Musings

If you need to use an excerpt for an entry perhaps inside an entry loop with several weblogs this plugin will automatically select the correct excerpt field then format and truncate it to a specified length.

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the number of people who click on display ads in a month has fallen from 32% of Internet users in July 2007 to only 16% in March 2009, with an even smaller core of people (representing 8% of the Internet user base) accounting for 85% of all clicks.

Jack Loechner – MediaPost

Interesting stuff there indicating an ‘alarming’ drop in click through rates. Jack goes on to talk about how advertisers are using these figures to express a flaw in the system, and how they are wrong to do so.

The internet is a constantly evolving entity but equally so are the people who who use it, just because we’re not clicking ads as much as we used to doesn’t make them ineffective. We still see, read and hear them and that’s worked just fine for television, radio and print advertising up until now. Just as he says:

online display ads generate significant lift in trademark search, online and offline sales, and brand-site visitation across all verticals, among those internet users who were exposed to the online ad campaigns – whether they clicked on the ad or not.

Interesting stuff, and useful for those of us who use or implement online advertising.

p.s. apologies for the crappy stock imagery there, I was feeling a tad lazy

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This tutorial will show you how to build an text input that will give autocomplete / auto suggestions via AJAX straight from an ExpressionEngine template then redirect straight to the entry. It could be used for searching, or shortcuts to particular entries, I have it working for the latter on a recent project. It will allow you to …

1. Start typing parts of an entry
2. Scroll through the autocompleted suggestions that pop up
3. Click one (or use the keyboard shortcuts)
4. Get redirected to the relevant entry on the relevant page

• View the demo here
• Download the template files here

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There are many live chat apps out there, and they’re mostly very expensive. Good old Google have of course created a live chat functionality, but not particularly advertised it. In fact you have to do a little searching and wrangling to get it to work properly for you.

In this tutorial I’ll show you how to

1. Integrate the Google Talk / Live Chat functionality into your own website
2. Customise the visuals for if you’re on or offline
3. Display the chat window on your own site with a nice lightbox plugin

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I’ve had a lot of response to the jQuery sortable list post I wrote a while back, and a lot of them ask how to send the results to a database. I’ve often said the best thing to do would be to update it by AJAX, but I’ve never really explained how. So here it is!

• You can see the demo here
• And download the source code here

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The Magpie RSS feed plugin for Expression Engine is ace, but there’s no support for displaying a random feed from the source. The following snippet shows you how.

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I’m using a proprietry open source Ecommerce system to complete a project at the moment all it’s file extensions are renamed to *.phtml. This means I lose syntax highlighting in Dreamweaver, to add a new document type for syntax highlighting you can do the following:

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ExpressionEngine ships with no URL rewriting, and that means that every page on your ExpressionEngine website will be prefixed with index.php. To remove the .index.php from each page you’ll need to do some URL rewriting. ExpressionEngine have some documents detailing how to remove index.php on their website, but they don’t cover if you’re hosting your site from a subdirectory (www.mysite.com/subdirectory/expressionengine/)

To remove index.php from your pages, just create a file in the root of your ExpressionEngine install called .htaccess. This will tell Apache how to rewrite the url to remove the offending prefix. Here’s how to do that:

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I was recently looking for a way to upload large images for the web and automatically create different sizes (small, medium and large.) The only viable way to do it is with Java because it can all be done client side. If you do the work server side, you’ll be uploading a large file then using a lot of processor power to resize it.

I’ve tried a few and the one that came out on top was the JumpLoader it’s good looking, functional and customisable. When uploading several versions of an image at different sizes though it will zip them up (for transfer purposes,) you’ll then have to unzip them – here’s the PHP to do that.

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this post has been extended in the new Extending the jQuery Sortable With Ajax & MYSQL post

I’ve recently made use of a drag / drop style list that will remember the order of the list. If you use the standard jQuery sortable items, you’ll get the two following problems:

1. You won’t be able to click on any items in the sortable list you have
2. You’ll probably want an update of the order of the list after every change.

I did find a solution to the problem over at Scott Sauyet’s site, but I needed a little more… The following example will do both, it uses the handle and update options on the .sortable item. By adding these simple items you can produce a pretty advanced sortable list. You could even add AJAX into that update command and automatically update your database with the new values every time you change then removing the need to refresh, and that’s very web 2.0.

DEMO AND SOURCE HAVE MOVED TO THE NEW POST

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