Helpful Coder

Over on Maximum PC - there were a few things I didn't know you could do with the various Google apps. One is uploading files to google docs - any file. Which ties in well with my previous post about storing passwords - I uploaded a copy of my password safe file to google docs as a backup. Can't hurt, right? Also, I wasn't aware that you could set up forms in google docs that act as surveys, and then store the results in a google docs spreadsheet. This is a little alarming, as a decent amount of my work involves coding up custom surveys similar to this...

This one's really simple, but I end up using it a lot so why not post it? Say you need to display an xml news feed on a site. I needed to. So I looked at how to do it with PHP, and it seemed far more over-complicated than need be for something so simple. One again jQuery comes to the rescue. If you're not familiar with jQuery, it's a javascript library that makes javascript actually pleasant to use. I used to avoid javascript because of cross-browser issues, and everything always seemed more difficult than it needed to be. jQuery fixes all that. The code snippet below uses jQuery to grab the XML feed, go through each item in the feed and output a simple bullet list of linked titles. Should be easy to adapt it to whatever your needs may be. Just be sure you also have the jQuery library set up on what page you use it on. It also uses a <ul id="theBox"> to put the bullet items in. $(document).ready(function(){ var theBox = ""; $.get('XML URL...

This is probably a problem that others have encountered, so I thought I'd address my solution here... If you work on a lot of different websites, you tend to have a lot of username/password/etc info that you need to keep track of somehow. You can try to remember them all, or use the same info for each - the potential problems with these two approaches are obvious. What is needed is some way to store this info securely and ideally across different computers, and with an eye towards keeping it backed up - obviously losing all the passwords to your clients' websites would not be a good thing! The only worse thing would be having that information fall into the wrong hands. My current solution makes use of two free pieces of software. The first is Dropbox - a free cloud-based backup/sync program. Essentially, it sets up a folder on your computer, and anything in that folder is backed up to their server and sync'd with other machines with dropbox that are connected to your ac...