I know this may seem like a pretty easy question but I have yet to find the answer. I am working on a project at work where we have 2 sets of data and only certain visitors can see certain data. We have 1 set of data that can only be shown to users visiting from the United States and the other from anyone outside of the US.

I have already found a way to get country data based on the visitors ip address. The real trick here is provided the service with the users IP address. I know your probably thinking to yourself that is easy, but I am having trouble over here. If you use web server variable cgi.remote_addr you will get the correct address most of the time. In my case though many of our internal visitors are under the umbrella of our proxy server. This means that when I use cgi.remote_addr it actually retuns an internal address.

My question to all of my smart readers is, What are my options. I have the backing of my server admin so he can help me out in anyway I need but this is new territory for me. Any guidance you can provide is much appreciated.

This entry was posted on November 11, 2011 at 8:09 AM and has received 1337 views. Comments 4 | Print this entry.

The other day I ended up building a custom toolbar button for tinyMCE. I put it out on twitter and asked if anyone was interested in a demo. I got a couple responses so I decided to sit down and write a more practical example. I put a quick video tutorial that you can view by clicking on the image below. I have also pushed the code for this example up to my github account.

On a side note I was thinking about building some plugins for tinyMCE. I could image selectors for Flickr, Facebook and Twitter being really useful. So the question is would anyone be interested in this and would anyone be interested in paying a couple bucks for these plugins (10/20).

This entry was posted on October 8, 2011 at 2:25 PM and has received 1116 views. Comments 0 | Print this entry.

I was asked over the weekend by a client to add a new feature to their website. This client runs an online shopping cart and like other small vendors will run out of stock on a particular item every so often. They wanted a way for a visitor to sign up to be notified when that item was back in stock. While this seems like a fairly easy feature to add I had a couple of self imposed requirements.

All we need from the user is their name and email address. As a visitor I really don't like being taken away from my browsing expirience for simple forms like this. I decided that this form would need to be a modal dialog box. To do this I am going to use jQuery UI because It flat out rocks! I also need this information to be stored in a database so that we can export this info by product. The client will then take these email addresses over to Constant Contact and notify their customers that the product is back in stock.

To show you how I did this I created a little one page shopping cart. In our our sample application I have a book store and on this page I have 3 Flex books, 1 of which is out of stock. If the book is out of stock I have a button for the user to click on.

When the user clicks on the In stock notifications they will see the following form pop up in a modal window. When the user submits the form they will see a small transition and then the success message below.

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This entry was posted on October 3, 2011 at 8:41 PM and has received 2049 views. Comments 3 | Print this entry.

I just thought I would share my go to starter template with you guys. I know its not much but it is powerful. HTML5 ready, Twitter bootstrap and jQuery at your fingertips. This is usually what I start a new template or project with and makes getting started a snap!

This entry was posted on September 28, 2011 at 4:09 PM and has received 1860 views. Comments 9 | Print this entry.

I would like to take this chance to reach out to my readers and get some opinions and ask what would you do. I put on a local charity around Christmas called Toys For Shots. First off If you are in the area or would like to get involved please check out the website for more information.

At this event we have a Chinese auction where guests can win some really really great prizes. To encourage people to RSVP we are giving away a free raffle ticket that can be used for any of our themed baskets. We really want to have a good idea of how many people are coming to the event so this seems like the best solution.

Enough of the backdrop, on to the geeky stuff. We have a facebook event page for people to rsvp on. This is a great way for people to RSVP and also help us spread the word about the event. I also understand that not everyone has facebook so I am providing a way to rsvp on our site. With these two methods I think we can accommodate everyone. When it comes time to print our report of who has RSVP'd I can use the facebook graph API along with my database to get a list of guests.

My what would you do question is really two questions. Is this a good approach for an event that will probably only see 300-350 guests or can you think of a better solution? Should I display a list of all guests who have registered below so they know they are registered? Below is a screen shot of what the page might look like, but I would love to hear your thoughts.

This entry was posted on September 15, 2011 at 9:15 AM and has received 858 views. Comments 0 | Print this entry.