Tuesday 23 April 2013

CSS and HTML5: background image in buttons

   


Would you like to do something like:

Or maybe you prefer it another way, like:




They look the same, don't they? However they are a bit different in the making. Let's see how...

The first way to do such thing is to use the <button> tag:
<button>
<img src="http://www.w3.org/html/logo/downloads/HTML5_Logo_32.png" />
</button>
The image is just like any text we usually put inside the tag.


Thursday 18 April 2013

jQuery: scroll to the top, to a specific container and to the bottom of a page

   


Some time ago I wrote an article where we discussed how to use JavaScript to create a smooth scroll to the top of the page.
Today we are going to see how to do it with jQuery, and we are going to do it in order to scroll to the top of the page and even to the bottom of the page. After that we are going to create a simple jQuery function that will scroll to a specific element of the page.

Interested? Ok... follow me.

Tuesday 16 April 2013

ASP: pass a variable to JavaScript

   


One of the most often asked question in forums is "how do I pass an ASP variable to JavaScript?"
It is quite common to find out that people ask the question the other way round: "How do I pass a JavaScript variable to ASP?"
Ok, the two things are completely different and they involve completely different solutions.

First of all, let me explain something you might already know. ASP (or to be precise VBScript) is a server side language, while JavaScript is a client side language. The two work on different levels: ASP is executed before the page is completely loaded, while JavaScript works only after that. For that reason we cannot pass a JavaScript variable to ASP without reloading the page.

Thursday 11 April 2013

CSS: create a post-it note

   


I've recently needed to create some sort of post-it note for a web site. The general look of the homepage was like a working desk, and it was suggested to add a yellow post-it somewhere in the upper right corner of the viewport.
Because I know that time is money and that we don't really need to reinvent the wheel, I have collected some solutions I've found on the web.
If you're interested, please keep on reading.


Tuesday 9 April 2013

Ms Access: database administrator

   


Today I would like to share something that I've found a long time ago (exactly around 2008). The thing is I still find it useful today while at that time it has saved me in critical situation a lot of times.
It is called DBAdmin and I think you should have a look at it if you administer MS Access databases over the internet.
"StP Database Administrator (DBAdmin below) is a tool that allows you to manage your MS Access databases through your browser, providing various set of functions you can perform with your databases, without having downloading them, changing and uploading again. Most of features needed for database management are included, you can even create a new blank databases on-line."
The things you can do with DBAdmin are incredible and because we don't really want to download-change-upload our mdbs wasting time, the tool is a perfect companion.

Have a quick look at the tool page and let me know what you think.


Thursday 4 April 2013

CSS: rotate background images

   


We can use CSS to rotate elements in a web page. You may already know about it, but a friend of mine asked me how to rotate a background image, without rotating the container.
Hmmm... that was a question, but the answer surprised me when I found how to do it.
Are you interested? Well, get into the article and see how to do it.

Tuesday 2 April 2013

jQuery: calendar and datepicker plugins

   


Holidays time - short post. I hope you find it useful.
Now on with the calendar and datepicker jQuery plugin parade!

wdCalendar – jQuery Based Google Calendar Clone
"wdCalendar is a jquery based google calendar clone. It cover most google calendar features. User can choose to have a daily view, weekly view or monthly view. User can easily create, update or remove events by drag & drop. It is very simple to to integrate wdCalendar with a database.
wdCalendar is free (open source LGPL license), easy to use, and with great functionalities."

Event Calendar
"Event Calendar is a jQuery and ColdFusion event calendar that works a lot like the Google Calendar system. With Event Calendar, you can share calendar information throughout your organization. There is also a simple user facade, that you can extend, to help control user rights."

jQuery.calendarPicker
"This component is a light-weight calendar/date-picker.
Some features:
  • supports internationalization (supports do not necessary means it is implemented:-) )
  • supports changing current date
  • supports mouse wheel scrolling
  • supporting (deferred) callback on date selection
  • supports variable number of years, months and days
  • supports next/prev arrows"

Date Picker - jQuery plugin 
"Date Picker component with a lot of options and easy to fit in your web application."

FullCalendar
"FullCalendar is a jQuery plugin that provides a full-sized, drag & drop calendar like the one below. It uses AJAX to fetch events on-the-fly for each month and is easily configured to use your own feed format (an extension is provided for Google Calendar). It is visually customizable and exposes hooks for user-triggered events (like clicking or dragging an event). It is open source licensed under an MIT license."


jQuery Datepicker
"A jQuery plugin that attaches a popup calendar to your input fields or shows an inline calendar for selecting individual dates or date ranges."

Multiday Calendar Datepicker JQuery Plugin
"Multi-day, multi-month animated datepicker jQuery plugin that weighs in at 14KB with the uncompressed development version."

jQuery Frontier Calendar 
"Full month calendar jQuery plugin that looks like Google Calendar."

jQuery UI datepicker

Calendario
"Today we want to share a flexible calendar concept with you. Calendars can be a very tricky thing when it comes to their layout and responsiveness. This is an experiment for trying out some grid layouts that can be applied to calendars. We’ve created a jQuery plugin for the calendar itself and you can see some examples of how to use it in the demos. The aim is to provide a suitable layout for both, small and big screens and keeping the calendar structure fluid when possible. On large screens we want to show a grid-based layout while on smaller screens, we want to simply stack the days of the month."