You can try out the plugin below:

As you can see, this simple growth comes very naturally to the user. It can be useful for sites needing large user input. So if you would like to use this plugin, read the quick guide below.

• First, you will need to download this one file: jquery.autogrowtextarea.js.
• After downloading and importing the script you will need to add some CSS to your page, as follows.

  <style type="text/css">
    textarea
    {
      overflow:hidden;
      height:auto;
      width:326px;
    }
  </style>

  The overflow and height properties should remain unchanged. The width however is tricky. You see, textarea’s are not generated the same way in different browsers, meaning that each browser will set a different width to your textarea. To counter this, I have created a small script that will give you the right width to use.

  • Columns:
  • Font size(in px):
  • Appropriate textarea width: -px

  I have set my width to 346px since I am using 40 columns for my textarea. It’s nice to point out that the default textarea font size is 13px.

• With all that done, you can call the plugin this way:

  <script type="text/javascript">
    $(document).ready(function(){
      $("#txtInput").autoGrow();
    });
  </script>
  <textarea id="txtInput" cols="40" rows="5"></textarea>

  Where “txtInput” is the textarea’s identifier and “autoGrow()” is the function that activates the plugin for the selected textarea.

As you can see, the implementation is quite straightforward. I am planning to include automatic width detection in the plugin, so you don’t have to generate the appropriate width every time.

If you like this plugin and would like to suggest features, or report bugs, you are welcome to contact me.

The error message I was getting was “Failed to send your message. Please try later or contact administrator by other way.”. A quick Googling and I came upon this post by Mario Vargas. I then realized that the error I was getting was because my mail settings were messed up. You can find my mail settings on the screenshot below:

Wrong config for Contact Form 7. Click on picture to enlarge.

As you can see, I was using the reader’s email address to send me emails. This was the wrong thing to do. Even if the mail would be sent, it would be flagged as spam. As a general rule, you should only send emails belonging to your domain from your domain. (send only @technoreply.com mails from www.technoreply.com).

So, I applied this formula. I changed the senders email to one that belongs to me. The screenshot below speaks for itself:

Good config for Contact Form 7. Click on picture to enlarge.

This simple little trick worked for me. It saved me a lot of time since I did not have to tweak my server.

In this light, I have written 5 guidelines for you to follow. If followed, these will make your code look clear and much more readable. Here it goes.

#1 Indent your code

I don’t even need to stress on that. Indentation is essential if you want readable lines of code. Remember, nothing says amateur programmer more than unintended lines of code.

#2 Avoid excessive white lines

Most programmers use white lines to separate blocks of code. If you are the type of person to leave white lines randomly in your codes, you are probably not doing any favor to the next programmer that will be working on your codes. Think of white lines as separators, not as beautifiers.

#3 Use comments moderately

I read an article once that said, “Good code does not need comments”. That is a very good advice. Your code should properly describe what it is doing. This is achieved by using meaningful variable and method names. Comments should only be used to describe confusing operations.

#4 Use meaningful variable and method names

Many programmers shorten their variable and method names so that they can code faster. To me, this is ridiculous. A good variable name should be descriptive. Also, most IDEs come with code completion nowadays. Meaning you always type the first few letters of any variable or method name, before you get all the possibilities in a box. So why choose short, meaningless variables over long, meaningful ones?

#5 Group your declarations on top

Variable declarations should be on top. Be it inside a method, a loop or anything else. The reason is simply because it has been this way for ages, and anything the other way round would seem uncanny.

There it goes. You have my 5 guidelines for clean, well-presented and perfectly readable code.

The other day, I had to do what most developers hate. I had to accomplish a task and I did not have enough time. Yes it happens at times. In more detail, I had to write a console application that would :

• Fetch a CSV file on an FTP server
• Parse the file
• Export the parsed data to the database

Once again, there is nothing challenging about this application. The only problem was that this was an urgent task.

So what did I do? That’s where the title of this post makes absolute sense. I searched the web. That’s all I did, I swear! In a matter of a few Google searches, I had all the code snippets to build this application. This small exercise made me realize that there is an endless amount of free resources on the web and once assembled, it can be the basis of a very powerful application. Maybe you do not realise, but this little console application saved me 2 days of coding/testing. Thank you Internet.

Resources:

Fetch file from FTP

Parse CSV file using delimiter and qualifier

Some days back, I was faced with a small task. I had to make implement Javascript regular expression validation on a field. The requirement was simple; the field should have minimum three alphanumeric characters, including French characters. For you to have an idea, French characters include “accent aigu” and “accent grave” (you can read about French accents on wikipedia).

Okay so I had the requirement and I was all set. I created a RegularExpressionValidator element on my ASP.NET page and I added “[a-zA-Z0-9 ]” as ValidationExpression. The code looked like this:

<asp:TextBox ID="txtName" runat="server" />
<asp:RegularExpressionValidator ID="rexName" ControlToValidate="txtName"
  ValidationExpression="[a-zA-Z0-9 ][a-zA-Z0-9 ][a-zA-Z0-9 ]+"
  ErrorMessage="Please enter at least 3 alphanumeric characters." runat="server" />

This worked perfectly. It matched three alphanumeric characters or more. But the problem was it was not matching any of the French characters. After some Google searching and some code trial and errors, I came up with this “[a-zA-ZÀ-ÿ0-9 ]” as ValidationExpression. This worked like a charm. The new code was like this:

<asp:TextBox ID="txtName" runat="server" />
<asp:RegularExpressionValidator ID="rexName" ControlToValidate="txtName"
  ValidationExpression="[a-zA-ZÀ-ÿ0-9 ][a-zA-ZÀ-ÿ0-9 ][a-zA-ZÀ-ÿ0-9 ]+"
  ErrorMessage="Please enter at least 3 alphanumeric characters." runat="server" />

If you can’t see the logic, let me explain. The code now matches

• all characters from a to z (lowercase invariants)
• all characters from A to Z (uppercase invariants)
• all characters from À to ÿ (all accent characers including French accents in uppercase and lowercase)
• all digits from 0 to 9 (note that the requirement did not require the name to start with a non-digit)
• whitespaces (whitespace was not catered for in the requirement)

So there you go. You now have the regular expression validation for French characters. The beauty of regular expression validation is that it is hard to come up with, but it is very easy to implement.

To fix it, just add a reference to “System.Configuration.dll“. And change from “ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings” to “ConfigurationManager.AppSettings“. (C# code example below)

Now if you have no idea what this gibberish above means, here is an in detail explanation. Non-noobs, please read no more. Noobs, follow the steps.

1. Right-click on your project, look for Add Reference and click on it
2. Choose the .Net tab and search for System.Configuration on the list
3. Click on OK
4. Now that the reference is added, just replace ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings with ConfigurationManager.AppSettings in your code. (C# code example below)

So if your code was like:

Console.WriteLine(ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings.Get("anyKey"));

It should now be like:

Console.WriteLine(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings.Get("anyKey"));

Now that this is fixed, you can get back to work on your project. It is an easy fix as you can see, but it’s not intuitive. I had to find the fix on aspcode.net. Hope this helps some of you out.

Taking a look at the GMarker section in the Google Maps API, we realise that the constructor takes two arguments. GLatLng and GMarkerOptions. What we need is the GMarkerOptions, which specifies the map marker options. Taking a look at the GMarkerOptions, we see that the class has no constructor. It only has a list of properties. Among, the clickable property.

But how do we use those properties? A little bit of googling around gave me answer. It was found on the Official Google Maps API Blog. The solution is pretty simple. Just take a look on the code below and you will see what I mean.

var markerOptions = {
clickable: false
};
var marker = new GMarker(new GLatLng(37.4419,-122.1419), markerOptions);
map.addOverlay(marker);

As you can see, the code is very simple, but the documentation is not precise enough. Hope this helps you out. Just a note, map marker options should be separated by a comma.

To fix it, just change your code from:

document.body.onload = alert("Hello world");

to:

document.onload = alert("Hello world");

It appears that document.body.onload does not work on IE. Before, when I loaded the page, I used to get  the error dialog “A Runtime Error has occured” saying “Error: Not implemented“. On debug in Visual Studio, I’d get “htmlfile: Not implemented“. All these error messages are not very clear, but fortunately, the faulty line of code was highlighted.

I have not yet researched about the difference(s) between document.body.onload and document.onload in Firefox (or IE), but if you’re only using a small piece of javascript code, you should be alright with this fix.