In web development, form validation is undeniably a crucial asset to avoid errors when submitting data to a database. Sounds like a tedious job you say? Enter jQuery, one of the most useful and intuitive web tools of the last decade which takes what is potentially hours of writing javascript and turns it into just a few lines of code.

Similar to the way that most Apple products have “an app for that”, jQuery usually has a plugin for any otherwise time-consuming task. The tool, designed to simplify client-side scripting in HTML, and it does the job to a standard far above expected.

Client-side validation certainly has it’s advantages. Not only does it dramatically reduce unnecessary trips back and forth to the server, it can also improve the user’s experience visually when completing a form on the web. With jQuery validation, we can create an extra class which is to be applied to form fields whose data entered is incorrect, so when we add the script, the user is prompted to fill in the form correctly before any call is made to the server.

Form validation can also be implemented using PHP. It is advisable to remember that not everybody browsing the web will have javascript enabled so it is still highly recommended to use some server side validation alongside jQuery to ensure that any data is submitted correctly. As jQuery is client-side and PHP is server-side, the jQuery will always run first so users with javascript enabled will save pointless round trips to the server.

As the Not Web Design newbie, I see jQuery as a tool which has been a catalyst in my learning process so far and I am sure I will enjoy learning how to use more of it’s plugins in the future.

I had always dreamt of a job in web design and development as it was a hobby of mine in which I had taught myself some very basic HTML and CSS and was keen to progress (and still am) to PHP, MySQL and beyond.

So I received a call one day from a friend saying that she knew of a web design company who were looking for new team members. A week after going for an interview with the company director, I began working with the “Not Web Design” team in Salobreña on the southern coast of Spain. I quickly found out that every project they work on is powered by the Joomla! content management system and they had even developed software designed to help other developers use Joomla! I’d heard a few things previously about Joomla! and I couldn´t really understand why a team of professional developers would want to use something which I thought would be so restricting.

After half of my first day at work, I was completely converted. I find that Joomla! not only speeds up a lot of those usually very time consuming tasks, it also simplifies the way the development process works and most importantly, leaves all the power in the developers hands.

We have recently been working on an online dating web site for some clients and have (of course) been working with Joomla! The way we have been able to integrate all the Joomla! functions which we have chosen to use but create custom components and modules when needed has been great.

I am still very much a beginner in this business but the team I work with are unbelievably advanced. Joomla! does everything they need a CMS to do, without stepping on their toes.

I would recommend Joomla! to anybody wanting to learn to build websites!

When Google registers a new link to your web site it is big news! Every incoming link you get will help push your web site higher in the search result. You can check the links that Google has registered as linking back to your site simply by entering the following into the Google search field:

link:www.mysite.com

This will show a list of the most important pages linking to your site. For a more complete list check out the Yahoo Site Explorer

But back to Google. The links listed in the Google search are the important ones as they are the ones that help you rank better in Google (or so it is widely believed). Would it not be nice if you received an email whenever Google registered a new link to your web site?

Get Google to email you when they discover a new link
In order to get notified when Google discovers (and registers) a new link to your site you need to use Google Alerts. To be alerted when Google finds your link all you have to do is type”link:www.mysite.com” (where www.mysite.com is replaced by your real web site address) into the Search terms field. Then select “Comprehensive” and “as-it-happens” and finally enter your email address.

You will now be sent an email whenever Google registers a new link to your site!

If you like getting backlinks then why not try our new service Automatic Backlinks it is 100% free!

Just another quick little note to let readers know that we have just finished a Joomla component that can successfully download and maintain an updated local database version of the brilliant location data found at http://www.geonames.org it is not stable enough for us to release it but we can use it as a foundation for building similar applications. So don’t hesitate to contact us if you need to implement Geonames data on your own web site. Especially if it is a Joomla web site.

Creating the import was quite complicated as all the geonames files are zipped CSV files so we needed to program an application that could doanload, unzip and try to convert the data into database inserts. After much swearing and long evenings we have managed to come up with a very robust solution.

Just a quick post to let the world know that we have experience developing and applying the booking.com xml interface into a Joomla component that downloads and updates a local database of all the hotels.

It is quite a task as booking.com only allows you to download 1000 records at a time from up to 15 different feeds per hotel (There are more than 50.000 hotels).

Please contact us if you need a similar solution. We have the experience!

One of the most tedious things about search is that you have to go back to the search result after viewing a matching page before you can go to the next matching page.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could click previous and next directly on the page of all the matching pages and thus browse through all the results without having to go back to the result page? Well - read on for the answer to how this is possible and so difficult to achieve.

Searching for real estate?
The above mentioned problem is especially obvious when searching for properties on a real estate web site or any other web site where it is unlikely that anyone result will be the “correct” match. On these sites it is a great feature to make it possible to browse the matching results from a search directly from the resulting pages.

Saving the query and not the result list
The problem facing developers is to make the results available in the correct order on the actual resulting (matching) pages. Initially you might think that the best option is to save a list of all the results in a long array and then look that up on the individual resulting pages, and that could be a way to do but not if you use pagination on your results pages.

Let us say that you have found 2000 matches - hopefully you will not show all 2000 results on one long page, but instead break the pages up with say 10 results per page (like Google). Now if you have done your SQL correctly you will have made a lookup with LIMIT in it so that SQL only returns a certain amount of results. This leaves us with the problem that we can not make an array with ALL the results in it - because they are simply not available.

Instead we should save the SQL QUERY and pass that on to the matching pages when viewed.

Using the query and the position of the result that was clicked on you can create your previous/next buttons on the details pages. It works really well and saves lots of time for the browser.

Example and what about Google?
You can see our implementation on http://www.livingstone-estate.com simply perform a search and view one of the results and then enjoy the page flipping.

I wonder how long it will be before someone creates this as a Firefox extension for Google? It would be great to be able to scroll the result without having to go back to Google? Wouldn’t it?