I do a lot of writing. I write about web development and I write about nonsense (usually more of the latter than the former) and I sometimes forget where I wrote about what and for whom.

I have decided to trawl the web and track down the articles and tutorials I have written and create a post here on LukeDingle.com with a summary and link off to the site where the work resides. It will also give me an opportunity to write follow-ups or go into further detail about the subjects in question.

You will see these posts appearing under the category Writing For Others. I will change the publish date to the date it was published for real so it doesn’t look like I’m dressing mutton as lamb.

I think it’s a good idea to bring everything together and expand on previously published works.

I would be interested to hear your opinion on this idea.

A couple of days ago I explained how I added controls to a table that when clicked, moved a table row (TR element), up and down within a table.

You can take a look at the solution for that problem by reading “Sortable table rows with jQuery“.

As so often happens with the code I write, I saw an opportunity to tweak and refine it. I was prompted to make these changes when a colleague complained that one should be able to drag and drop the rows within the table.

Again I found that the problem wasn’t so hard to solve as I first imagined. Read on and I will show how I achieved it.
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I was working on a web application today and found myself needing to do something I haven’t needed to do previously. It has probably been explained far better elsewhere and is more than likely a common task for most people but for me it was something new. I’ve done so much on the web and it’s always good to be reminded that there is plenty I haven’t touched yet.

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PHP5 Abstraction for the Rest of US

Millions of web developers, from those just starting out with sparkling ampersands in their eyes to hardened veterans with ‘< ?php’ burned to the back of their retinas, have found a love for PHP and its possibilities but still talk in hushed whispers about the mystery and intrigue of Object Oriented Programming (OOP) in PHP.

This tutorial aims to remove some of the curly-brace-filled haze that often surrounds OOP and by the end of this lesson you will have created a class, instantiated an object, given inheritance to some children and come to understand why OOP is such a powerful tool to have at your disposal. If you have no idea what any of the above means but are shaking with a desire to find out, read on as we look at Abstraction for the rest of us.

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Last weekend I decided to go out on a limb and move to Ubuntu, replacing my Vista operating system. The reasons for this decisive move were many and varied:

• I use Linux exclusively when I program at work so it could sometimes be jarring to come home, starting programming for myself only to find that some things don’t work on Windows or at least, they don’t work quite as well
• Every server I have anything to do with is Linux so a Linux development environment at home would help when making sites live (I’m looking at you file-name capitalisation)
• Django is easier to get up and running on Linux and aptitude on Ubuntu makes installing python extensions a breeze
• I could easily go on…

So, armed with my freshly burned ISO of Intrepix Ibex (Ubuntu 8.10), I backed up all my data and began to install Linux.

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It would have been quite a bit easier to outline what a cat should do if I were, in fact, a cat. As it happens though, I am not a cat, not even a little bit of a cat. Labelling myself as a “cat person” may have confused you there but this was just to say that I think cats are great animals, fantastic pets and one of the few animals that, if nothing else, make hilarious video montages.

My JavaScript Cat’s requirements aren’t going to come from the mind of a cat, requirements that I expect wouldn’t be much more than:

1. Find nice sunny window-sill to sleep on
2. No matter where I am, arrive home and start meowing when owner rattles the cat biscuit box
3. Attack own shadow, fall off bench, jump ridiculously high at unexpected noises or something similarly comedic when a video camera is around

No, my JavaScript Cat will be modelled on what I have observed of these domesticated felines and… actually, scrap that. My observations include all of the points listed above, maybe I am a cat?

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Just a quick entry here to advise an improvement made to my Blog Promotion Tool.

I realised, as I was placing examples of the dynamic images all over the place, that server load may increase with all this image manipulation work being carried out by PHP. The image_factory now caches all files it creates and simply loads the cached image if all parameters and content are the same. When the content for the feed that you get your dynamic comes from changes, all cached images will be deleted so that you aren’t clogging up storage space.

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As I was laying the foundations for my JavaScript Cat I found myself in a little quandary, (excuse the oximoron as quandaries are not usually little) and a quandary is not a very nice place to be. I realised that I was creating this cat for the amusement of myself and others but without a way of getting the word out there, no one will know when I’ve added further developments to my scripted feline.

I decided to play around with something I haven’t used as often as I would like and use PHP, the GD Module and XML/RSS to create a dynamic billboard that I could deploy quickly and easily. Of course it would have to be a one-time only deployment because I am notoriously lazy; the rest should be done for me.
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Although I have owned the domain name for quite some time, it was a simple thought a few weeks ago that prompted me to get a site up and actually blog about something. The idea was “A JavaScript Cat”.

I like cats but I rent and therefore I am not allowed to have pets. I was pondering this one night as I was drifting off to sleep and initially I was just thinking of ways I could get a cat and keep the fact away from my landlord.

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Clean Up Your Page, Removing Bad Behaviour

When developing websites, it’s good practice to separate behaviour (JavaScript) from structure and presentation using The Document Object Model (DOM). This indepth tutorial is all you’ll need in order to get a good understanding on how to do it.

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