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Archive for July, 2008

Recursion

July 31st, 2008

No, I'm not dead yet =)

I've still been working on the WP Theme Generator, which nobody is using. I found that my webhost has the php setting for adding slashes turned on by default. My code relied on having no slashes. To fix this, I had to write a short recursive function, which I'll share here, and then explain.

Recursion, it's just a fancy word for a function, in which it calls to itself. Like function a() { a(); }. That would provide an infinite loop, but it's the most simple recursive function.

So, my situation, the $_GET and $_POST vars had slashes added. And I wanted to strip them out, but I would like my function to accept both strings and arrays, for sake of convenience and consistency (always use my function, instead of sometimes stripslashes()). What I wrote was this:

 
function ss_($in) {
	if (is_array($in)) {
		// It's an array, loop through all the keys and strip them.
		foreach ($in as $key => $value){
			$in[$key] = ss_($value); // <= Reference to itself, recursion!
		}
		return $in;
	}elseif(is_string($in)){
		// Regular stripslashes
		return stripslashes($in);
	}else{ return null; }
}

Comments say it all, really.
Just another quick example would be a countdown function:

 
function countdown($num) {
	echo $num, '<br/>';
	if ($num == 0) return false; // Stop countin at 0.
	countdown(--$num); // --$num subtracts the one from $num before the value is read. $num-- does it after.
	return $num;
}
 
countdown(20);
 

That all for now, folks.

Popularity: 22% [?]

Miscellaneous

Cronjobs

July 21st, 2008
The Cronjob Interface

The Cronjob Interface

I've just set up my very first cronjob, to take out the trash of the theme generator. So  here's a warning, if you're creating a theme there sunday morning around 3.00 am, or wednesday morning around 3.00 am, you have a chance your files are going to be deleted midway through your process..
BAWWWWWWWWW...

Tutorial on Cronjobs will follow :-)

Popularity: 20% [?]

Miscellaneous

WordPress Theme Generator

July 20th, 2008

You'll never guess what I've made now! :).

A theme generator, which takes in regular templates (all HTML), and turns them into a 'basic' template, with a widget-ready sidebar, archive support, comments, and what not!

Click

Please let me know what you think in the comments section. And, please; Do note that this is a beta version, hmm let's make up a number. Let's call it version Oh-point-six ?

Thanks for reading.

Popularity: 39% [?]

Miscellaneous, Web development , , , , ,

CSS Hyperlink Tooltips

July 19th, 2008

Ever wanted nicely styled CSS tooltips?

Here's a quick explanation:

 
<a href="#">Link text<span>Your tooltip</span></a>

Use that HTML. Then add the following to your stylesheet:

 
a { position: relative; outline: none; }
a span { display: none; }
a:hover span {
display: block;
font-size: 8pt;
position: absolute;
top:-25px; left: -45px;
border:1px solid #383a47;
background-color:#5cbbe3;
color: #383a47;
text-align: center;
padding: 1px 5px;
width: 130px; }

This code hides the span tag when you're not hovering over it. (a span { display: none; }) and positions it nicely when you DO hover over it.
Read on for an example (just a single hyperlink, but it's not valid xhtml so I put it on a different page)
Read more...

Popularity: 24% [?]

Web development

Designing a website layout

July 18th, 2008
The steps I took for designing my new layout

The steps I took for designing my new layout

I'm personally not the creative type, being original with design is very hard for me. I just can't think of that special thing to do to make a design unique. So the thing I did was: sit down, pull out a sketchbook and a pen. And just draw a regular layout. Then switch some things around, and you have a general layout to work with. This is what I came up with:

That's what my next layout (which will be a wordpress theme) will look like, at least, that's what I'm aiming for.

So I'll be focusing on that, using photoshop. I'll be sure to keep you updated.

One more thing: Cypher. An online text-based hacking game. By clicking that link and signing up, you're selecting me as the referrer so you'll be making me 100 credits! Woot!

Popularity: 16% [?]

Miscellaneous