Author Archive
How to create click-to-call phone number links in PhoneGap
When presented with this problem, my first instinct was to look through the PhoneGap API documentation to see if I could find a way to interact with the internal phone system. After reviewing the documentation, I wasn’t able to find the desired solution, so, I started thinking of other ways to solve this problem. After [...]
Solved: Problem Linking to Google Maps Using PhoneGap and Childbrowser Plugin
Today, I had an odd issue which took me a couple minutes to solve. I was trying to make a link from a PhoneGap iOS application to Google Maps. My intent was to have these links show using the Childbrowser plugin, which, I had installed and working for other links but for some reason Google [...]
How to Make a Cross Domain AJAX Request with jQuery
I am currently working on a project that required me to make a cross-domain AJAX request using jQuery. This is a function that is disabled by default because of security implications, however, there is occasionally a need for this type of request. In this case, I need to load content from a remote URL or [...]
Redefining or changing a PHP $_SERVER variable for an entire website.
Today, I was faced with the need to redefine a PHP $_SERVER variable for an entire application, made up of hundreds of PHP pages. In this case, I needed to redefine $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] for an entire website. The application was built by another company under the assumption that $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] would always point to the document root, [...]
How to get Fixed Header and Footer Toolbars in jQuery Mobile 1.0
At Zipline Interactive, we have been doing mobile websites for a number of years. When we originally started building them, most customers were satisfied with a very simple website but as the mobile market has grown and more and more users have smartphones, many customers expect their mobile website to function much like a mobile [...]
Photos from Sun Mountain Lodge in Winthrop Washington
My wife and I recently stayed at Sun Mountain Lodge in Winthrop Washington for a marriage retreat through our church, Life Center Church in Spokane Washington. The trip was very educational and fun. This was the second consecutive year that our church marriage retreat took place at Sun Mountain Lodge. In addition to being at [...]
Accurate Cross Browser Testing With BrowserStack.com
The worst job for any web developer is testing your creations across browsers. Until now, there has been no good way to test a website in various versions of IE, Firefox, Chrome, and Opera. When installing an updated version of each of these browsers your older version goes away. For many developers, this means you [...]
Cool Photos from West Medical Lake
I snapped a couple of cool photos last Sunday morning at West Medical Lake. West Medical is just a couple miles from my house and a great fishing hole. Enjoy.
Remove Unnecessary Querystring From .htaccess 301 Permanent Redirects
Today I ran into an odd problem while trying to create permanent redirects on a website to help with search engine optimization. The website I was working on used a fairly standard URL rewrite rule that rewrite all portions of the URL to a querystring and then the application handled the querystring internally. This methodology [...]
How to Detect a User’s Language with PHP
I was recently looking for a simple way to automatically detect a user’s language using PHP. There are a number of ways this could be accomplished but after some thought I realized the easiest is to get that information from the users web browser. Users are most likely to browse the web in a language [...]