Comments for Edward Yarnold

Comment on Working from home: Month 1 by Jonathan Ruiz Peinado

Jonathan Ruiz Peinado — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 18:42:05 +0000

Nice routine, I’m glad to hear that you are comfortable with it!

Comment on Working from home: Month 1 by Tom

Tom — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 09:27:40 +0000

The work/play balance is so difficult to strike right when working from home but you’ve got some great tips here to keep the two separate.

I hope your new arrangement works out for you and congrats on the new house!

Comment on A problem with forms submitting using AJAX: how to resubmit? by Ed Yarnold

Ed Yarnold — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 15:16:11 +0000

Good idea, but if you did that then I think you would need to provide some kind of visual indication of why the second submission didn’t work… would possibly be quicker & easier to disable for that many seconds?

Comment on A problem with forms submitting using AJAX: how to resubmit? by Tom

Tom — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 10:49:57 +0000

How about ignoring repeat form submissions posted within a few seconds of each other? You could track the last submitted time in a session and ignore further submissions if they’re posted within 2 or 3 seconds.

Comment on Does your website still need to be functional with Javascript disabled or unsupported? by Ed Yarnold

Ed Yarnold — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 08:32:41 +0000

Tom, one other thing is.. if you’ve a slow internet connection and the whole page hasn’t loaded yet and you click a button.. the Javascript event handler probably hasn’t been attached yet. The last thing you want is a hard failure in this situation!

Also, remember that a lot of people add the event handlers once the whole page has loaded and not when the DOM is ready… which means the time before the JS will ‘work’ is even longer…

Comment on Does your website still need to be functional with Javascript disabled or unsupported? by Tom

Tom — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 22:49:02 +0000

This is the point where I like to remind people that one small error in your JavaScript can potentially prevent all scripts on the page from functioning, at which point you’ll be glad that you put a few small fall-backs in place.

Comment on Coding things the quick way – often a false economy by Ed Yarnold

Ed Yarnold — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 13:01:49 +0000

Wow, thanks Tom. Never thought of doing it that way! I must investigate triggers and views some more, I’ve never used them myself (not yet anyway).

Comment on Coding things the quick way – often a false economy by Tom

Tom — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 12:24:12 +0000

Alternatively you could cater for this in your database rather than modifying your script.

In MySQL you can make use of triggers and views to accomplish what you’re after; set triggers on DELETE statements to update the record with is_deleted = 1, and views to select table contents where is_deleted = 0.

The only change you’d need to make to your model(s) is to select from the view rather than the actual table.

Comment on Should you sanitise your HTML before or after you save to your database? by Ed Yarnold

Ed Yarnold — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 10:14:47 +0000

Can’t believe I missed that point, Tom! I had that very situation a few weeks ago. A site had been built where all data was htmlentitied. We wanted to export a stock list to PDF but had to unhtmlentity everything first. Not a pretty solution, and it could have been avoided with a bit of foresightedness!

Comment on Should you sanitise your HTML before or after you save to your database? by Tom

Tom — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 23:12:31 +0000

In my mind it’s clear – always perform data filtering on output. Why? Because it offers more flexibilty. Sure, you may just be displaying data on a web page for now, but if you want to be more creative in future (e.g. export to Excel or PDF) you’ll likely not want special characters escaped to HTML entities and the like.