The how and why of my programming
Dark-Ape
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Homepage: http://www.dark-ape.com/
Posts by Dark-Ape
Weekly Work
Mar 29th
Currently working on getting a new website out for work sometime within the next month, so we’re in rush mode for the project. Not much research happening at the moment, but I haven’t halted everything.
I am still looking for a solution to my jQuery problem for my Custom Tags, and I don’t mind help if anyone has the time to spare: http://dev.jquery.com/ticket/6239.
Still trying to find the presentation files for the “SQL Server Data Compression 101″ class from SQLSaturday#33, but no luck as of yet. I’ll try directly contacting Patrick since my previous one might have been filtered as SPAM.
On a note of the strange, is “most minimal” actually a valid English phrase? It seems odd reading that, yet a Google search for ["most minimal" phrase] yields approximately 16,000 pages with all but one link on the first page being technical writings – the one exception was a government Court of Appeals ruling from a judge… Technical folk make some of the best phrases. (“All your base are belong to us.”)
SQLSaturday#33 Notes
Mar 10th
My notes from this past Saturday are now available for download here.*
This is only the first version of the notes as I want to expand further on some of my notes, but I took notes expecting to review the presentations at a later time. Unfortunately, I have yet to find the notes for one of the courses and will be updating the file once I have; I will also add an update to this posting as well.
* The associated file in this posting was last updated Mar. 10, 2010.
SQLSaturday#33 Review and Advance Notice
Mar 7th
SQLSaturday
Yesterday I attended SQLSaturday#33 in Charlotte, NC. It was the second time I have attended, my first time being the very first SQLSaturday in Orlando, FL about 3 years ago. I was glad I received the opportunity to go this year – last year there were not any near me for to attend and then return for work on time – and as before I learned plenty while learning how much I really still have left to learn. Strangely, I really appreciate the fact of knowing that there is plenty left for me to learn. As such, I would like to thank all of those who came to share and teach those who attended.
I would especially like to thank the following people who taught the classes I attended:
- Mike Walsh, “As a DBA, where do I start?” and “You Can Improve Your Own SQL Code”
- Kendal Van Dyke, “Getting started in blogging and technical speaking.”
- Timothy Ford, “Tips For The Lazy But Driven DBA”
- Patrick LeBlanc, “SQL Server Data Compression 101″ (I’m still laughing about his “white paper” slip-up)
- Geoff Hiten, “Bad SQL”
For anyone interested, I will be condensing my notes for their classes for some co-workers and I will also post the notes and the materials by Wednesday – this way I can kill two geek groups with one zip.
Oops, a bug!
I would like to thank Connie for pointing out that there seems to be a bug with my script in “Custom Tags using jQuery 1.4.1,” but I have been unable to determine why and have submitted it for review by some others. Internet Explorer 7 and 8 both fail to execute the script, while still allowing other JavaScript to run, and say the problem exists within the jQuery library itself. I will post a correction once I, or someone who is quicker, have found the source of the problem.
Next Post Preview: Custom iContact API
Next Monday I will be posting a custom mini-API for anyone using iContact’s API – my rendition uses a single function call to subscribe a contact to a list regardless of whether the contact already exists or not. Strangely, I couldn’t find anything like had to make my own, but this is an important feature for anyone who wants to integrated a newsletter sign up form into their own website. I hope you look forward to it!
Custom Tags using jQuery 1.4.1
Feb 25th
So I’ve had the problem for a long while of wanting to pull database-driven items onto my already CMS controlled pages from anywhere within the page. These lists wouldn’t all be the same, and rather than worrying about have to make a separate tag for each different database table, I wanted them pretty much standardized, so I thought of using jQuery for it. (It is moments like this that I absolutely love JavaScript even though I am usually against it.
So, I did what I normally do and defined what I needed… I wanted to decided:
- What table will I be pulling the information from?
- What kind of additional parameters am I probably going to need?
- How do I want to “standardize” the look of all these different resource records into 2/3 columns per list?
I am going to ignore #3, but I figured there would be a couple different lists (events, books, comments, posts, etc…) that I might want to reference, so I made those my additional, optional fields. My tag thus became something like “<jtag type=”events”></jtag>” with the other parameters as additional attributes of the tag. The major problem was figuring how to compactly, yet simplistically generate the queries to .load() the results… After messing round with it for a couple of hours, I finally found a solution I was happy with.
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Pagination: Requirements Built The Product
Feb 12th
As I mentioned in Pagination Part 1: Who Is It For?, I had specific needs and goals for this function when I started it. My primary requirement was that whatever was created would be versatile enough to handle a variety of styles and list types, yet still create uniform pagination throughout the web site. While doing background research on what other pagination systems were doing, I noticed that most of the other styles were either a) taking SQL information as parameters and returning the paginated results along with the list or b) were taking “the basics”, seen below, and spitting out links for pages 1 through N, N being the last page number. Neither were sufficient enough for my usage standards, for both developer and user alike.
Pagination: Who Is It For?
Feb 9th
Pagination is an important feature of any site with pages, vertical or linked, of content to display. It is useful so that the visitor does not have to continuously scroll the page for content, nor click through too many pages to reach the desired content. There are also the concerns for the host and administrator: database traffic, result processing, usability to viewers, typical search engine optimization (SEO), etc… For both the end-user and the administrator, pagination is the result of trading between the developer wants, the targeted users of the content, and the users’ wants.
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