J. Cornelius

Yesterday Google announced that they enhanced Gmail for IE 6 users. Really? Google updated the Gmail core almost a year ago. According to the post “IE6 wasn’t able to handle the complexity of the new code in a way that met our performance and stability goals”. So now, 10 months later they release new code saying “we’ve been working with the IE engineers at... continue »

So it seems IE8 is petting the cat backwards already. Hakon Lie’s article bashes IE for its use of a broken page icon to denote standards compliant pages. This is a epic misapplication of an icon — but, is it truly a sign of Microsoft denouncing the use of Web Standards? No. As Hakon says in his post, and others have pointed out the default is to render Intranet pages in... continue »

Everyone needs a password for something from time to time. It's usually a pain to try to think of something unique and hard to guess. This is a handy tool that creates random character alpha-numeric, case-sensitive passwords on the fly. Here is your password: Want to go again? Just select how many characters you want in the password, and how many passwords you want to... continue »

As common or rare as it may be for someone to need the ability to select and deselect checkboxes in a form, here is a way to do it using the Prototype JavaScript Library . I recently needed a way to do this for the Private Message functionality of a Web Application I'm working on. The example code below is taken from this Application. First make the Event observers: ... continue »

A few guys I work with and I have been mulling over the idea of creating a new organization for software authors for a while now. The existing predominant group is hopelessly submerged in internal politics and bickering, and is providing little if any value to it's members. One of the many issues with the that organization was the lack of a decent website. We knew if we started a new group, we... continue »

Contest winners are supposed to be random, pulled from a hat so to speak. The process of doing that is a little less obvious when that hat is a MySQL database with 500,000 people in it. You can't just stick your hand in and grab the first peice of paper you feel. Wait.... actually you can. So I needed to select a random group of people from this MySQL table. It's super easy to... continue »

During a session at SXSW on Web Standards and SEO ( transcribed here ), the conversation revolved around how search engines treat semantically correct, valid pages versus the spaghetti mess of code that makes up the bulk of the web. Tim Mayer from Yahoo! said that they do look at valid markup as a 'signal of quality', but can't give extra weight to pages using web standards yet because there... continue »

PHP and Smarty Search Bookmarklets Do you ever want a quick way to search PHP or Smarty Documentation for a function? Here it is! Just drag this link to your browsers bookmarks (or links) toolbar and voila! Search PHP.net Search Smarty Docs Modifiers to Make Life Easier These simple Smarty modifiers have made life easier for me. The use them just save the... continue »

siteWatcher is an easy way to check if your Websites and MySQL databases are up and running. It runs on a schedule you set and simply checks your websites for content you specify and notifies you by email if that content is not found. You can also use it to check connectivity to MySQL databases. To setup siteWatcher all you need to do is download the PHP file, put it on your server... continue »

Everyone wants to display friendly error pages for visitors to thier website. This is easy to do using a variety of methods, but are the common methods always the best decision? There are an abundance of pages that discuss how to make custom 404 error pages. While this practice is an excellent way to help direct misguided visitors to the correct area of your website, it can have some... continue »

If you've ever had to create a bunch of zone files for a bunch of domains you know it can be a pain. Should you ever find yourself in that dark hole again use this. It is a quick and simple DNS Zone File creator for BIND. It takes an array of domain names, creates zone files and adds the zones to your master BIND configuration. All you need to do is put the domains in the array and restart... continue »

Recently while writing some billing functions I came across the need to show customers the credit card number on file for their account. Since most people would freak out if I showed them the entire number I had to make a quick function to obfuscate the number and let them know what type of card they previously used. Here is a quick way to do just that. This function is super easy to use... continue »

When specifying colors in HTML or CSS it's best to use the hex code which is something that browsers understand and convert into colors. Choose a color from the list below and look to its right to get the hex code. If you wanted a nice blue for example, you could use "#0000cc". You can print this chart if you like, just make sure that "Print background colors and images" option is on in... continue »

It's always a good idea to have all the traffic for your site go to www.yourdomain.com. Through the magic of Apache mod_rewrite, you can keep your URLs clean and tidy. Often times people will just type your domain name (i.e. "yourdomain.com") into their browser to get to your website. This can cause some interesting and undesired issues, especially if you plan to do any detailed log... continue »

All of the conversion functions that I found seemed really bloated. Here is a nice clean way to convert seconds to a more user friendly hour:minute:seconds format. This example takes the current Unix time and converts it to the desired format. Of course you can use this for just about any application that requires you to convert seconds to a more readable format. $seconds = time(); $time =... continue »

Mailtos are a convenient way to let your audience offer feedback on your Web site or to arrange other contact information. But you can do a lot more with a mailto than just automatically generate an e-mail message. Super ninja mailtos can automatically CC and BCC people, or even fill in the subject line. You could go read the RFC to learn how, or you could just keep reading for the quick and... continue »