RedCoupe

Just had a MS SQL Server problem where as the title suggests, I wanted to order a query by a date column to show the most recent entry at the top, but it wasn’t working because the date column was stored as a nvarchar instead of a datetime.

I tried various things like CONVERT…. and CAST…AS datetime, but for whatever reason I could not get this to work.

I got round this by doing some string concatenation:

SELECT * FROM tbl_articles
WHERE visible = 1
ORDER BY RIGHT(dateval,4)+SUBSTRING(dateval, 4, 2)+LEFT(dateval,2) ASC

The date was stored in the table as text like 22/10/2011, the above concatenating turns it into 20111022 which can easily be sorted in the proper order.

I know this is more than likely not the best way of doing it and should have persevered with the casts and converts but it works fine for the minimal amount of data I have in that table. No doubt I’ll have to revisit this if the number of records significantly increases.

I have another site produced with WordPress and it uses a modified version of the Twenty Eleven theme.

The trouble was that whenever I applied an update to the theme, it obviously overwrote my modified style.css. I suppose if I wasn’t lazy I could have copied the theme to a new folder and simply used the copied theme. Although I do like getting updates including any improvement tweaks etc.

To get round this I found a great plugin called Style Press which was made by grandslambert who has also produced some other handy plugins. So I installed it, added my custom css, reverted the style.css back to the original version, and it worked perfectly. So in future whenever I apply a new update to this theme, unless class or id names change, the site will always look the same because the extra bit of css is always added at the end of all the other style includes in the html.

I’ve had reason to write a title in German that contains umlauts and apart from copying and pasting, I couldnt find a way to do this via my keyboard. By the way I’m using Windows XP.

I know I can use the “Character Map” application under Start>All Programs>Accessories>System Tools>

I found the ü symbol and it said the keystroke was Alt+0252. Well I tried this using the number keys along the top of my keyboard and it didn’t work. So I ended up just selecting what I needed and copying it etc. Since then I found out that if I took numlock off and used that number keypad it works fine.

Aparently on the Mac if you press Alt+u and then typing the following letter; a, u, or o. When the letter is pressed it will display the unlauts over the top as they should be.

Here’s a table of ALT codes for letters with accents:

Im always forgetting the very useful vi shortcuts, so here’s a list of them:

ˆ = Control key

If you see a 10, this can be replaced by any number

I was working on a couple of web pages this morning to allow completion of a course booking form, user then submits to a thankyou page, confirmation emails are sent etc.

The problem I faced was that only the course ID was being passed to the thankyou page so in the emails that are generated, it displays Course Details: 7 , instead of Course Details: 12/12/2011 PHP Basics.

So my initial thought was to create a hidden field just before the end form tag together with some javascript that gets the relevant label value:

document.getElementById('coursedetails').value = document.getElementById('training_id')[document.getElementById('training_id').selectedIndex].innerHTML;

Then in the thankyou page I just got Request.Form(“coursedetails”), this is in ASP VBScript just in case you were wondering. Works like a charm.

Since doing this is I should have done it a much easier way and not have to rely on JavaScript being enabled. I already had the value because I was already using it to display the dropdown list label. So the hidden field could have just contained the default value of the currently selected item.