Cranfield School of Management makes a nice little apperance on one of the top design/developer blogs Smashing Magazine.

The Sub-Navigation for Cranfield consists of a rollover cookie trail which allows users more control over exploring the site, this enhances the user experience and quickens the web journey from point a to b. Smashing Magazine has picked up on our little cookie trail and placed Cranfield under 'Breadcrumbs with Sub-Navigation'.

Thanks Smashing Magazine for including us in your posts and to all of the hard work Creative Jar put in to create this stunning site.

Peace ^_^

Microsoft have at last released Internet Explorer 8. There are two noticeable outstanding features:

• IE7 Compatability mode, if old websites don't look right in IE8 - you can switch to IE7. If your website doesn't look good in IE7 - call our sales number.
• IE Dev bar - this is a better developer tool than Firebug, and that is a big boast!

Download IE8 

So there is NO excuse now to be using IE6! Please - use anything other than IE6, the whole web industry is waiting for this browser to become history.

Interesting talk from Tim Berners-Lee on his vision for the Internet.

Been working with the new ASP.net pager control and i must say I'm impressed

when it was all .net framework 2.0, we'd been working with a nice little usercontrol which handled all it's postback internally and we had pretty good control over the markup.  Then .net 3.5 comes on the scene with it's listview and pager, so we thought we should give them a go

It was a partially good experience but the lack of mark-up control was pretty limiting.  I'm not much of a front-end guy so i just plumped for the standard layout and went with that.  However, as our front-end guys show much more attention to look & feel than I do, they demanded better markup, nicer buttons, parameterised visibility, the lot basically

We saw there was a TemplatePagerField node for the datapage and http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.ui.webcontrols.templatepagerfield.aspx showed us we could literally spoon any kind of controls and mark-up into it.  The server side functinalty opened my eyes to some new counters i didn't even know existed.  I was used to the listitem having a container, kind of like a row in a database, but the pagers container is actually the entire collection of rows.  Kind of obvious when i think about it as i was only ever throwing it the whole set and it did it's thang and paged the data as required.

Also, you can have any combination of fields so you can still use the standard pager ones.  i particularly like the page buttons one which gives you a link to each page so the users are not forced to keep pressing next and previous to get to the products 

check it out though.  Saved us loads of time recently :¬)

I was working on a project this morning which uses a non-safe web based font and decided to use sIFR 3. For the first time implimenting it, I was impressed and got it looking how I intended in Firefox quickly. It wasn't until I was cross browser testing that I found - oh! the flash isn't loading at all in Internet Explorer. To cut a long story short, a lot of googling and head-meeting-desk bashing, it turns out that even though I had the Flash Player installed in Firefox; I had not installed the Internet Explorer Flash Player. Find it a bit odd that you need to install one player multiple times, but I digress.

Not 2 hours later, we found an issue with some flash that would not work in Opera - the embedded no flash content was appearing instead. Luckily, because of the work I had just done with sIFR, I found that again I had to install the Flash Player for Opera. Hey presto! It fixed the issue.

So in future, if you find that your flash is working perfectly fine in one browser; do not spend hours trying to pick your code apart to fix the problem. Make sure your browser has flash installed. I found this was a handy tool to quickly know if my browser had flash installed.

Here at Creative Jar we are constantly on the look out for tools in which we can use to en-rich the user experience for our customers. This involves finding new ways in which to perform tasks on a website such as filling out a form, re-ordering items on the website and at the same time making them easier for the customer to use.

I have recently been looking a lot into jQuery -- a code library that builds upon the Javascript language and is designed to make things easier; both for the developer and the end-user.

"jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript." -- jQuery official site.

jQuery enables to create a lot of the UI (User Interface) which we want to create for our customers; we can make items drag and droppable, animate objects to draw attention such as success or error messages. I find that by integrating jQuery into our websites, we can really lift the website off the page and bring it to life.

What I love most about jQuery is the ease of use, browser compatibility and the size of the code. We get a tool that; is easy to impliment on a webpage; works in IE6+, Firefox 2+, Opera 9+, Chrome and Safari 3+ and is roughly 19KB in size meaning that it does not affect the page loading times.

To make things even more exciting, jQuery released a new verson of their jQuery UI on March 6th.

"jQuery UI provides abstractions for low-level interaction and animation, advanced effects and high-level, themeable widgets, built on top of the jQuery JavaScript Library, that you can use to build highly interactive web applications." -- jQuery UI official site.

This new UI offers semantically clean code for their 'widgets' that can be styled easily using a CSS Framework -- making the tools we use a lot more easier to style and fit in more with the design created by the Creative team. That way everyone is happy -- as developers we have cool tools we can implement into web pages and as designers we are happy with the look and style of these tools. I will definitely be looking to use this a lot more in our projects.

You can view demos of what you can achieve with jQuery and jQuery UI here.

I was tearing my hair out recently (I didn't have much hair left in the first place, which makes it all the worse!) when the CHARINDEX function was returning 0 even though the string I was looking for definitely existed in the input string!

The database column being searched was of type nText and it turns out that the function concatenates the column value (at what length, I don't know), unless you CAST it to a more usable data type.

So, I added a CAST([ColumnName] AS nVarChar(max)) to the script and hey presto it starts working!!

I would be very appreciative of a message or something to let me know that the input string was concatenated.

Hope this saves someone else from tearing some of their precious hair out!

Nat

Creative Jar are always pushing the boundaries of code  - in particular we like to make full use of the suite* of HTML tags. To this end we stumbled across a little known tag - NOINDEX. Everyone is aware of the NOINDEX meta Tag, but theres not alot written about the NOINDEX HTML Tag.

Visual Studio Intellisense doesn't list NOINDEX as a tag, but neither does it cause an error. Not saying that Visual Studio is the W3C, but using it all day long you do tend to rely on it. W3C don't list NOINDEX either (full list of valid HTML tags) so using it will invalidate your HTML. But some Search Engines use it, notably Yandex which is a Russian Search Engine.

We find NOINDEX useful to wrap around content that we don't want picked up by our internal search index cache. It would be great if this was to become a valid tag. So if you think this would be useful or if anyone has a use for a similar tag, leave a comment. Or even if you have a work around for wrapping content in a tag that won't get picked up by more popular Search Engines, let us know by leaving a comment.

* - What is the collective noun for code tags?