A new version of my Vista-like Ajax Calendar (vlaCalendar) has been released:
version 2.1 is made compatible with MooTools installment, version 1.2, and offers some new features:

At first I wanted to make the vlaCalendar compatible with mootools 1.2 when its gets out of beta stage. After receiving lot of emails and comments from people wanting to use the calendar with the beta version, I decided to make vlaCalender v2 also compatible with mootools 1.2 beta2!

New mootools 1.2 beta2 compatible files are added to the download packages.

Update June 10, 2008: Working on mootools release 1.2 compatibility
Update July 2, 2008: vlaCalendar version 2.1 released, compatible with mootools release 1.2

A new version of my Vista-like Ajax Calendar (vlaCalendar) has been released!

The vlaCalendar is a unobtrusive web version of the slick and profound Windows Vista taskbar calendar, by use of the mootools javascript framework, AJAX, XHTML, CSS and PHP.

Key features:

New features in version 2:

The Vista-like Ajax Calendar version 2 script is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial 3.0 License.

Documentation, including (code) examples, and the download are available here.

Update June 04, 2008: Added mootools 1.2 beta2 compatibility
Update June 10, 2008: Working on mootools release 1.2 compatibility
Update July 2, 2008: vlaCalendar version 2.1 released, compatible with mootools release 1.2
Update October 11, 2009: vlaCalendar's successor, Calendar Eightysix released

As you may have noticed: the site has a new look. I've gotten tired of the old design, its useless features and crappy code.

This new design has a reduction of 40% lines of HTML code and uses the lightweight mootools javascript framework, instead of the heavier Protoype, combined with script.aculo.us, framework. Still tweaking the looks. If you have any comments on the new layout please leave them behind.

Ow yeah I did not pay too much attention to IE6 and older. With success: no nervous breakdown this time.

During my internship I dived into the world called (automatic) testing. As a PHP webdeveloper this was a totally unknown area. Testing is a common iteration in medium to big software projects (usually talking about .NET and Java projects), using iterative Agile oriented methods. Even some of our species swear by test driven development; making tests first and then code.

When testing relatively simple web projects, as 'simple' website developers, it usually comes down to basic functional black box testing. But have you ever endlessly tested registration forms by filling out hundreds of fields by hand? And have you ever changed a minor detail and later came to the conclusion it broke the whole form process? If this sounds familiar automatic testing brings the solution.

In every type of browser input fields (text boxes, text areas, selects etc.) look different, which is quite annoying for designers. You could just style the input components, but styling is usually limited on most input fields.

If you like the Vista input field designs, then why not append this look in your design? Here's the CSS to make input fiels look the same as in IE on a Vista machine...

Adobe Flex is not well documented (well, let's say information is hard to find). Even more so for the charting component for Flex Builder 2. Hereby a tutorial where we set up a column chart, import XML data and format the chart.

Update: Added formatting paragraph and the end result.

If you need recurring tasks, e.g. back upping your database every week or checking if a subscription has ended, and your (shared) hosting runs on a Windows server you probably don't have an option to run cron jobs. Unlike Linux servers, which do support this.

There are several sites that offer free cron services for you. The best is the German site cronjob.de. (Use Babelfish to translate the site.) It supports unlimited cron jobs down to every 5 minutes, unlike other sites like webcron.org which offers only 3 cron jobs down to every one hour.