Category Archives: book

novelrank

December 17, 2009 3:00 pm 1 Comment

Because it’s difficult to know exactly how well my book is doing, I went looking for online apps that might be able to help.

I came across NovelRank a few weeks ago, which keeps track of your Amazon SalesRank and uses the fluctuations in the value to try figure out when a sale happens.

At first I was a bit disappointed, as my own ratings should not many sales going on, but I realised that this was because there were no reviews out there so people a) didn’t know about the book, and b) didn’t know if it was worth buying.

Since the reviews have started coming in, sales have picked up, as can be seen in the NovelRank graph for my book.

I like this application – it’s a simple idea, and the author has made it freely available (I assume he makes money from affiliate links).

Want to see it in action? Buy JQuery 1.3 with PHP and then view NovelRank graph for my book the graph a few hours later to see your very own blip appear on it.

It’s interesting to see that the book is not selling at all in Canada. What’s wrong with you Canadians?? ;-)

On a very related note, I’m in talks with Packt to produce another book. More on this later when details are more concrete.

Filed Under: ajax, book, javascript, jquery, packt, php, programming, reviews, web development

jQuery 1.3 With PHP; buy it!

December 13, 2009 6:35 pm 16 Comments

Christmas is coming, as most of us (especially parents and people that have wallets) know, so it’s time for ye all to dig deep and buy the perfect gift for that favourite web developer in your life.

Not knowing what that perfect gift could possibly be, I’ll recommend instead that you invest in a copy of my book, JQuery 1.3 with PHP.

Reviews are just starting to come in. I only know of two on-line ones so far, my favourite of which is this one:

The author does a great job of introducing complicated theories and breaking them down into manageable steps, whilst always taking very thorough considerations for applying jQuery knowledge into CMS ’s and web applications.

I noticed that the same reviewer posted this on Twitter: thoroughly impressed with reading jQuery 1.3 with PHP. writing a review on it, will be available soon!

The other one that I’m aware of is more of a list of notes than a review. The only thing he says in general about the book is “Overall a good book.”

There are a few minor criticisms in the second review that I don’t agree with – that I didn’t use inline functions in all cases, didn’t use Google’s functions to load jQuery from its CDN, and used document.getElementById in some cases instead of using jQuery’s $ function.

My reaction to those points are: inline functions are explained later in the book as I didn’t want to throw the reader head-first into understanding them, there’s no point in loading three libraries (google, jquery and jquery-ui) when you only need jquery and jquery-ui, and for the purposes of getting an element by its ID, document.getElementByID is much quicker than $.

I think the real problem with my decisions with the above points is that, after having had them pointed out as mistakes, I feel I should really have explained more clearly in the book why I chose to do things in those ways in the first place. Well, that’s something for edition 2 :-D

So far, though, the reactions are positive, and I hope this continues – there haven’t been any “this is crap” reviews so far, which is good.

I know of a few other people that are writing reviews, and can’t wait to see them. So reviewers, please do criticise it – it makes the end-product better.

And christmas shoppers, it’s a great book ;-)

Filed Under: book, javascript, jquery, packt, php, programming, reviews, web development

php.ie slowly upgrading

December 7, 2009 10:49 pm 3 Comments

It’s been a while since I wrote anything vaguely technical. I guess it’s because I like to write only when there’s something new to say, and usually only if I have some new code to give away.

No new code today, but I can describe the recent work on php.ie (I’m the secretary of the Irish PHP Users’ Group).

So firstly, it was basically a static/brochure site for about a year, until we installed WebME (written by me!) as the CMS and created a skin for it so there’s only a tiny design difference. If you want to try out WebME, then download the SVN version from the google code site, or create a test site here (uses a really old version of WebME – you’re better off using the SVN version).

Then, I started rewriting the right panel. Beforehand, it displayed recent twitter messages, but they’re not often put out so it was a bit of a wasted space.

The panel now uses a WebME widget which displays recent Twitter messages, emails from the mailing list, and posts from the forum.

Over the next few days, I’ll be adding a new News section to the site, and the message widget will be able to show new articles from planet php.ie and new jobs from the jobs page.

I’m currently reading through Ken’s linux.ie todo list to see what I can appropriate for php.ie for its ongoing development.

Big thanks go to Michele and the team at blacknight for hosting the site.

Oh! Just a reminder, buy my book! JQuery 1.3 with PHP – hasn’t been reviewed by anyone yet, as far as I know, but my own opinion is that it is worth having on your shelf if you are a PHP developer that wants to step into jQuery.

Filed Under: book, linux, php, programming, web development, webme, webworks

jQuery 1.3 With PHP: Datatables chapter is online

October 26, 2009 2:33 pm 1 Comment

Packt have put another chapter of my book online. This time, it’s the datatables chapter, which discusses how to use the Datatables plugin to organise very large data tables.

The chapter discusses how to make a large (over two million rows) database usable through an ajaxified table.

The Datatables plugin supports search, sorting and pagination.

Filed Under: ajax, book, databases, javascript, jquery, mysql, packt, php, programming, web development

jQuery 1.3 With PHP: calendars chapter is online

October 24, 2009 9:18 pm 1 Comment

Packt have put one of the chapters of my book, jQuery 1.3 with PHP, online as an article.

I mentioned this chapter in June, and provided a small demo and the source.

I’ve had a few requests for example code on how to do this using a real database. I’ve been meaning to make the time to do that. I’ll get that done hopefully tomorrow.

In the meantime, though, please enjoy the article.

By the way, the book went to the printer only a few days ago, so if you want to avail of the pre-order price, now’s the time.

Filed Under: ajax, book, databases, javascript, jquery, packt, php, programming, web development

KFM 1.4 released

September 27, 2009 12:27 pm Leave a Comment

It’s been almost a full year since the last release, 1.3.1, and I haven’t done much on KFM in that time.

Benjamin ter Kuile, though, has! Today, we release KFM 1.4

In the time that I’ve been busy with other stuff, and procrastinating on KFM, Benjamin has been working diligently, adding features and making the core files more stable.

Here is a short list of improvements, gleaned from the SVN logs over the last year. I’m sure I’m missing a lot.

  • jQuery upgraded to 1.3.2 (faster, better, stronger)
  • you can edit multiple text files simultaneously
  • context menu code improved to help it work in Chrome, Opera and Safari
  • file icons are now created as a montage, improving display speed
  • a lot of functions converted to “lazyload” – improves startup speed
  • images are also lazyloaded – if an icon is not visible on the screen, its thumbnail is not loaded
  • lots of bug-fixes

Not many new features, as KFM was basically complete.

1.4 is the last 1.x version which will be released. We’re done with the code-base, and ready to start on a much more ambitious project.

We’re going to rebuilt the entire system from scratch in a modular way, adding functionality that would be very difficult to shoehorn into the present system. The new version will be called KFM 2, and I’m really excited about it. I will be starting the coding for it very soon, as soon as I’ve finished with the release of my book, jQuery 1.3 with PHP.

For those of you that are already using 1.3; 1.4 is /faster/, but 1.3 already completes the initial spec, so only upgrade if you find that 1.3 is slow. New users should install 1.4.

Filed Under: ajax, book, javascript, jquery, kfm, packt, php, programming, web development

jQuery 1.3 With PHP: cover mockup

September 18, 2009 12:01 pm 4 Comments

6989_MockupCover

I’ve been sent a mockup for the book’s cover. The suggested title of the book is “jQuery 1.3 with PHP”. The working title was “PHP and jQuery”. Which do you prefer?

The book has been completed, in that all the chapters are written, and it’s in the final edit phase at the moment. This involves Packt having a technical editor try everything in the book just to iron out any kinks. It’s already been gone over by three other reviewers, and the only problem appears to have been with the File Management chapter, where the web-server was IIS on Windows. That should be solved by the time the book comes out.

I’ve learned a lot while writing this book. A major point that keeps raising its head is that I keep using colloquialisms and aphorisms (ha! “raising its head”), and those are not globally understood. Another is that I keep using British spelling, but it’s expected that most readers will be American.

From a coding point of view, I tend to write compact code with comments only appearing where something is obviously confusing, but I’ve tried to put proper comments in the book whenever any reviewer asked a question about the code.

Anyway – I expect it will be in PDF form in only a few weeks! I’m looking forward to hearing what people think of it.

On a funny note, I was working on something in work recently, and was trying to figure the best way to do it, when I suddenly remembered I’d written a whole chapter on it, so went and read what I’d written! I’ll be keeping a copy of the book on my own shelf ;-)

This kind of thing is always happening to me – I would need to solve some problem (hooking an OKI B2200 printer to Linux over Samba, for example), go searching for the answer, and find that I’d written the solution for it a year or two previously…

By the way, KFM 1.4 will be released next week. It will be the last 1.x version. We (Benjamin and myself) are starting a total rewrite after that, which will become KFM 2. It’s going to be massive!

EDIT: 2009-09-18 Wow, that was quick! The book is already available to pre-book

Filed Under: book, javascript, jquery, kfm, packt, php, programming, web development, webme, webworks

jquery remoteselectoptions plugin

August 2, 2009 12:22 pm 2 Comments

Based on some work I did for chapter 3 of jQuery 1.3 with PHP, I’ve created a plugin to encapsulate the remote selectbox trick.

The idea of this is that in a lot of cases, there may be huge select boxes in your forms, but the selected value might not ever need to change. For example, if you have a country list, and you’re pretty sure that the user is in Ireland, then it might be pointless to have a full list of countries in there if it’s unlikely to be changed.

demo
country-select

Notice that when you click the select box, it’s populated with countries. However, the source of the page does not include those countries in the HTML. So how does it do it?

How it does it is to add a focus event to the selectbox, which populates it only when it’s actually about to be changed. In this case, the missing options are in a file named countries.html which is 9k in size. So, by using this trick, we’ve saved 9k in bandwidth. Multiply that by the amount of large selectboxes in your forms, and it could be considerable.

Look at the source of that page:

<html>
	<head>
		<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
		<script src="jquery.remoteselectoptions.min.js"></script>
		<script>
			$(document).ready(function(){
				$('select[name=countries]').remoteselectoptions({
					url:'countries.html'
				});
			});
		</script>
	</head>
	<body>
		<em>select a country</em>

		<select name="countries"><option value="IRL">Ireland</option></select>
	</body>
</html>

All that’s needed is to include a single option in there to indicate the default, then run .remoteselectoptions() on the selectbox, telling it what url it should grab the options from.

In case you need to do some checking on the server-side based on the current selected item, the script calls the option source with a selected GET parameter set to the current selected option’s value. You might set the url to a PHP script for example, which would build up the option list based on that selected item.

Download the source here (4.5k)

Rate it here.

Filed Under: ajax, book, javascript, jquery, packt, php, programming, web development, webme

jQuery: nested sortables

July 23, 2009 11:19 pm 8 Comments

As I said in my last post, I was pretty sure that the code in my last chapter was correct and that the problem was with jQuery’s Sortable itself.

I spent the last few hours studying the Sortable code and think I’ve fixed it.

Here’s the example from last post showing the problem, and here’s the corrected version.

If you want to patch your own copy of Sortable, here’s my patch file.

I think there’s actually a moral here – if you want to make sure that something is fixed, then you should knuckle down and do it yourself, as the jQuery developers really do have better things to be doing.

Buy the book! jQuery 1.3 with PHP

Filed Under: book, javascript, jquery, web development

jQuery 1.3 With PHP: chp8, drag/drop

July 22, 2009 12:43 pm 2 Comments

For chapter 8 of jQuery 1.3 with PHP, I wrote about drag and drop. jQuery has a few different ways to do drag and drop. The most fundamental way is to use the Draggable and Droppable interfaces, but as it happens, most of the things you might want to do with a CMS can be done just with the Sortable interface.

The examples I wrote for this chapter are:

  • Sorting a list and saving the result. demo, download
  • Sorting a tree-based list (navigation menu, for example) and saving the result. demo, download
  • Dragging items from a list of contacts into a list of people to send emails to. demo, download

The second one worried me for a while, as it kept behaving erratically on me – I would sometimes drag an item and it would simply vanish. It turns out that it’s a bug in jQuery UI’s Sortable that should be fixed by the time the book is out, so it will work better then. I’m not worried about its behaviour right now as I’m certain this will be fixed.

I only used Sortable in this chapter, as I was trying to think of a case where Sortable couldn’t be used, and the only cases I thought of were a bit too advanced for the book – the book’s supposed to be for PHP developers that are not absolutely rock solid in JavaScript and those examples might be a bit daunting. Maybe if there’s a second edition I might expand on it with more advanced examples.

An advanced example might including dragging a shopping item into a basket. You could not use Sortable with that because usually, what you are dragging is a full description of something, and when you drop it into the basket, you want it to change to a compact description. Coding is involved there, and that’s when it gets bogged down. Writing about that sort of complex case would mean diving into JavaScript and away from the core subject of the book, which is the interaction of PHP and jQuery.

update: I fixed Sortable. Here’s an example of nested sortables using the corrected code: demo.

Filed Under: ajax, book, javascript, jquery, packt, php, programming, web development
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