Christopher Hill, personal homepage

Battle of the CSS positions

by Christopher Hill on 18th October, 2008

It all began a couple days ago, one slightly dull Tuesday afternoon. The air was thick and the light was dimmed. Ahem, I have a challenge for you; try and place a div underneath another. “Piece of cake,” you say. “That’s hardly a challenge”. Well, not so it would seem. I was perplexed by what I saw for a few minutes, at least. So much that I wrote this article and created a little demonstration.

Removing tables from HTML

by Christopher Hill on 25th June, 2008

Coffee spurts everywhere. “What!”, I can hear you choking, “Are you crazy?”.

I agree. Tables are great. They provide a implementation that is pretty much identical across all browsers. Not to mention they are pretty kick-ass at presenting tabular data. So why is it then that people feel the need to eradicate them altogether?

“Eh?” example number 1

A couple of days ago I stumbled across an article written by Antonio Lupetti…

Delete from multiple MySQL tables

by Christopher Hill on 23rd June, 2008

I have just spent the last half hour scratching my head over how to delete from 2 tables, joined by a unique ID. For some reason, MySQL kept spitting out: Unknown table ‘myTable’ in MULTI DELETE. Many visits to the MySQL manual still made me scratching my head (Yes, looking back on the manual makes me hit my head for not noticing the “Note” about a third of the way down the page).

The syntax

The MySQL manual says the syntax is:

DELETE [LOW_PRIORITY] [QUICK] [IGNORE]
tbl_name[.*] [, tbl_name[.*]] ...
FROM table_references
[WHERE where_condition]

jQuery tooltip

by Christopher Hill on 20th June, 2008

Sorry for the lack of updates recently but I have been swept off my feet with work. A couple days ago I redesigned part of my companies website, Centation, whereby I needed to make a little jQuery tooltip to add a dynamic flair to the page. Well, I didn’t need to make one, but the lack of quality jQuery tooltip plugins forced me to. I thought I would give you the code of how I did this, and give you a couple demonstrations.

Parse string as a query string

by Christopher Hill on 28th April, 2008

There has been an odd occasion in the past where I have used a string (Note: not the query string) in order to form a settings class in some way or another. I didn’t realise that there was a built in PHP function for this, and is only through reading through most of the PHP string functions that I came across it (and many other interesting functions).

The times of doing this are long gone (Am using the query string here just for clarity):

<?php
foreach (explode('&', $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']) as $chunk) {
$chunk = explode('=', $chunk);
$variables[$chunk[0]] = $chunk[1];
}

And I am now saying “hello” to this:

<?php
$variables = parse_str($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']);