So, lets start with a simple HTML table that everyone can use and understand.

View the basic table here Read more...

New rules on cookies: do they affect my website?

Posted 23rd August 2011 | Category: Web Design |

New rules for cookies suggest that all websites will need to get permission from users when using cookies. Cookies are small files used to store key information about a visitor and remember preferences. This could include personal information, such as the visitor's location or interests, which presents a privacy issue. However, most cookies are used to store anonymous information and preferences, either to remember key selections made by the visitor or to track navigation for marketing purposes, and are generally there to make life easier for users.

New rules on cookies

Many cookies are provided by third party code, for example when you add a script from Flickr or Facebook to your website. This code can include content that will help track how visitors find their website, for example. For this reason many website managers that don't have the knowledge to create cookies themselves may still be affected by the proposed changes. And it's the third party cookies for ad tracking that are apparently being targeted by this legislation.

These changes are being applied by the UK government's Information Commissioner's Office to comply with new EU legislation. The ICO says it will give companies time to correct irregularities before any penalties will apply. However, a number of organisations including browser companies such as Google are reportedly in talks with government to minimise the impact. Read more...

Choosing social media buttons for your website

Posted 9th August 2011 | Category: Web Design |

You can hardly miss social media buttons. They are sprawled across the internet and appear in ever greater numbers on various blogs and websites. There are a huge number of websites that now use these buttons to allow users to post links to content or like a web page. The list of services that the AddThis widget contains gives an idea of just how many there are!

In this article l will be concentrating on three such services: Twitter, Facebook and Google. These services can be used to help your website content go viral - all it takes is the click of a button for users to spread the word about your website. Due to this simplicity many users are now choosing to interact with these buttons.

The buttons also allow you to easily bring more users to your website. Rather than just relying on search engine optimisation and your own hard work, these buttons enable users to spread the word for you. By sharing links to your website across these services you will potentially gain more inbound links that will help to improve the rank of your pages. Read more...

Using caching in PHP to speed up third party API access

Posted 16th June 2011 | Category: Web Design |

Integration with third party sites using their APIs is all the rage. Sites like Twitter, Google, Facebook and Flickr all provide the ability to integrate their content into your website. Using these services for site development provides more interesting and useful content to your visitors, for example an up to date Google calendar or an active Twitter feed.

This is great as long as the website doesn't suffer as a result. If the third party has issues that you can't control, then your website will be slower. Sometimes there are fail-safe mechanisms to minimise the effect of third party services, but a much better approach is to use a cache. Instead of showing empty space where no new data is found, the cache would always contain some content.

Is your site slowed down by third party code?

From our own experience both back-end and front-end integration with third party data sources can affect performance. One of our clients installed JavaScript widgets in a page using our bespoke CMS, which led to very slow page loads because some of the widgets took an incredibly long time to load. Read more...

Automatic link shortening

Posted 18th May 2011 | Category: Web Design |

We recently had a requirement to extend our content management system to allow posting to Twitter. Each post needed to have a link back to the site and to save space we decided to use the bitly (http://bit.ly) shortening link service to create shortened links to enable extra characters to be entered into the Tweet.

Bitly includes an API that allows you to connect to their service and automatically shorten links. It is actually a very simple process. Before you can access the API you will need to sign up for an account on the bitly website, once you have done this you will be issued with an API key.

First curl needs to be used to connect to bitly: Read more...