Author: Luca

by JQuery4you.com

Here are 5 demos which you could use as the barebones for your next infinite scrolling project. I’ve been playing around with infinite scrolling for one of my projects and I’ve tried a few jQuery plugins which can manage the “endless scroll” showing items, posts, rss feeds, tweets or anything really. The content can be generated dynamically from JavaScript but most commonly loaded from a server script using AJAX. Also I found that Firefox 8 only detects the scroll upto 99.85% of the screen which was strange.

Infinite Scrolling Demo 1

This demo uses the jQuery Masonry plugin together with the Infinite Scroll plugin. The Masonry plugin really is good for obtaining fluid layouts definately recommend it for that. The infinite scroll plugin by Paul Irish is good at loading pages which already exist such as page.html, page2.html, page3.html but it can’t handle dynamic generated content such as hitting the same page.php file with appended parameters page.php?data=xxx. Just bear that in mind if you go with this option.

by electrictoolbox.com

Dates and times can be stored as an integer value as a UNIX timestamp. This isn’t a particularly human readable format but can be converted in MySQL to a datetime value using the FROM_UNIXTIME function.

Dates and times as timestamps

Back when I first started using MySQL and PHP and created an ecommerce system that was used on a number of websites, I decided to store datetimes as a UNIX timestamp for whatever reason. This made it easy to use the PHP date function to format the dates but is not so useful when browsing data in the database or selecting date ranges in a query. I no longer do this and always store date times as a datetime field type now.

Converting integer timestamp to a datetime

In my old ecommerce system there was a table called “orders” with a column called “date_ordered” which was a UNIX timestamp stored as an integer. To convert this to a datetime as part of the SELECT query this needs to be done:

SELECT other fields here, FROM_UNIXTIME(date_ordered)
FROM orders
WHERE ...

The integer field will now be represented in the resultset as a datetime string in the format YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS.