Insert name here » Web development

More updates

Chris — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 13:35:58 +0000

It’s been a long time since something was posted here, so I thought I’d post some pointless rambling. We’ve just moved the blog to a (hopefully) faster host. That’s about it.

In other news, I’ve been working on some new features for the ever popular PHP Unserializer! It will now give you the option to make changes to your data and put it back into a serialized format. Currently it only works with arrays that don’t have any sub-arrays, but I will gradually expand it to cover these too. We hope it’s of some use.

IE7 applies div margin on text input element

Chris — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 14:59:44 +0000

I stumbled upon an annoying bit of IE7 behaviour recently. Whilst putting together an enquiry form, I used normal divs to contain my text input elements. The divs had a left-margin defined, but for some reason IE7 would render the left-margin correctly, but in addition to this it would then apply the same width as if it were a left-padding on the div, or as if it were a left-margin on the text input element.

The following example should show that no gap is present between the left of the text input field and the red border of the div (in browsers other than IE7 of course), this is the behaviour I expected.

http://blog.tanist.co.uk/files/iemargin.html

I found the fix to be to put a zero-width space before the start of the input tag, this makes IE7 behave as per the other browsers. I have tested the example in the IE8 beta, and it does perform as per everyone else.

Has anyone else had the same problem?

Some useful scripts

Chris — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 11:31:29 +0000

Things have been a bit too quiet on here recently, so I thought I would take a few minutes to tell you about some neat scripts I have discovered recently whilst working on a site for Scotts Castle Holidays – they specialise in self catering holidays in large Scottish castles.

The first one would be Highslide JS. SCH uses this on a few pages, for HTML popups as well as the main image galleries belonging to each property. Highslide is an awesome bit of code, customisable in almost every aspect, extensive documentation and a great support forum for issues/feature requests. It needs to be licenced for a commercial site, but it is a small price to pay (29USD) for the instant functionality gain.

Secondly, there is the simple accordion script from Deziner Folio. This required quite a bit of tailoring to add the additional functionality required for the site, but is a great starting point for any accordion as it is so small, coming in at barely over 1k.

Let us know if you decide to use either of the above in your own projects!

PHP Unserializer

Chris — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 09:38:24 +0000

We’ve just put together a quick utility to allow us to paste a PHP serialized string into a form and have it return the unserialized output. I’ve always found it annoying to deal with serialized strings as they are hard to view in this form, so decided that a simple page would resolve this.

I give you the PHP Unserializer (it’s in the links on the right too!).