It is very common to have an archive in your WordPress blog displaying a list of the months that you have created a post on your blog. This navigation is the result in most cases of the wp_get_archives function of WordPress. However you may not know that you can utilize this same function to display…

After learning the basics of XSLT one often wonders how to filter the XML data to returns data that contains a search string or has a value greater then or less than another value. To do this in XSL Stylesheets you can use take advantage of XPath in your xsl:foreach elements. Lets assume we have…

XSLT  (EXtensible Sytlesheet Language Transformations) is a tool that can be used to transform XML documents into other formats most commonly of which is XHTML. XSLT is a stylesheet that defines how to display or output the data from the XML. Using XSLT you can sort, filter, and manipulate the data as needed iterating of…

The Flint Particle System is an open source flash project with the goal of creating a base framework that is easily extensible by developers to create their own particle behaviors and effects. One of the many features it has is the ability to have your particle emitters move with your mouse. Below you can see…

Recently I came across the issue in java where the split command I was executing was returning an array split on every character and not the | character as I had specified. String[] subStrings = myString.split( “|” ); The reason for this functionality is that the | character represent a character delimeter. To split the…

In Dynamic websites we often find that we need to modify page content on the fly based on user actions. A common example of this is allowing the user to add additional input boxes for configurations or attachments. I personally like to contain such input as a new row in a table. To accomplish this…

The NOEXEC option of SQL is used to specify that the SQL statements are not to be executed. Utilizing this command with the SHOWPLAN option enables us to quickly see the query plans for a SQL statement without having the query actually execute. This gives us a quick output of the steps the DB Server…

Those familiar with SQL will have most likely used the UNION command when they want to combine select statements into 1 result set. Most often individuals will use UNION without understanding that additional work is done behind the scenes to remove duplicate entries. That is why it is important to understand your database and to…

Recently at work I have been working with Database Tables that have been denormalized to “enhance” their performance. As part of the denormilization process table columns where converted from int to the varchar data type. This change lead me to wonder if there is a performance gain from using varchar over int. After doing some…

SQL Maps are the core to the iBATIS Persistence Framework. These xml documents define the mappings between sql statements and your application objects. The base elements that make up the sqlmap are: resultMap resultMap elements define how returned data from select statements should be mapped to your objects. Providing relationships between object properties and columns…