Andrei DANEASA » HTML

Google.com has interstitials ?

andreiash — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 15:41:38 +0000

Today afternoon on any seach on google.com the user was unable to click any of the results since google said it has interstitials. I mean strange, very strange…. all of them?

For those of you that don’t know what an interstitial is, it’s an intermediate page shown before the desired page, usually used to advertise something.

Here is the proof that it was either a hack either a very poor programming:
- A search for word “google“:

- If i am clicking the link for Google.com, I’ve got: “Warning – visiting this site may harm your computer!“:

Now after more than half an hour Google is working well again… hopefully this will not happen again in the future…

Andrei

Internet archive – website as it was sometime ago

andreiash — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 20:48:02 +0000

Did you ever want to check a website as it was 1 year ago for example? I do want, because lots of websites that I initially developed were redesigned during the years and it was nice to find my work in the archive.
How it’s working? It’s a search engine that takes a snapshot of every website on a regular basis, normally every month.
Where? At: http://web.archive.org

Lots of people are asking me about MPMCostumes.com. They decided to remake the website with their initial partners, even that with my platform they sold more than 20K USD in a few months. Unfortunately on http://web.archive.org the images and flash animations do not appear, but you still can check it as it was 2 years ago.

Web 2.0 developer tools

andreiash — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 12:12:15 +0000

Web 2.0 is everywhere, lot of people pretend that they are developing web 2.0 applications, but not all of them succeed. I will not make a review here, but just want to unveil some tools that will help building web 2.0 web sites.

1. The fundamental of web 2.0 is Ajax, which is no more than reloading just parts of the page via JavaScript without reloading the whole page. In order to use Ajax on-the-fly you need to use Prototype JavaScript Framework. Prototype also extends DOM, which means you are not longer required to fully qualify an object, but just use a shorter name prefixed by $.

2. To increase the power of Prototype you should use Script.aculo.us , which comes with Prototype built-in. It’s providing animation framework, drag’n'drop support, Ajax controls, unit testing. Be honest, didn’t you want to enrich your normal textbox with auto-complete support provided by the database? And don’t worry if there will be too many results, because Scritp.aculo.us is highly customizable in limiting the results, setting the minimum characters for auto-complete and so on.

3. All the time I wanted some grid controls to provide sorting, in-place editing with Ajax support, powerful tree controls and paging controls. All of them are provided by ExtJs and many more. If you want to make your web application to look more like a desktop app, without increasing too much network traffic then ExtJs is the solution for this.

4. Do you have a small photo gallery on your website and don’t want to create a gallery script or integrating a too advanced gallery application on your website? You should use Lighbox JS , a very small script that will open your images in a very nice way. Implementation is very quick, there is no drawback in using it, it’s working on all browsers (or if it’s not working, it will just open the image, without background and open effect).

Good luck on 2.0 !

How to send HTML emails via PHP

andreiash — Sun, 16 Jul 2006 19:47:25 +0000

HTML emails….. hmm, not such a good idea.
I am not such a big fan of HTML emails, because I am assaulted by tens of such emails daily, most of them spam ones. And using Microsoft Outlook as email client, it ask me to download (or not) pictures from the server. This could be a bad idea sometimes, because harmful code could be be hidden in image files today (especially GIF files).

I was hired to make a newsletter module for one website and first I started to search how to make this.
The steps are below.

1. Create the HTML page for newsletter.
2. Take care to have the CSS and JS embedded in the HTML file and not outside the file.
3. Replace the relative location of image files with absolute location. E.g:
if you have:
[code lang="xml"]
name="com_soon" width="100" height="35" border="0" id="com_soon" />
[/code]
you must replace with:
[code lang="xml"]
alt="Coming Soon" name="com_soon" width="100" height="35"
border="0" id="com_soon" />
[/code]

4.1. If you want to send the email by Outlook Express, you need to open a new e-mail window, choose File » New » Mail Message. Once your mail window is open, make sure the format is set to Rich Text (HTML) by choosing Format and making sure there is a highlight next to the Rich Text (HTML) line.
Once your e-mail is set to Rich Text, choose View > Source Edit and you should see three tabs at the bottom of your mail message.
Click the Source tab, and you’ll see the HTML source for your default e-mail message. Copy and paste all your HTML code into Outlook Express Source view.
After you’ve pasted your HTML code, you can click the Preview tab to see how it will look in Outlook Express. Now all you have to do is type in your recipient’s addresses, and click “Send”.
4.2. Dinamically send via PHP. First of all you must assign all the HTML to a variable. Take care to escape double quotes. Then send via mail() function like the following:
[code lang="php"]
$to = "andrei@webxpert.ro";
$object = "newsletter";
$from = "contact@webxpert.ro";
$message="

language="javascript" type="text/javascript">

//cross-browser object creation function
function createRequestObject() {
var ret;
//read the user’s browser
var browser = navigator.appName;

//Internet Explorer has his own object
if(browser == "Microsoft Internet Explorer"){
ret = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
}
else{
ret = new XMLHttpRequest();
}
return ret;
}

//create a request object
var http = createRequestObject();

//you will call this function
function sendRequest(action) {
//here’s the catch – call an external page
http.open(‘get’, ‘req.php?action=’+action);
//wait until the request is completed
http.onreadystatechange = handleResponse;
//finalize the request
http.send(null);
}

//function that handle response state changes
function handleResponse() {
//fires only the object change to state 4
if(http.readyState == 4){
//get the text from the external procedure
var response = http.responseText;
var update = new Array();

//parse the text
if(response.indexOf(‘|’ != -1)) {
//response should be ‘divID|value"
update = response.split(‘|’);
//update the element with the divID with the value
document.getElementById(update[0]).innerHTML = update[1];
}
}
}

onload="javascript:sendRequest(‘currentDateTime’)">
This page shows how Ajax is working. Is is nothing fabulous here.

Click here for
href="javascript:sendRequest(‘currentDateTime’)">update time
id="currentDateTime" class="mark">

Nothing else but the date and time is updated.

If you want to see this example working and test it, click here.

*This is not intended to be a complete tutorial of Ajax, but it covers the main functionalities. The rest is only programmer’s imagination.

Andrei
http://www.webxpert.ro

Rounded-border textbox

andreiash — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 11:22:21 +0000

*You could probably also want to read the second version of this article here

Did you ever want a fancy textbox like this one ?

I’m sorry, but HTML and CSS does not support this kind of appearance. You should use a trick in order to look like this by creating a background with a rounded textbox drawn. Then you should create a html textbox input with no border, smaller than the drawn textbox.
The CSS style for this textbox is the following:

.textbox {
font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 11px;
margin: 0px;
padding: 2px;
border: 0px none;
width: 150px;
}

Andrei
http://www.webxpert.ro

Read also

Rounded-border textbox II