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So excited about this I came back to blogger!  That is all

Pop Tarts

Pop tarts have been the start of my day for the last two weeks. Normally I have a delicious bowl of cereal, but because of certain conditions I have not had time to enjoy this luxury. The problem is I have been "enjoying" off brand pop tarts.

$.50 seems like a lot for some reason when you are shopping. $.50 does not seems like a lot when I'm eating cardboard for breakfast. I might not have known the difference it wasn't for one day where I forgot the stale treats at home and had to buy a packet out of the vending machine.

Up until this point I was happy with the tart's half brother, but this morning would change everything. Even taking the dang things out of the wrapper got me excited. I could feel the presence of something more than just a breakfast, it was as if I was beholding some type of magical being. This magical being had ONE wish before he was eaten "Please, place me into the toaster so that I can become even more tasty", this wish was quickly granted.

I left him to charge while I went to get my morning coffee (a must at 6:30am). When I arrived I could already smell the baked tasty treat. The Strawberry pop tart was radiating with some type of aura that can only be described as "breath takingly delicious". I simply could not take my off of the wonderful breakfast item I was about to enjoy.

Enjoy it I did. And while I'm still finishing off a pack of Disgust Tarts, I long for the day when I can shove another Pop Tart into the toaster.

Ajax + PHP

How can i turn what I did today into something worth reading....

Well I set out to make a site that would allow users to enter data into a form and send it to a database. Then it refreshes a div tag with the new content (the stuff they entered).

The first way I tried was to put the PHP at the top of the page, then basically call "self" when the submit button was pushed. While this "worked" it refreshed the page, which is not what I wanted, it felt kind of "jerky".

Then I set out to see how I could use AJAX to fix my problem. It turns out, that it is quite simple to call a PHP file, and the only real difference to what i had with my current PHP was 1. it was in my html page, and 2. It outputted too much.

The trick with AJAX and PHP is instead of doing something like this

echo $f_name;

echo $l_name;

You must create a string to add everything together, and then output that string.

Instead of the above code you would type:
$outPutString .= $f_name;

$outPutString .= $l_name;

Then when you are ready to send done with adding to the string, output it.

echo $outPutString;

this Echo (or Print) is what the AJAX will receive and stick in your code.

A major thing to notice is your "Submit" button is not type="submit" any more, you need to change that to type="button".

This will now not clear any data, I did not look too far into this, but I reset everything to "" when the AJAX is called to send the form. Something like this

document.getElementById('var1').value = "";

document.getElementById('var2').value= "";

document.getElementById('var3').value= "";

Helpful Site:

http://www.tizag.com/ajaxTutorial/

While this helped with this problem, a decent knoweledge of PHP and DOM JavaScript is important.

I want to post

So here I go.

I've recently been doing a lot more ActionScript than I ever thought I would. I do that at my current job, and while I enjoy it there is some opening for more PHP and Database programming, so I'm taking the big plunge and going back to my true goal of being a web developer instead of a flash developer.

I will talk more on the learning of that later, but as for right now I am re designing a site for a local company. It was/is in pretty bad shape and it's fun to get back to CSS and HTML. I plan on using Dreamweavers spry widgets and maybe throw in some javascript. MooTools anyone?

If I do anything particularly neat, I'll be sure to post on that. Which could be more interesting than my random post about my life....

I need to post More

Ok, so it seems as though I am going to try and update a blog on a regular basis. I think the main problem is I don't think I have anything to talk about. SO here is where I will tell you what my great idea for a blog is.. and well I am just going to write about me discovering the majesty of web programming. I will post about new tricks and tools I find.

I am going to focus my upcoming efforts on RSS feeds and how to incorporate them into a website. I am going to try and use my Blogger and Twitter sites to update my webpage.

So yeah look here for more information about that.

OOoohh looky here a new blog post.

This entry is mostly for show. If you are reading this, I am probably showing my site in class. Most likely I am talking about my google gadget and how it is mostly just an external javascript file that has an array of images. The images are stored on my web server, with time I would like to see if there is a way to get random images from fliker or the like. 

Either way, this was my post for today. 

It's Saturday!

So, I'm trying to keep on this (Blogging). I looked into twitter, but I do not think it is for me. I really don't do that much, none of my friends would care, and I don't have a way to update it that much. If any of those change, I might look into it, just something to say I know/have done. Kind of like my blogging.

So not to be a twit but, I am looking into style sheets for XML. I am trying to take XML from an inDesign document and put that straight into a website. The worst part is the images. inDesign does not export them correctly. It puts the address for the image in the actual tag... again, makes no sense.

Also I want to learn a good deal of javascript, Yeah not much to say about that. Well with that I'm going to to go and look into XML or JavaScript.