Ian Purton

How to Create Javascript Catfish Sliding Promotions

ianpurton — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 14:40:53 +0000

An effective way to advertise or promote a product is the Catfish pop-up, so
called because it lies on the bottom of the browser. Less annoying than fullblown pop-ups and to me much better than adverising embedded within content. I’ve mocked up two example pages a transparency example and an example form.

(more…)

Helper to Display Rails Flash Messages

ianpurton — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 14:30:19 +0000

A simple code snippet for displaying your flash[:warning] = "Warning Message" messages in rails.

(more…)

Recompile suexec to work with Apache Virtual Domains on Fedora

ianpurton — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 10:45:28 +0000

Q. Having problems getting suexec and Apache to work together with your virtual domains ?

A. You need to re-compile suexec to work from a different document root.

Suexec and the Document Root

Basically, suexec is hard coded to work from /var/www/html/ if your virtual domain is using sub directories under another path then you’ll get this problem. I like to host each of my domains on a separate user account under /home.

(more…)

SEO WordPress Sandbox Theme

ianpurton — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 11:56:19 +0000

The SEO Wordpress Sandbox Theme is a bare naked WordPress theme ready for styling via CSS. The theme has been search engine optimised and the markup enhanced to help with search engine rankings.

I’ve used the Yahoo CSS grids framework which, to quote Yahoo, gives you.

The foundational YUI Grids CSS file offers three preset page widths, seven core templates, and the ability to nest subdivided regions of one to four columns. All told, the file offers almost 200 preset layouts and an unlimited number of custom permutations that work across all A-grade browsers, all for less than 2.5kb of minimized file weight.

(more…)

WordPress Recent Posts Plugin

ian.purton — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 08:13:53 +0000

This PHP code will give your WordPress blog a recent posts list as I have on my sidebar to the right.

It’s not actually a plugin, you need to cut and paste this code into the sidebar.php of your theme.

(more…)

Simple Email Send Function In Ruby

ian.purton — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 13:20:17 +0000

If you need to send an e-mail in ruby, this little function works well.

def send_email(from, from_alias, to, to_alias, subject, message)

msg = <
To: #{to_alias} <#{to}>
 Subject: #{subject}

 #{message}
END_OF_MESSAGE

  Net::SMTP.start(’localhost’) do |smtp|
  smtp.send_message msg, from, to
  end

end

Keeping Track Of The Referrer In Javascript

ian.purton — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 07:08:00 +0000

This Javascript code will add a handler to a cancel button on a form, so that when the button is clicked the user is returned to the page that requested the form.

This is useful when you have more than one route to a form, such as an edit link on a table or an edit link on a details screen.
(more…)

Update Copyright Dates using JavaScript and Clean Markup

ian.purton — Thu, 18 May 2006 05:49:00 +0000

Rather than update copyright dates by hand or with server side code, it’s sometimes useful to use Javascript.

(more…)

How to get MSN Chat for free on your Orange SPV M600 Smartphone

ian.purton — Thu, 04 May 2006 01:26:00 +0000

If you’ve tried to load the latest version of MSN Chat onto your M600 you’ll have noticed that Microsoft have introduced a fee.

This fee applies to the latest version of MSN Chat. The older version of the software doesn’t charge but it doesn’t work on Windows Mobile 5.
(more…)

Viewing iPod H.264 videos on a Pocket PC with TCPMP

ian.purton — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 02:00:00 +0000

You can use the Core Media Player TCPMP version 7.1 and above to view iPod videos on your Pocket PC or Windows Mobile device. You will also need the ffmpeg plugin and to hear the audio you will need to download and install AAC decoders from here

(more…)