Fixing Birth Date in phplist

If you are using the popular phplist mailing list configuration software, you might run into a situation where the birth date lists only 10 years – all of which are on or around the current year. How do you fix this to allow your subscribers to view a greater range of dates?

Setting up registration error messages with Javascript redirect

OK, got the WORKIT website to output error messages. Both for duplicate entries, as well as incomplete forms. This is how it was done.

Viewing word count for topics in phpBB3

Question: you want to be able to see the word count for each post in phpBB3. How do you do that?

Answer: You need to edit two files in the phpBB3 code to get this to work. Read on.

Simple web framework for web-based CRUD: Ajax CRUD

I’ve been looking for a while now for a web-based CRUD tool that is simple and works “out of the box” and allows me a simpler way to access data than use phpMyAdmin.

I thought CakePHP was the answer, but – as powerful as it is – it is hard to set up, especially on the restricted 1and1 accounts that I have on which .htaccess files tend to require some work.

I found this beautiful tool called Ajax CRUD – its simple, but enables an easy, AJAX based interface to CRUD functions for your database tables. In fact, it can even do more complicated stuff such as filtering the columns, and some other things.

Sidenote: Among other things, I was looking at the Bazaar source control system for some software that apparently can be checked out only using Bazaar. I’m trying to set it up in Eclipse as well, but not too successfully…

XPath for accessing Flickr’s popular tags

I was finally able my parsing of my Flickr-based project to use XPath instead of iterating through nests of XML elements to get at the daily, weekly and all-time popular tags on Flickr’s most popular tags page.

Flickr Popular Tags page parsing using Java – update

In my last post on parsing Flickr popular tags I had discussed converting the Flickr page HTML to XML (using Tidy on the command line) and then using the Java XML APIs to get a Document that I could parse.

But I was able to find some sample code of how to use Tidy (jTidy) to parse HTML and return a Document, so I have changed my code as follows…

Parsing Flickr’s Popular Tags page

For my Visual Databases course (again), one of my project goals is to be able to parse Flickr’s most popular tags page, save the results over the course of a few days, and check the variation of the popular tags with time. And on my Windows desktop…

OK, here is what I did.

Setting form values in jQuery

For my assignment in “Visual Databases”, one of my projects involved having a hidden form value set using Javascript. The value would be set to the id of the div when the mouse moved over one of the div elements.

Since I was using jQuery, I looked around for some code that would enable me to do this using jQuery, and this was the result: