The first person who can send me a nice 175×180 JPEG advert can have a placement just under my twitter status (on the right of this page) for one month! Just send the image itself, and the link to your site.
Please ensure that it is relevant to the content on this site (web design & development) and that it also looks pretty!
Send your image and link to rich(at)blemble(dot)com.
Using cookies can be very useful from a user experience perspective. They are used to save small amounts of data onto the users’ machine, enabling the site to use this data next time the user visits. This is particularly useful if you have an age-gate (maybe for a movie or an alcoholic brand) but you don’t want to confront the user with this each time they visit if they have previously confirmed a valid date of birth. In this situation, you can set a cookie on their machine (named ‘ageCookie’ for example) and give it a value of ‘true’ or ‘false’. You can then detect the value of this cookie next time they visit (if it exists) and perform the necessary actions.
It’s simple, there are 2 core functions you will need: setCookie() and getCookie(). They are pretty self-explanatory, one sets a cookie on the users’ machine and the other gets a cookie.
Here is the code:
// This function will get a cookie from the users' machine
function getCookie(theName) {
var nameEQ = theName + "=";
var ca = document.cookie.split(';');
for(var i=0;i < ca.length;i++) {
var c = ca[i];
while (c.charAt(0)==' ') c = c.substring(1,c.length);
if (c.indexOf(nameEQ) == 0) return c.substring(nameEQ.length,c.length);
}
return null;
}
// This function will set a cookie on the users' machine
function setCookie(theName, theValue, theDays) {
if (theDays) {
var date = new Date();
date.setTime(date.getTime()+(theDays*24*60*60*1000));
var expires = "; expires="+date.toLocaleString();
}
else var expires = "";
document.cookie = theName+"="+theValue+expires+"; path=/";
}
Once you have this code in your page, you just need to call these functions and pass the parameters. For example: setCookie('ageCookie', 'ok', 365);. Notice how I pass a value of 365 for theDays parameter. This will ensure that the cookie will stay on the users’ machine for up to 1 year (given that they never clear their cookies).
Over the last few weeks I have been tinkering around with the popular web development framework, CakePHP. I’m a rookie at the moment (hopefully not for long) but I definitely recognize the benefits of using it.
Other popular web application frameworks include Ruby on Rails, Django, and the Zend Framework.
Cake uses the Model View Controller (MVC) development pattern. When I first heard about MVC and looking into it a little further I found it very daunting and slightly confusing, but I’m not sure why because I now feel very confident working in this way! It’s a simple concept: the model represents the data of the application, the view handles the visual layout of the data, and the controller performs all the logic for the application.
The most obvious advantage to me at this stage is speed. I know that with both Ruby on Rails and CakePHP you can ’scaffold’ your applications first. Basically, scaffolding (much like a construction site) is a rough structure for your application. You put the scaffolding up first, then start bulking the application out and replacing the scaffolding with your own code. It’s really great for getting something up and running quickly.
The scaffolding will automatically detect the fieldsets and datatypes in your database and generate all the boring CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) code for you at run time, so you don’t have to sit around creating forms and can get a basic application up and running within minutes!
Another really nice tool is bake. This is a PHP command-line script (you run it from the shell), which will create all the CRUD code in files. So once you have scaffolded your application and are happy with all the forms/validation/relationships you can create an editable file using bake and start to customize the code.
