Brussels web design blog

javascript / flash file upload and progressbar widget

jqUploader: jQuery plugin for file upload and progressbar, has been updated !

jqUploader is a jquery plugin that substitutes html file input fields with a flash-based file upload widget, allowing to display a progressbar and percentage.

The plugin uses the form action attribute value (normally pointing to a server side script handling the upload and other data manipulations, and appends a variable “jqUploader=1″ so that the upload code is initiated when it sees that key/value is on the posted data.

speed up your firefox

Mathias offers good tips to really improve a lot the speed and memory management in Firefox 2. check it out: Mathias Bank » speed up your firefox

How to set mysql charset to UTF-8 no matter the specific sql settings

I learned something new today in php / mysql development:

I'm facing the same issue every now and then, for a mailinglist script i wrote which uses mysql as data storage.
Problem is, depending on the end user server configuration, special chars such as é,è, ê, ë get wacked when saved in the database, as it sometimes is not set to use utf8.

What i've learned? You can avoid the problem by just setting the database connection to view any data being sent or retrieved as utf-8 by just opening the connection and then telling MySQL that it should set/handle all string type data as utf-8!

You can also set this in your MySQL config file, so it's automatically done at startup!

Fancy Form Design Using CSS

The ultimate and state-of-the-art theory about web form design. accessible, pretty, unobtrusive, ergonomic. I'm impressed !
Read it all at sitepoint: Fancy Form Design Using CSS [CSS Tutorials]