Designoplasty Web Design and Development Blog

Today I spent some time making some data import code work better. At the start of the process I had a PHP function that I would call to import some data. The problem is, that process would take longer than 30 seconds after which it would time out. A while ago, I changed the function to [...]

The last couple of days I’ve been doing a ton of AJAX programming on some WordPress plugins. Wordpress actually does have one very handy AJAX feature that makes using AJAX just a little easier. I also use jQuery because it’s really nice for a lot of things including AJAX work. AJAX is a great technology, and [...]

I just watched this video to see what was coming up in ECMAScript 5. What this video taught me is the JavaScript is junk and that design by committee always leads to bad solutions. When looking at some of the ridiculous code examples in this video, I just couldn’t believe it. It is so difficult just [...]

Fueling my hatred of Internet Exporer, today I had to process this code. This function is based on Alex King’s work which has been adopted by WordPress. I adjusted his function to allow me to easily place tags around the selected text in a textarea. I find it so horribly annoying that this bit of code [...]

I just finished my first AJAX enabled plugin for a WordPress blog. I’ll write more about it later, but I used jQuery and it worked out great. I learned about some great things today. wp_enqueue_script and wp_enqueue_style These are two awesome functions to get your plugin scripts and styles included in the right order taking into account [...]

OK, where do I start. I’m kind of exhausted. I’ve been doing so much totally intense WordPress PHP and JavaScript work over the last few days that my brain is mush. But at the same time, I’m so needing to conquer it that I can’t stop. I keep putting the computer away, then I get [...]

Now that I have a few blogs and kind of a standard way of doing things, I’m figuring out what adds time to posting and what are repetitive tasks. For me, probably the biggest thing is adding images. I like to add images to every post, but it takes forever. I have to: find the image upload it [...]

Today I ran into an issue that seems to have been plaguing a number of WordPress coders. I had turned a list generated by wp_list_categories() into a set of pull down menus using jQuery. The problem is that wp_list_categories() puts title attributes in all the anchor tags. This means that the browser pops up tooltips [...]

Today I learned jQuery. It was intense. I was at Starbucks. The first code I saw I was like, “What?” I still don’t understand exactly how they do it, but I get the syntax. $(…) The builder pattern is also very interesting. I was able to get a nice fading pull down menu working today. It even fades in [...]