Yesterday while at work I was building some functionality into the user interface using show and hide with div’s when a workmate pointed out the Scriptaculous library. Now this little thing is amazing, by making something like the onClick action point to one of Scriptaculous’s effect functions I can have cool slide downs or fades to make my interface look really slick. Of course you can have over kill but its very hard.

To create a form that would slide out when you click a link is easy. Include the JavaScript files and then using a div with the onClick value set to something like “Effect.toggle(’div_id’, ‘effect’)” and then set the id of the div you want to show/hide to the value you set in the effect (and set the div to have style=”display:none;”, to hide it at the start). If you want to get really fancy set the div’s onMouseOver and onMouseOut to something to give the hover over effect. I normally go with a light colour for the background and a darker version of the same colour to get a nice look.

The thing I love about Scriptaculous is that you get all these effects that you see on the high-end “web 2.0″ sites with the use of a simple (to use, but complex on the inside) but comprehensive library and I will definitely be using it for my next website to make things a lot smoother.

There is one to note about this though, and that is that be careful when using this to show/hide actual content and by content I mean text that you want the search engines to read because they will not like reading inside div’s that have their display property set to ‘none’ and because of this it is best using in terms of forms or inside member area’s where search engines shouldn’t be lurking other than that, go nuts!

Enjoy.

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I have been really busy lately with new work so I haven’t posted for a while but heres an update in the form on some useful information that may save your butt further down the line.

If you are a developer like me then chances are you have at least a few websites that you maintain and uptime is  an absolute must even for the most simple of sites. One of the things that has been taking up some of my time lately is systems in place to monitor various services and servers uptime.

Now there are many packages and systems out there that you can use for monitoring services and servers but for the list of features, the ability to be heavily customised, and also being Linux-based and opensource, Nagios was the only option.

Many people seem to think that Nagios is a hard to setup monitoring system but once you actually realise that it is as simple as the make it out to be, and what the bare minimums are to make it functional and useful.

I plan to document with some following posts how simple it is in some step by step guides to get Nagios setup from basic monitoring with tools like Ping to checking disk space on remote hosts. You really can have a monitoring system setup with a few simple linux commands and modifying some sample config files.

Within the next couple of days I will post what is required to get up and running with Nagios and I plan to provide you with some information as to how you can get more advanced and monitor that status of certain services and servers parts.

Stay tuned…

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Here is the final concept for a new project we are launching called School of Interpretation.

The aim is to provide a site where people can express ideas and thoughts about the interpretation of designs with the goal of having other people learning from what is being said and designed.

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Over the past couple days the whole virtual server had gone down.

The main result of the site going down is damage to reputation, and loss of subscribers and also the loss of services related to the server that we had running which was also running some client websites.

If the web hosting company had of implemented proper reliability practices and tested them there would of been no problem, but they hadn’t and it took this long for me to find out that the level of expertise is thoroughly lacking.

I am in the process of discussing some compensation for the downtime and if they don’t come through I am more than happy to name them and go elsewhere.

Make sure you pick you web hosting company carefully especially if you are using it to provide something that is professional or providing a service that is relied upon.

The case is often the bigger the company the more reliable due to the larger scale of their network and larger customer base to keep happy, be very hesitant of smaller companies and don’t do what I did and make a mistake.

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