SiteCrafting, Inc.

Happy Halloween from SiteCrafting! Today we found a chicken in our office. Feel free to order him around.

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Prototype and jQuery conflict over the $ function. In the entry, I will show you how you can start to include jQuery code in the an environment that is already Prototype heavy.  Read more →

I was working on a content retrieval procedure recently, and hit a snag. I needed to retrieve the content of one field, do some other processing, then compare that content to a field in another table. That middle processing step was preventing me from just doing a JOIN between the two.

Logically, what I wanted to do was this:

BEGIN
    -- set up variable to store name of table
    DECLARE storedValue VARCHAR(64);
    
    -- query to grab the value used later
    SELECT firstValue
    INTO storedValue
    FROM FirstTable
    WHERE id = 1;

    -- other stuff happens here

    DECLARE tableCur CURSOR FOR
    SELECT *
    FROM SecondTable
    WHERE secondValue = storedValue;

    OPEN tableCur;
    tableLoop: LOOP

        -- process results

    END LOOP tableLoop;
    CLOSE tableCur;
END

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Sometimes, you just need a way to GOTO. Here is a little trick that will duck out of a section of code using break

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Not as snazzy-looking as my last two, but a useful query nonetheless. One the applications we built over the years, among other things, takes a list of names and addresses (currently a little over 2600), and selects around 200 of them at random. The client has been keeping track of the alphabetical distribution of last names with each random batch, and was concerned that the apparent weighting of the list toward the beginning of the alphabet was evidence that the lists were not truly random.

Fortunately I was able to get a quick statistical breakdown of the overall list, using the following:

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We're happy to announce a new bookmarklet called JSCommandlet. It is a JavaScript console developed for use within SiteCrafting. If you do any kind of JavaScript development, especially working with Internet Explorer, JSCommandlet is for you.

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Leave it to Disney to get it right. We've all heard the stories. We all know about the legendary service, cleanliness, and fun. This story is a bit different as it is about all of those things, but more in my area of interest.

Here's the set up. I spent a week at Disneyland with my family. Fun was had by all. I enjoyed seeing my kids enjoy the rides, the characters and the fun that is Disneyland. All in all, I took over a thousand photos and a lot of video. Where the story gets interesting is in the photos I didn't take.

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Today marks the first day Stack Overflow opens its doors to the public. In case you're not in the know, Stack Overflow is essentially a Q&A site geared towards developers of all kinds. It takes a language/technology agnostic approach and simply provides a framework within which the community can ask and answer techincal questions. Think of it as ExpertsExchange.com except free and much more community driven.

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Today I discovered a very powerful addition to the PHP world. Phar is an archive extension for PHP that allows an entire PHP application to be packaged into a single file. It's basically PHP's answer to Java's .jar archive format. Don't get excited yet, it gets better...

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Though adding another browser to our already rigorous bevvy of website testing doesn't appeal to me, having new such programs help drive web innovation is always welcome. Case in point: today's beta release of Google Chrome.

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