Web Dev/Design « Kevin Pajak – Interactive Web Developer/Designer – BLOG

Archive for the ‘Web Dev/Design’ Category

Customized WordPress theme for DailyWebGeek.com

Friday, February 5th, 2010

Going to begin work soon on an original, fully customized WordPress theme for DailyWebGeek.com. More details to follow.

Mobile version of web sites

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

Beginning preliminaries for this, doing research (very special thanks to Antonio Lupetti for his STUpendous article, “Best Practices To Develop Perfect Websites for iPhone and Mobile Devices!!) My Japanese pop-culture site, Jpopexpress.com, has a mobile functionality (which uses Google Reader), but certainly an independent, standalone mobile-optimized version of your website would be superior (and in addition, provide you with more distance from the “proprietary monopolies,” something that I have been increasingly focusing on lately ;) ).

[Oh, and FYI: just in case you didn't know already, dimensions for the iPhone screen are 320w x 480h ;) ]

Live chat client showing list of current users online

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

OK, so I’ve nearly got this puppy complete. It’s a live-chat client that will allow logged-on users (and only logged-on users, although I also have a version that guests can use) to make “posts” (just like to a “wall” on Facebook or Twitter), with the chat/comments page automatically refreshing every 500 milliseconds to show latest posts that other users have just made, in real-time. (one tentative name I have for it is a “living wall”). Last night, I added the ability to show a list of all users who are currently logged on, and hope to have this out of beta soon ;)

These are just some of the advantages of this application:

- All posts can be saved into a database (into any table you so choose. You could, for example, insert the posts on tables related to individual topics or categories, current news items, a photo, or basically anything else you can put on an individual web page. [so to use this interactive chat client on a different page, just insert the posts into a different database table]).

- This can provide your web site users with a cross-functional, enhanced web user experience, allowing them to see who else in your online community or company is currently logged on, chat with them, comment on various pages across the site, view/update profile information, other content etc [sounds a little like Facebook, MySpace, or similar online communities doesn’t it, only think of the advantages of having this on your own site ‘).

- Flexibility. If you like, you can either destroy or save records of “chat sessions” (or series of wallposts too, if you’d like to use the app in that way).

More soon! :-) .

Clearing contents of $_POST array values (to avoid re-submitting form data upon page refresh)

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

After trying SEVERAL different possible methods & suggestions, I finally was able to achieve this by pointing my form’s PHP processing page to another page, rather than the same page itself (I really wanted to keep everything – form as well as form-handling all on the same page, but I found that I had to do this in order to prevent the user from re-submitting form data [through the contents of the $_POST array] that does not clear upon a user’s hitting the refresh button on the browser). And following that, I had my form’s processing page script then re-direct back to the original page where the form was located:

// redirect to the same page without the POST data
header(“Location: original-page-with-form.php”);
die;

Here are some of the pages I consulted in my research:

http://www.thefutureoftheweb.com/blog/get-redirect-after-post
http://www.issociate.de/board/post/171234/Clear_POST_variables_on_page_refresh.html
http://www.mail-archive.com/php-list@yahoogroups.com/msg04635.html
http://qaix.com/php-web-programming/437-896-clear-post-variables-read.shtml

*NOTE: Of course, keep in mind that any header(“Location: PAGE”); PHP code must be included BEFORE any contents are outputted on the page, otherwise you will get the lovely “Headers already sent” PHP error.

Hope this can help anyone else out there who may be struggling with the same issue :)

“Twitter emulator” progress

Saturday, January 30th, 2010

OK, so now I’ve got my “Twitter emulator” working (complete post-to-wall, saving all posts into a database), now with post authors listed according to logged-on username [i.e. wall posting for logged on users only]. Almost out of beta, few final tests to go :-) .