An article about how to do highlighting of the active form element.
Looks really good and is very usability enhancing, now its time to wait for someone to roll these into a couple of controls:
http://www.ryanbrill.com/archives/form_highlighting_redux/
When reading up on http://weblogs.asp.net I came across the following Database design suggestion:
“Used on an in-production, web-based staff directory of 600 or so, the idea behind tblStaffDirectory is expandability. By putting everything in one table, we don't need to worry about ever having to modify the database structure. Data in this table is stored in the following manner:
| ID |
intID |
strTable |
strField |
strValue |
| 1 |
1 |
Staff |
StaffID |
1 |
| 2 |
1 |
Staff |
First Name |
John |
| 3 |
1 |
Staff |
Location ID |
4 |
| 4 |
4 |
Locations |
Location ID |
4 |
| 5 |
4 |
Locations |
City |
Anytown |
Creative, eh? While queries to retrieve the data in a useful manner may be a bit complicated (120 lines and 38 JOINS to get the equivilant of “SELECT * FROM Staff“), it's a heck of a lot better than the alternative (changing the table structures). Besides, I don't think users mind waiting 5-10 seconds for the page to load. I challenge anyone to come up with a better implementation than this.”
I disagree that this would be a good solution to this problem huge sql statements can hardly be a good way to do things in a relational database kind of way.
This table is also in no way normalised table and field are strings and are redundant a much better and cleaner way to solve this would be the following:
Staff_tables
- id
- name
Staff_tables_fields
- id
- name
Staff_departmentname
- id
- locationid
- firstname
- lastname
- city
- etc
If all the departments have the same table structure the Staff_tables_fields table can even by avoided.
Since the example was in a staff_tables table can also be avoided because the tables can be queried with a simple sql command this list can also be selected with a where statement limiting the resultset to just tables with “staff_*“
This eleminates the possibility of typos in the tables and fields.
Advantages:
- The database structures are clear and easier to maintain.
- The speed should be going to normal levels.
- Errors in the database are avoided.
These are not the most common mistakes -- but they may be the nastiest:
http://www.secretgeek.net/TechWritingMistakes.asp
Personally I don't really think they are so bad, but we will see if I can I can avoid these in my articles when they come out.
This doesn't happen to me too often but this definitely is an exception:
http://my.msn.com
The why I'm blown away:
The dragable contents with transparent effects
The themability
The gradients
The context menu's
The resizable columns
Luckily most of this disappears in FireFox :)
Anyone have any pointers on how to integrate this kind of stuff in new websites ?
Update: http://www.brainjar.com/dhtml/drag/ seems to explain part of how to do it :)
Should be interesting for most here:
FREE XDN Professional for .NET Bloggers during May 2004
Mike Schinkel, president of Xtras.Net, made an offer on his personal blog of a free XDN Professional membership (http://www.xtras.net/xdn) during the month of May 2004 for anyone that blogs about .NET frequently. If you are a .NET blogger, see Mike's post for how to get your free XDN membership.
http://blogs.xtras.net/mikes/PermaLink,guid,2650d93d-0994-4f74-ae52-900173d03ebd.aspx