http:///blog.php Various musings on things technical with some having a Dartmoor flavour. en-gb Wed, 03 Feb 2016 18:51:22 GMT Wed, 03 Feb 2016 18:51:22 GMT 15 Texting used to be chore until I got a smart phone. All the multi presses on tiny keys to get to a single letter meant I hardly used it at all. Tue, 29 Jul 2014 16:18:27 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/What-is-the-most-useful-mobile-phone-app/rss Many webmasters are wary of adding discussion forums to a website because of problems with spam and the need to keep software up to date. If you write your own software then you have to include features to allow users to register and administrators to block or ban users and to moderate comments. Sat, 24 May 2014 09:16:44 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Open-yourself-up-to-comments/rss During 2013 mobile and tablet usage continued to grow at a phenomenal rate so that between them they now account for 25% of all internet usage. I think this can no longer be ignored by website developers. Sat, 18 Jan 2014 03:29:34 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Happy-Responsive-New-Year/rss That is a bit of an attention grabbing headline but there is at least one function in PHP that doesn't like dates after 2038. Tue, 11 Jun 2013 10:23:21 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/PHP-wont-work-after-2038/rss I was caught out the other day by some jQuery form validation not working on one of CMS sites. The reason, I eventually found out was an illegal character in an element ID. Wed, 14 Sep 2011 12:23:29 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Illegal-Characters-in-jQuery/rss There have been quite a few releases of the Firefox web browser recently - I'm using version 6 now! - and whilst there haven't been many major innovations for a while, I've just got round to using tab groups. Thu, 25 Aug 2011 14:04:26 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Firefox-Tab-Groups/rss I've recently been looking at various solutions for highlighting code snippets as I wanted something to make it easier to publish on this blog. I've settled on highlight.js as it is so simple. Wed, 24 Aug 2011 12:29:22 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Syntax-highlighting-on-web-pages/rss I may be in the minority but I have had no interest in the football world cup - even for the pitifully few matches that England played. However, I'm glad that Spain won last night and I'll tell you why Thu, 08 Jul 2010 02:37:39 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/An-interesting-take-on-the-World-Cup/rss I guess everybody at some time or another has sent an email saying a file is attached but forgotten to attach the file before sending. If you use Google Mail that may be a thing of the past. Fri, 04 Jun 2010 06:46:20 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Have-you-actually-attached-that-file/rss Google has just released their font API which allows anyone to embed a variety of fonts into a webpage without any licensing issues. Thu, 20 May 2010 13:59:37 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Google-releases-a-font-directory/rss I have many clients who occasionally like to print out a form record from their databases. Obviously they have reports for the information they regularly print out but sometimes its useful to take a 'screengrab' of the current record they are viewing. Wed, 17 Mar 2010 14:25:00 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Printing-forms-from-Microsoft-Access/rss Although Microsoft Access has a search and replace feature it only works on data within a form or a table. There is also a Find facility within code modules but what if you are looking for something within a form or query design. Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:49:47 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Microsoft-Access-Search-and-Replace/rss Here's a quick tip when using Ajax and PHP to output HTML to a browser. If the code contains special characters such as currency symbols you may get unexpected results. Thu, 14 Jan 2010 13:35:20 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/PHP-and-Ajax-with-special-characters-/rss I thought I'd put up some images of our part of Dartmoor taken during the recent cold weather. Tue, 12 Jan 2010 13:44:47 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Winter-Wonderland/rss Here are several ways of sorting text fields in numerical order in a MySQL query. Tue, 24 Nov 2009 10:20:05 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Sorting-text-fields-in-numeric-order-in-MySQL/rss A while back I published an article on how to use the Send To Mail Recipient feature on a Windows computer to resize a batch of images. This is fine if you have an email client set up on your computer but what if you use webmail? Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:24:08 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Another-easy-way-to-resize-images/rss Is the two day Postal Strike that began this morning the nail in the coffin for the Royal Mail? Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:40:16 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Death-of-Snail-Mail/rss I have just read an article on Smashing Magazine website which was fascinating, especially the one about the use of images with faces. Thu, 24 Sep 2009 09:41:28 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/10-Useful-Usability-Findings-and-Guidelines/rss Following their free PDF book giveaway last week, Sitepoint are at it again. This time it is five books for the price of one. Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:36:49 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/5-books-for-the-price-of-1/rss You can get a copy of 'The Principles of Successful Freelancing' for free until 14th September. Tue, 08 Sep 2009 01:46:21 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Sitepoint-book-giveaway/rss Whilst working on a Microsoft Access project recently, I needed to produce a report with certain fields highlighted in different colours depending on their values. I new I could do this with conditional formatting so I ploughed on and started building the Sat, 29 Aug 2009 02:19:19 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Conditional-Formatting-in-Microsoft-Access-Reports/rss I recently wanted to update a Google calendar via the API using PHP. There are plenty of samples on the Calendar API site but they all use the Zend framework which I didn't want to use. Sat, 22 Aug 2009 04:26:30 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Google-Calendar-API-PHP-Class/rss Yesterday I had the need to get a list of unique values from a MySQL database where the values were stored as a comma delimited set. There were several ways to approach this but I wanted to try to minimise the amount of processing required. Thu, 30 Jul 2009 01:13:58 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Using-GROUP-CONCAT-in-MySQL/rss I went to see a screening of this new Chris Chapman film about Dartmoor last night and it just reminded me how lucky I am to live in this part of the world. Fri, 24 Jul 2009 01:21:32 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Wild-River-Cold-Stone/rss Up until now, if a web designer wanted to use a certain font on a website they either had to play safe and use something like Times New Roman or use JavaScript and Flash to change the fonts when a page is loaded. Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:04:38 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Improvements-in-web-typography-/rss Normally when retrieving records from a MySQL database you loop through the results and perform an operation on each in time. The other day, however, I simply wanted to get the position of a certain record in a set - nothing more. Sat, 04 Jul 2009 05:20:07 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Finding-the-position-of-a-record-in-MySQL/rss There is a move going on at the moment to try to get Microsoft to remove the Word rendering engine from Outlook 2010. Whats more the campaign is being mounted using Twitter. Wed, 24 Jun 2009 01:07:29 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Dont-let-Outlook-mess-up-your-emails/rss Although most blogs and larger websites have rss news feeds it is thought that only 3% of computer users are familiar with how they work. Sat, 06 Jun 2009 08:50:02 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Getting-news-feeds-via-email/rss It seems any web application worth its salt nowadays must have an API that developers can use to create mashups or display content within their web pages. Thu, 04 Jun 2009 01:17:17 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Restricting-API-usage-on-websites/rss There are times when you want to pass an unknown number of arguments to a function. A simple example might be a function to add a list of numbers. Fri, 29 May 2009 05:15:04 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/PHP-functions-and-varying-numbers-of-arguments/rss I've recently come across an application from the Ordnance Survey that allows you to embed maps on your website much like the very popular Google Maps. Thu, 28 May 2009 10:00:00 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Ordnance-survey-maps-on-your-website/rss I had a great day out yesterday when I was exhibiting at the Dartmoor Partnership Showcase Day. Thu, 14 May 2009 01:28:29 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Dartmoor-Showcase-Day/rss URL shortening services such as tinyURL have been around for some time now. Originally developed to overcome the problem of links wrapping over several lines in email clients they are now more prevalent because of social media applications such as Twitter Sat, 09 May 2009 02:31:30 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Short-URLs/rss Google Maps have been around a long time now and have been integrated into numerous websites and applications but in some cases are overkill. Mon, 20 Apr 2009 01:26:32 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Google-Static-Maps/rss The validation plugin for jquery is a simple way to add sophisticated validation to any forms on your website. However, I recently had a problem with IE6. Fri, 17 Apr 2009 03:03:46 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/jquery-form-validation-and-IE6/rss I was recently sent a file containing a poster design to put on a website that I look after. The only problem was that it was a Microsoft Publisher file and I don't have Publisher on my computer. Fri, 10 Apr 2009 05:33:37 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Reading-Publisher-Files-without-Publisher/rss An amendment to the Flexible Working Regulations issued by the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform comes into effect today. Mon, 06 Apr 2009 10:02:05 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Flexible-working/rss A quote I made after a networking event last year has been picked up and used on the advertising material for this years event. Thu, 26 Mar 2009 02:27:55 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Famous-at-last/rss A website design company in Australia has created this simple site to show people (or remind those that know) why the Web adds value to any business. Fri, 20 Mar 2009 02:28:15 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/13-Reasons-you-should-Embrace-the-Web/rss It seems that nowadays every site must have a map to display content. Whether its a business search facility, a store locator or a list of attractions on a tourist trail users expect to be able to find information using maps. Thu, 19 Mar 2009 02:45:48 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Geotagging-website-content/rss You've been there before - select your start point and destination, enter the dates you want to travel on and the results page says sorry there are no flights/ferries on that day. Wed, 11 Mar 2009 03:55:00 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/A-decent-travel-search-engine/rss Since Google released their Google Maps application and the API to allow developers to add maps on their own sites it seems that nowadays a website isn't complete without an interactive map. Fri, 06 Mar 2009 03:38:26 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Google-Maps/rss With the recent rise in popularity of online applications and the subsequent drive to create rich user interfaces comes a host of powerful javascript libraries. Wed, 04 Mar 2009 01:57:10 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/The-power-of-jquery/rss If you maintain a website using a content management system then uploading photos to the site is one of the trickier tasks to do. Tue, 03 Mar 2009 02:50:56 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Uploading-images-to-a-website/rss From 24th March everyone will be able to register a .tel domain. This new top level domain is very different to all the others that are currently used though. Sat, 28 Feb 2009 03:09:40 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/A-global-telephone-directory/rss I was working on an update to some software the other day and while it worked fine in Firefox and Opera it kept throwing up a javascript error in Internet Explorer. Wed, 25 Feb 2009 02:19:43 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Internet-Explorer-reserved-word-problem/rss Besides the obvious one of making sure you own the copyright (or are licensing it) on all content on your website there are several other issues you need to be aware of - even on the smallest website. Tue, 24 Feb 2009 01:14:46 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Your-website-and-the-law/rss One of the most common tasks when developing websites or online applications is date manipulation. You might for example need to create a list of memberships due to expire within the next month. Fri, 20 Feb 2009 02:06:05 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/A-hidden-gem-in-PHP/rss Have you ever needed to take a screen grab of a web page you are viewing? You can press the Print Screen button but if you want to edit anything you have to load it into your image editing software. Wed, 18 Feb 2009 05:30:05 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Screen-capture-of-web-pages/rss If you find yourself frequently moving data between different types of databases then you can either write a script to do it or you can use one of the many utilities available. Fri, 13 Feb 2009 07:21:56 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Database-Conversion/rss If you want a good deal on books about web design and marketing take a look at the fantastic offer on Sitepoint at the moment. But HURRY its only on until this Friday. Wed, 11 Feb 2009 04:05:57 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Fantastic-Book-Offer/rss If you ever need to record a video tutorial of something on your screen then this great online application is the ideal tool Tue, 10 Feb 2009 01:19:18 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Video-screen-capture/rss Most modern digital cameras nowadays have very high resolutions which means that the photos are larger than most computer screens let alone web pages. Thu, 05 Feb 2009 01:44:58 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Resizing-Photographs-for-your-website/rss I had a bit of a disaster last night whilst trying to get all my digital photos into a web based gallery and needed a quick bit of code to fix it. Wed, 04 Feb 2009 01:40:55 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Sorting-photos-by-date-taken/rss As some parts of the country experience the worst winter weather for 20 years can your business cope if no one can get into the office? Tue, 03 Feb 2009 00:55:55 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Is-your-software-weatherproof/rss A company in Holland have come up with a new font that they say will save on ink costs by cutting down the printable area on each letter. Mon, 02 Feb 2009 01:42:53 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/A-font-with-holes-in/rss This week I returned from a weeks skiing holiday in France and yesterday I got an email from the company I purchased my travel insurance from asking if everything went OK. Fri, 30 Jan 2009 01:10:18 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/The-all-important-follow-up-email/rss On many websites with search forms, if you do a search and then go to another page to view the results, clicking the back button brings up a 'page has expired' message. Thu, 29 Jan 2009 02:19:28 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Page-has-expired/rss RSS autodiscovery is a technique that makes it possible for browsers and other software to automatically find a site's RSS feed. Wed, 28 Jan 2009 06:49:05 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/RSS-Autodiscovery/rss How to get information sent to you rather than having to go out and find it. Wed, 14 Jan 2009 04:26:44 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Using-RSS-feeds/rss I have several enquiry forms on some reasonably high traffic web sites and I have been getting a daily bombardment of rubbish from spambots automatically filling in these forms. One of the forms even has CAPTCHA on it but this isn't very effective. Sat, 10 Jan 2009 01:34:35 GMT http://www.slowducks.co.uk/blog/Spam-filtering-in-online-forms/rss