The Science of Web Art, Design and Development

I have just published Zo’C Subcats, a wordpress plugin that enables you to display either a list or a drop down menu with the subcategories of a category of your choice. The plugin gracefully degrades in absence of Javascript.

You can read further instructions and download it on the plugin page or you can download it immediately here.

The plugin started humbly to address a need of my fellow blogger Desty, and was published thanks to the incentive of Michael and Jen.

Any feedback is welcome :-)

Enjoy!

(Comments are disabled on this page, you can discuss this on the plugin page.)

This plugin has been downloaded 387 times.

This is the 2nd part of a six-part tutorial about photography basics. So far we’ve seen

• Some physics background related to photography

In the previous post on this series, we have seen that light incident on a rough object is reflected, also called difused, in many directions and this create so many unordered images that the eye mix them all up and we can’t distinguish them, like in a mirror reflection.

In this post we will see how to isolate and project images to understand the basics of a photographic camera. Principles of all cameras even the most modern digital SLRS and even webcams.

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Simple hint, how to select a number random items from a MySQL database:

SELECT *
FROM your_table
ORDER BY rand()
LIMIT 2;

The code above, selects all the fields from a database table named “your_table” orders the results randomically and gets the first two. Change two for your favourite number.

Want to see an example of this working? Just look to your right! On the sidebar, there is a section named “Recommended Reading”. This is a section with books I like and recommend. I keep a list of books on a database and I pick two six at random with a query like this, each time a page is loaded.

Maybe you did knew this command already, or at least you heard about the ORDER BY command, but do you exactly know how it works and how further you can go with it?

I’ll show you some nice things in this article.

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I think most good web developers know how a bad browser Internet Explorer is.

Web development has an inherent difficulty because code you write is only an outline of what you want done, an intention. Is really up to the browser what is actually going to happen.

Some browsers don’t support some features and web developers should treat this with graceful degradation. Explorer is no exception.

One of the beauties of the web is that the user is in control. Browser choice and options are there to ensure that and sites should support that.

As a web publisher one want primarily to deliver information to public, not layout. The layout is support, meant to enhance the usability of the page. Not only for eye pleasure and reinforce brand indentity.
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I decided to share a list of my favorite Wordpress plugins for those of you who might be interested, but before anything else, I want to encourage people to use Wordpress instead of Blogger.

There are many well regarded blogging platforms around that I don’t really know well, but I do know well blogger and wordpress and I certainly think that blogger is not nearly a serious platform as Wordpress is.

I won’t extend this subject on this post, you’ll have to trust me on this, but I do want to give three arguments in favor of wordpress.

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In my opinion, one of the coolest things of the site I’ve built to Paulo gazela is the event agenda on the navigation bar.

Of course there are many calendar programs around to add to your site and it’s also possible to integrate google calendar or a similar tool, but all Paulo needed was a way to show the events he was going to be in for the folowing, say, 15 days, and an easy interface to add them.

The solution is very simple. We’ve built a database with the date, time and details of the events and we created a SQL query to get all the events 15 days from the current date.

A single SQL query like the one below can handle everything

SELECT *
FROM event, place
WHERE event.place=place.id
  AND CURDATE() < = event.thedate
  AND DATE_ADD(CURDATE(),INTERVAL 15 DAY) >= event.thedate
ORDER BY
  event.thedate ASC,
  event.thetime ASC;

If you want to understand better what this is, to build the database tables and get some more detail, read on.

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