SkeyMedia

YSlow is an add-on for the popular FireBug add-on for the popular browser, FireFox. Confused?

It has neat tools to help you to improve your site’s load times, and rates you accordingly. I scored an F on my blog. haha

Check it out: YSlow

I got an email tonight to take some free online tests. I took a couple, and scored pretty high in many areas, as I expected to, but also got stumped on a couple of the performance related issues (as I rarely deal with them). It’s fun to see how you compare to others who have taken the same test.

You can view my complete transcript here:

Brain Bench Transcript

I recently spent a lot of time debugging this code i was working on for what I thought would be a simple onchange event.

The Issue:
I have sizes and colors, but not all sizes are available in all colors, so onchange of the color select box, i need to load the correct size options select box.

Between a lot of back-end manipulation, I was able to create my front-end JS arrays of colors with the sizes that are available. I ran into the issue that my passed in variable to the function was becoming the array, instead of calling the array.

For example, If I passed in “BLK” for Black, I was getting:

array[0] =>B
array[1] =>L
array[2] =>K
array[N] => undefined

where the Nth options looped through undefined until my for loop for the options of my color box’s length had been reached.

The Solution:
After scratching my head for hours and trying 232132 things, It turns out all I needed to do was to use the eval() function to evaluate my variable first, instead of treating it like a literal string.

Here’s the completed working source:

function popsizes(colorcode) {

var BLK= ["2XL","3XL","4XL","5XL","LG","MD","SM","XL","XS"];
var WH= ["LG","MD"];
// etc, many more color arrays

elem = document.getElementById("selcolor");
sizelist = eval(colorcode);

for (i=0; i<elem .options.length; i++) {
  document.getElementById("selsize").options[i] = new Option(sizelist[i]);
}
}

That script is powered by the onchange event from the form:

<tr>
  <td>
    <select "id="selcolor" name="color" onchange="popsizes(this.options[this.selectedIndex].value);">
      <option value="WH">White</option>
      <option value="BLK">Black</option>
      <option value=""> Many more colors, etc .... </option>
    </select>
  </td>
  <td>
    <select "id="selsize" name="size">
      <option value="">Select Color First</option>
    </select>
  </td>
</tr>

We’ve all seen it. Some 3rd party database you’ve inherited from someone else was simply never designed with scalability and portability in mind. There’s no hope to change it, as it will break the original design and thus the original application that it is supporting.
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It’s easy to grab the date from a field in a database so long as you saved a timestamp field along with your data row. However, there are often times in developing stored procedures and advanced queries where one needs to look up events in the future, or past based on some other reference point from either the data at hand, or an arbitrary date, such as in a calendar.
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Tonight I was working on an RSS package for a client of mine. Having dealt with RSS feeds in the past, I figured it wouldn’t be a big deal. However, my experience with them has always been on the ‘receiving’ end of it, imploding out the <item></item>’s and making sense of the xml.

For the most part, setting up the RSS2.0 feed was pretty straight forward. The one thing that took a little time to manipulate was the RFC-32 date/time formatting that RSS Feeds require in order to validate. And we all know how important validation is
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I recently wrote an article on BloggerSkills.com on how to better utilize the Lightbox functions within a WordPress blog. No more manually typing rel=”lightbox” attributes!

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