You may have noticed fuel prices going up. You may also know that Web Services are now located in the Durning Centre and that the building has received an award for its power saving features. Ever mindful of the environment, Web Services have gone one step further and installed the next generation, leading edge clockwork […]
Author Archives: Andy Davies
Mega Menus for GO
For anybody reading this blog from outside Edge Hill, we have a staff and student portal called GO. GO is intended to eventually replace the current intranet. Due the the vast nature of the internal information, we decided that the current top navigation bar just didn’t provide enough direct access to the services that staff […]
Slightly more Regular Expressions
For me regular expressions are like magic. I can appreciate the wonderful things they can do but I’ve never really understood how the trick works. As I develop primarily in PHP there are plenty of PHP string functions which when combined, can get me the desired result. However, yesterday I had to extract two values […]
Arrays in dBs and YAML Config
I’m working on some new mega-menus for GO. I’ll post about that when we go live. Following a pre-Christmas code review of the user-defined munu choices, we identified that we needed a way to provide a default set of menu items for everybody prior to them making and saving their personal choices. Mike remembered that […]
How do I know if it’s Christmas?
Its Christmas eve. Are you excited? In less than 24 hours Santa will have been, scoffed his mince pie and glass of port 😉 and gone on his merry way. So just how long do we have to wait for Christmas? If you Google “Christmas countdown” there’s a whole slew of sites with count down […]
Not delicious at all
So, I write a blog post for the first time for ages and one of the key components is about to go West. The news that delicious, Yahoo’s social bookmarking site is to go to the wall has ruined my Christmas, and I’m not the only one. I’m going home to eat humbugs and kick […]
Developing using jQuery, Firefox and Firebug
Its becoming more important to know jQuery. If you haven’t heard of jQuery, its one of the most commonly used javascript libraries used on the web. We use it for the corporate site, Hi, and GO. If your not a frequent developer in javaScript it can be an ordeal either re-learning what you’ve forgotten (I’m […]
Team Twitter
Twitter Nearly everyone in Web Services has a Twitter account. Many of the team have a Delicious account for storing all our bookmarks there’s even a team one. We needed a way to comunicate useful information from the team without it getting lost in the clutter of our personal posts. We needed a team identity […]
IIS 301s
We don’t use IIS very much, but a third party application that we are integrating into the corporate website runs on IIS, and today I had a very pressing need to add a redirect to one of the default application pages to one of our corporate site pages. I discovered 2 very good solutions: Add […]
Learning Something New Every Day
Today, I learnt about cononical linking. Canonical linking is a way of letting search engines know that your content is accessible through multiple URLs, by publicly specifying the preferred URL of page content. This prevents Google penalising your site for having duplicate content. I first came across the possibility of search engines penalising sites for duplicate […]