Hvassing.com

The most common way to get input from users when dealing with web pages is through forms of some sort. At the same time there are an amazing number of forms that has been designed without the user in mind at all. This is where a site starts to remove itself from the very reason they exists; their users. After a few years doing web programming and being an active user of the Internet I've both done some rather nasty mistakes myself and I've seen some of the school-examples of how not to do forms. Web pages are about one thing, and one alone; to serve your visitors. It's a one way street where it's all about making the most out of the short moment that your users are interested in your site.

From the web developer perspective I can understand why these solutions are used; they're easy to control. Computers don't know what to expect so they will accept more or less everything -- databases won't.

If a user is typing her phone number with spaces or land code a simple integer-field in your database won't do much good. But that's your problem, not the users. Chances are that they couldn't care less about your database setup, nor should they! Most users will type their phone number in a way that they can easily check to see if it's correct. Some of them will even type it with spaces in order to make it easier for you to read when you're trying to contact them. After all, the user did bother to fill out a form and likely she wants to get something in return -- like a call.

The key to a good form is to be as simple and concise as possible. Fill out this form and then move on. Simplicity is key! If you've done a good job with your forms the users might even not notice that they've filled out a form. Sharing information, such as e-mail address or a phone number, is key to starting a dialogue. Once that first step has been taken the rest should be easy -- the user has shown interest.

Small snippets of code work miracles, if they're only good for you and your database chances are that they're no good at all. Technology is only useful when it's helping people. Remember that you and your site are dependent on your visitors. Why not be nice to them?

Every time I start on a new coding project I roam through past projects, hunting for useful snippets of code that'll solve whatever it is that I'm currently doing in a faster and more efficient way. This goes for both CSS-hacks, PHP-hacks and JavaScript-hacks. However, roaming through all the different projects for just the right code snippet takes too much time away from what I'm currently doing and there's a limit to how much scavenging I feel like doing.

No more of the scavenging! I've collected some of my most useful code snippets, gathered them in one place for everyone to see and enjoy. Some of the code snippets are from PHP.net user comments and some are hand crafted by yours truly. Feel free to browse the collection and if you have any useful additions to it I would love to hear about them in a comment. 

I have tried my best to give credit where due, but nobody's perfect and I would really appreciate it if anyone has any comments as to where the snippets are from. Feel free to use the snippets wherever you like, a small comment as to where you found the snippet would be considered as an added bonus on my part.  Have look-see at http://hvassing.com/snippets/.

Comments about improvements, critique or additional snippets would be much appreciated.

I'm currently working on a web project that will become the company's online office with all their internal information stored and documentation for each of the projects they are working on. There aren't many requirements for this project, it just have to work. No hassle. No thinking. Just work. The login is simple, but what about if they should forget their passwords, or even their username?

You can buy pretty much anything you like these days -- even words. If I'd had any sort of imagination or even a hint of creativity I would've bought a word like serendipity like Pamela did, or Caramba in honour of Bart. I ended up buying Ceres, after the Roman goddess of agriculture, and gave it to my brothers company, Ceres Engineering Ltd.. They're not doing anything even remotely close to agriculture, but rather creating and innovation.

In Roman mythology, Ceres was the goddess of growing plants (particularly cereals) and of motherly love. Her name derives from the Proto-Indo-European root "ker", meaning "to grow", which is also the root for the words "create" and "increase".

The second word I bought was backpack, which I gave to Jason Fried, the company founder of 37Signals. Not sure why, just seemed like a good idea to give it to him rather than having someone else buying it and sell it for a hefty sum later on.

John Gruber bought Fireball (go figure) and Jiminy. What did you buy?