Well, ok, the Hannah's Bretzel site actually launched a few weeks ago, but I finally just uploaded some screenshots from the project.

View the Hannah's Bretzel screenshots

This may not help everyone (or anybody) who's having a yum dependency problem, but I thought I'd share just in case.

I recently ran "yum update" and was getting a bunch of weird dependency errors. The command that magically fixed everything was:

yum clean all

After running "yum clean all," I was able to run "yum update" with no errors.

From the yum man pages:

"yum clean packages"
Eliminate any cached packages from the system. Note that pack-
ages are not automatically deleted after they are downloaded.

"yum clean headers"
Eliminate all of the files which yum uses to determine the
remote availability of packages. Using this option will force
yum to download all the headers the next time it is run.

"yum clean all"
Runs yum clean packages and yum clean headers as above.

I just added a bunch of screen shots from my latest couple client projects:

Restaurant Intelligence Agency




Coverbuga

Here's an easy forward-compatible way to use JSON (json_encode() and json_decode()) in versions of PHP earlier than 5.2.

Download the Services_JSON PEAR package

And then add the following to your custom functions:

if (!function_exists('json_decode')) {
    function json_decode($content, $assoc=false) {
        require_once 'classes/JSON.php';
        if ($assoc) {
            $json = new Services_JSON(SERVICES_JSON_LOOSE_TYPE);
        }
        else {
            $json = new Services_JSON;
        }
        return $json->decode($content);
    }
}

if (!function_exists('json_encode')) {
    function json_encode($content) {
        require_once 'classes/JSON.php';
        $json = new Services_JSON;
        return $json->encode($content);
    }
}


That's it! Your code will continue to work, even when you eventually upgrade to PHP 5.2.

For those of you working with PHP and MySQL who want to set a field in MySQL to NULL if the corresponding field in an HTML form is left blank, here is a slick trick:

UPDATE table_name SET date_field=IF('$date_value'='',NULL,'$date_value')

For text fields this isn't a huge deal, but for any of the formatted field types like "date" or "decimal," setting them equal to an empty string (i.e. '') results in them having values like 0000-00-00 and 0.00. So this little "if" shorthand in MySQL is a great solution.

Karl Swedberg over at Learning jQuery has a great trick for pausing during a jQuery effect chain.

Here's an example that fades an object in, pauses for 3 seconds, and then fades the object out.

$("#some_object").fadeIn().animate({ opacity: 1.0 },3000).fadeOut();

Notice the animate() in there. All it does is change the opacity of an object from 1.0 to 1.0 (i.e. do nothing) over the span of 3 seconds. Brilliant.

For web designers out there who need a few quick and dirty testimonials to use as place-holders, check out the Testimonial Generator.

Just don't be an asshat and try and pass them off as real testimonials by posting them as comments on your own website:

(I refuse to link to these sites and give them even a miniscule Google Rank boost.)

* http://www.surveyspaidfor.com/surveys-paid-online/get-paid-for-taking-online-surveys-150-per-hour

* http://www.beststeps2freedom.com/

I just added a bunch of screen shots from my latest couple client projects:

Oshkosh Symphony Orchestra




Iconic Concepts

Quick tip:

If you're going to create a dynamic CSS stylesheet using PHP (e.g. style.php instead of style.css), make sure you spit out a "content-type" header at the top of the stylesheet or Firefox will choke and not load it.

Put this at the top of the page:

<?php header("Content-type: text/css"); ?>

I just added a couple screen shots of my latest client project for Goody Green Bag.



Check 'em out...