ElanMan

Update Select Elements On The Fly

ElanMan — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 12:22:07 +0000

In the previous post,’Create Dynamic Date Selects‘, we ended up with select lists for the Month, Day and Year. In this post, we’ll make these more intuitive by only displaying the correct number of days for a given month/year combination; for example, choosing February on a leap year should produce 29 days to pick from. [...]

Create Dynamic Date Selects

ElanMan — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 16:52:26 +0000

If you ever require users to submit a date using an online form, perhaps a birthday or an expiry date, a good way to eliminate spelling mistakes and format the submitted date how you want is to provide drop down ‘select’ elements. Using PHP, we can easily create dynamic select elements for the day, month [...]

Dynamic Copyright Date

ElanMan — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 18:18:43 +0000

Ok, we’ve all got the standard copyright notice at the bottom of our web pages, something like © 2009. © 2009 But let’s be honest, nothing looks worse than a copyright statement when the year is out of date! It gives the impression that you don’t care. You can easily prevent this by using the [...]

Select All Text InTextarea Or Input

ElanMan — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 11:44:38 +0000

Perhaps you have a textarea pre-filled with instructions, for example, ‘Use this area to write a simple bio about yourself…’. When the user wants to fill in the textarea, he has to delete your instructions first, pretty tedious to say the least. A really simple way to get round this is to select all of [...]

Create Your First AJAX Request (Part Three)

ElanMan — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 22:20:14 +0000

The complete script can be downloaded here In the last part of this series, we’ll create ‘showdetails.js’. This will turn our web page into a AJAX-powered web page! In the first part we created the XMLHttpRequest Object. Now we need to create an instance of it. var req = new getRequestObj(); The XMLHttpRequest Object has [...]

Create Your First AJAX Request (Part Two)

ElanMan — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 13:45:30 +0000

An example of what you’re creating can be seen here. The complete script can be downloaded here In the first part, we created a function, getRequestObj(), that we can now use to initiate a new XMLHttpRequest object. This is as simple as… var myReq = new getRequestObj(); However,it’s important to remember that JavaScript should always [...]

Create Your First AJAX Request (Part One)

ElanMan — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 20:36:07 +0000

AJAX is now everywhere on the web. The ability to update content on the web page without reloading the page provides a slicker experience to the user whilst also reducing the load on the server (the server only needs to output the updated content and not the entire page). The complete script can be downloaded [...]

Simple Random Image With PHP

ElanMan — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 20:14:56 +0000

We’ve already covered ‘creating a random image with JavaScript’ but the best way to produce a random image on each page load is to use PHP. Using PHP, you are not relying on the browser supporting JavaScript at all and everyone will see the random images. OK, to start, we’ll create a function called randomSelect(). [...]

Alternate Background Colours

ElanMan — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 22:56:50 +0000

To make it easier for your visitors to visually separate similar elements in your web page (such as table rows, paragraphs, list items etc), you can give alternate elements a different background colour. You can achieve this using a server-side script but here’s a really simple way to do this using JavaScript. You can see [...]

Form Validation Pop-Ups

ElanMan — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 16:09:44 +0000

If you have required fields in a form, a nice visual clue for the user is to have a message ‘pop up’ if the field hasn’t been filled in. A simple example of what I mean can be seen here. To create the above example, we start off with some straight forward html. The form [...]