Neji

I've been asked to put some 'guidelines' together on Twitter - terminology, who to follows etc. I've used Twitter in the past so I'm fine with how it works but my client is a large medical company who primarily deal with larger companies. I've used Twitter to promote blogs in the past but this is a little different. So what type of people should I suggest that they follow? Similar businesses? Customers? Potential Customers? All of the above? What type of interaction would help them promote their business ie interacting with competitors who may have a similar customer base? Directly with customers? Should the tweets they post focus just on business updates/new products or is it a good idea to tweet general opinion certain movements in the industry? It's probably a pretty open ended question so apologies if it's difficult to answer, I have some ideas but they're more common sense than anything else. Any help would be great, as well as any other general Twitter tips that you may suggest.

I have a decent grasp on PHP but my weakness is security. I'm don't quite get what functions/techniques to use when and where in my code. It's pretty important that I start to spend some real effort on getting this right. So, can anyone recommend any good books that spend a lot of time with security? I don't mind if it's a beginner's book too much, aslong as I can learn the right methods etc. Thanks.

Actually, just realised I won't be able to do it this way because FancyBox uses an iFrame. So I'm going to do a simple animate on hover but I have another slight problem. I want to fade everything else out while the image resizes, but if I add another animate in the hover state, both hover and hover out are animating. Not quite sure why. My code is here: $('a.zoom').hover(function() { $this = $(this); $this.children('img').animate({ width: '452px' }); $this.siblings().animate({ opacity: 0.25 }); }, function() { $this = $(this); $this.children('img').animate({ width: '142px' }); $this.siblings().animate({ opacity: 1 }); });

I'm trying to create an effect but I don't have much experience with jQuery. The site I'm working on uses FancyBox and within a popup that I've created, there is an image which needs to stay in it's position but upon hovering, I want it to enlarge the image but it needs to sit on top of the fancybox popup. I understand that I could use addClass to change the positioning but I also want a smooth 'zoom' type effect as well, so what would be the best way to achieving this? Hopefully that made sense, I've drawn up a couple of (crude) images to help.

I have a client who is switching his company's websites over to me and as part of that, the topic of SEO has come up - he's very, very keen to get his sites ranking higher up in Google. His company has a brand website and under that brand is several 'big' products. Currently, the individual websites are hosted on subdomains - www.product.company.com - and as we're changing a few things, I'm wondering what the best choice is for domains for the individual product sites. I've had a read of some articles which seem to suggest dedicated domains would be best, I'm thinking it would be too but I'm not all that experienced with SEO. Would it be worth changing to dedicated domains? Or even folders? One of the cons I keep reading about is the extra time it takes to look after a dedicated site - that doesn't matter to me or the client. It's all about getting as high up as possible. Any thoughts would be welcome.

I somehow expected you'd have an answer on this one for me! Thanks a lot, I'll take a quick look today then purchase.

I've recently decided that as I've been using Wordpress a while, that I may create some themes and plug-ins for public release, give back to the community and all that. However, I'm self-taught in Wordpress and I have no doubt in my mind that I could probably do things better in terms of both theme development and plug-in development. So I was wondering if anyone could suggest any books dedicated to these. I will be downloading some themes and reverse engineering them which should give me a good basis but I would probably learn better and quicker with a book dedicated to the subject. If there are no decent books, then can anyone suggest where the best quality WP themes can be downloaded from? Thanks.

Thanks for this, this seems like a much better way of doing it. I have played around with a couple of frameworks but this is more of a learning excerice really, although I hope to apply this kind of thing to real world projects later on. I'm pretty sure I'll be making use of frameworks in the future though.

That's the other problem, as the tables are totally unrelated, they have different structures. I'm wondering if it might be better in this case to do separate queries, store the results in an array and then display them, figuring out someway to order the results in a different order to the way they're found?

I've been coding PHP for a while now but I'm no where near an expert level, and I've always used the likes of Wordpress as the base for all my websites. Now, I'm playing around, creating a test project that will give me a better understanding of PHP application design. I'm employing OOP and after a struggle, I'm finally getting to grips with it. In my test project, I've come up against database connections. I have created a database class which deals with this, connecting, select etc. The project will run from a MySQL database and will pull data in from there. So my first question (and I may have many more) is how do I deal with database connections? I only have an index page right now that is using this. So currently, I create a new db object like so $conn = new db(); Obviously, at some point I'm going to be introducing a bunch of pages, is it as simple as doing this on each page and creating a new connection? Or is there a much better way of handling this?

Appreciate the respsonse. So what happens if, like in my case, I'm wanting to search two tables that are unrelated? Or shouldn't I be doing that at all?

Really appreciate the help guys. I don't really get the logic behind this tbh. I've for to this now: $qry = "SELECT news.title AS newsTitle, Ultrasound.Width AS UltrasoundWidth FROM news JOIN Ultrasound ON news.id = Ultrasound.id WHERE (news.title LIKE '%$search_term%' OR Ultrasound.Width LIKE '%$search_term%')"; $result = mysql_query($qry); while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) { echo $row['newsTitle'] . '<br />'; echo $row['Width'] . '<br />'; } It brings up the news item titles but even if I put a width in that I know matches, it just prints out a blank space. The ON statement defines the link, what's the logic behind that? I don't really know database design, do I need to set up primary/foreign keys in the database (these tables aren't related)? This is only really a test atm, once I figure out how it really works - I'll be putting into practice! Thanks again for the help.

What I want to do is take a search term, and search two tables (news and Ultrasound). The results returned should then be displayed. My query statement currently seems to list every row. Where am I going wrong? My query is below, am I doing this right? $qry = "SELECT news.title AS newsTitle, Ultrasound.Width AS UltrasoundWidth FROM news JOIN Ultrasound WHERE title LIKE '%$search_term%'"; $result = mysql_query($qry); while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) { echo $row['newsTitle'] . '<br />'; }

I'm trying to create a basic search feature for a site I'm creating but I'm a little confused at how to do so. My tables share some field names so a join seems out of the quesiton unless I can rename duplicate field names. They also have different columns in each table so a union doesn't seem right. So any pointers on how to best do this? Thanks, Neji

Login details are in the first post Thanks for the replies, any suggestions on code changes would be great!

Ahh, good question - that may be why it shows up okay on ipadpeek?

That's the one! I'm not familiar with altering code for an iPad, not having one myself makes this sooo much harder.

Appreciate the link but it looks fine on there but defintely doesn't on my clients iPad.

I'm trying to update a site for someone but it's been reported to me that the website isn't showing correctly on the iPad. Unfortuntely, I have no access to one so I was wondering if someone would be incredibly kind and have a look for me and tell me what changes I need to make? I know it's a big ask but help with this would be greatly appreciated. The site is hairbydawini DOT com - username: | password: - the login link is in the bottom left corner of the maintenance screen. The main problem is the logo (if you look on an up to date browser you'll see where everything is meant to be placed) but the navigation looks a little off as well. Thanks in advanced if anyone is prepared to help out!

Think I'll definittely give that ago, also into that kind of thing so even if it doesn't cover everything it might be a good intro and push me to learn more. Got to be worth a try, thanks.

Thanks for the responses, I did a little reading and believe I may be getting somewhere with this. Never thought of reverse engineering so thanks for the suggestion. Got some serious planning to do once I'm more comfortable with this!

In the past I've only ever dealth with creating sites with smallish databases, not a lot of users etc but I'm planning a project which will store large amounts of data in a MySQL database. As such, I'm really looking to learn about designing databases - how best to structure them, relationships etc. I have a very basic knowledge of this but I think it could prove important to me in the future so can anyone suggest any user-friendly ways to learn it? My trouble is that I actually find it pretty boring so I've always struggled to find a good learning resource because it's seems like a difficult thing to teach without a little bore here and there. I'd ideally be after something that relates it to a real-world website project, none of this 'imagine you're creating a student database' type stuff. I want something that will teach me the best practices for a real user-driven website. I may be asking for too much but any suggestions would be welcome. Thanks!

I'm really late replying to this but appreciate the link. Ended up doing it with two separate images, more reliable and no extra trouble really. Thanks!

I'm currently researching if to use image maps in an email signature. It's for a non-techy client so it may be easier if the image is in one. Having said that, I'm finding conflicting advice with regards to Hotmail. I've read of people having trouble but the info appears to be outdated, so can anyone tell me if it works or not? Any other problems with other email viewers would help too. It's only a simple couple of images so I may just end up splitting it but just researching the options at the moment. Thanks.

I agree it's fairly simple but master it in one week? No way.