Added a blog to Mercy Rescue Trust

A blog about a blog. Hmm.

Using Blogger for custom domains we've now integrated a blog into the Mercy Rescue Trust website. It is a gallery area to pass on stories based mainly on photographs.

A really useful tool for this was the Web Developer add-on for Firefox. By viewing the final rendered page with the mix of Blogger's stylesheets, the Blog template stylesheet and the Mercy Rescue Trust's stylesheet you can edit them in the browser to see which bit moves which. Then it is easy to copy the changes into the correct place. Very nifty.

24HourLondon launched

iPhone App with web-based API developed to deliver venues to an iPhone to those wanting to keep partying until the early hours of the morning in London.

Used JSON to transfer the information from the web to the App. The code is optimized for the expected thousands of simultaneous users. ;-)

http://24hourlondon.co.uk/

http://itunes.apple.com/uk/app/24hourlondon/id378065109

Putting images in image tags (rather than in the background of the CSS) allowed them to be found easily by Facebook when pasting the link.

Updating Mercy Rescue Trust's website

Updating the charity's website at http://www.mercyrescue.co.uk/

The new layout includes colours from a cotton shawl (a Kikoy) from the region. Added links to the Just Giving page for Mercy Rescue Trust.

Developing an iPhone App

Top Secret development of an iPhone App soon to be launched! More details when it is finalised.

I'm doing the web-server database for the application which will serve the information based on geolocation to the app using JSON.

Text finalised on Photo Archive

The text on the homepage and the about-us for the photo archive has now been updated.

Bit of a fiddle to sort out the style sheets to make all the hyperlinks look consistent.

Sorting cars by year and registration with MySQL

Just published the updates to tjlobb.com

The sort order on the car listing page was tricky.

http://tjlobb.com/stocklist.php

The cars needed to be listed by type and within type by year, then registration and then price. The trick is that the registration is a mixture of letters and numbers (e.g. W, X, 05, 51) and simple MySQL "order desc" doesn't work.

Used the following nifty trick which might be useful if anyone else is doing a car sales webpage. Set up three fields regyear (int), regcode (varchar length 2) and price (float). Remembering to trim whitespace off regcode in case someone mistakingly enters some. Then MySQL does all the sorting.

SELECT ... ORDER BY regyear DESC, LENGTH(regcode) DESC, regcode DESC, price DESC

The LENGTH(regcode) ensures that 51 is higher in the list than 01 and both are higher than any letters.

Photo archive now linked to Cornwall Museums website

Photo archive now linked to from the Cornwall Museums website.