Hello World

I've recently been working on a few websites and there are some common problems that I've encountered in Internet Explorer and Firefox while developing these. Here's a small list of things that may cause problems and what to do to solve them.

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Those of you who read The Daily WTF/Worse Than Failure probably have noticed this by now... but Opera Mini beta 4 simulator made it to the latest Error'd post.

In case you haven't read the posts at TDWTF yet, I suggest you go and start from the oldest ones. They are often very funny and it honestly makes you think how/why would anyone do that?... a few articles have also reminded me of my very first PHP apps. Ugh.

I decided to throw together a widget for updating your status here on MyOpera. Or is it My Opera with a space? Well, in any case...

It's a nice little feature... but quite useless to be honest... Fun, but useless.


I had to do some research to be able to make the widget work: It wasn't immediately obvious from looking at the HTML code for this page how it should do the XMLHttpRequest calls, but luckily the Opera folks hadn't obfuscated their JavaScript code that does the AJAX when you change your status, so I was able to get help from there.

Additionally, I realized I needed to add log in to the widget; Despite being logged in in the browser, the widget wouldn't be able to update the status. For this I again took liberties to get some help from Opera's people's code, this time the My Opera widget.


In the end the widget is very simple. It just does some AJAX calls and with Prototype making them work was a breeze. Have I mentioned how much I like Prototype? No? Oh, well in that case: Prototype is the best JavaScript AJAX/DOM library. Period.



As an end note, I know some of my old widgets are in need of updates... I'm sorry, I don't have enough time to go over them. However, if you like them and want to fix it on your own, I'm happy to answer questions related to the source code etc. and if you send me an updated version, I'll go over it and if it's okay I will upload it as a new version with credits to you. Note that this applies only to bug fixes, not completely new feature additions.

I've recently been trying out ScriptLance. It's basically a site for webmasters to post projects to which freelance coders can bid.

I've noticed an intresting phenomena while bidding on the projects...

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If you have done more PHP programming you've probably used a template engine or two. I personally prefer Smarty as my template engine of choice for most projects.

If you don't know what a template engine is, I'll give a short explanation: Template engine is something that can be used to help separate HTML from PHP - You do all your "business logic" in a PHP file, for example you fetch some things from a database. A template on the other hand is meant to display that data. This is usually achieved by assigning the data to template variables in PHP and then displaying the template file.

But most template engines need setting up and their own code base etc., so for small projects they might add unnecessary complexity and things like that. However, PHP on its own can be a simple template engine! In this post I'll show you how.

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