Avenue Designers: Weblog - website design in Wernersville, Reading and Berks County, Pennsylvania

Voted notable universal design

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Well, the results are in from the folks (Team Access) over at accessites.org. My website, Avenue Designers, has been given the "Notable Universal Design Award." It was a big accomplishment from where I've come in the past year, and I'm very excited to receive this award. Feel free to leave any comments on the article on accessites.org (link to follow).

To view the public briefing on my website written by Team Access, visit:
http://accessites.org/site/2007/04/avenue-designers/

Using SMS to get instant notifications

Monday, April 23, 2007

Phone and mail When I first started out in the business of freelance website design, I wasn't too worried with clients being able to get in contact with me, instantly. Why? Well, it was simple - I didn't have any clients! I was okay with waiting to check my e-mail, or reply to inquiries as soon as I got to a computer. As business began to pick up, I wanted a solution whereby I could instantly receive notifications if a potential client or anyone else contacted me via my online form. Then, the light bulb lit up.

I knew that there was one device I had with me all the time, my mobile phone. Even when I wasn't around a computer, I had my mobile phone to keep me connected. But, then another roadblock. No e-mail functionality. Granted, I have a smartphone; however, I wasn't paying for the internet access on the mobile phone. All right, so e-mail was out of the question. I had it. Text messages. I had a text messaging plan (unlimited) and I knew I could easily modify my forms to shoot me a text message simultaneously with the e-mail to my account.

Setting it up with PHP

The bit of code is so simple, I can not believe I didn't think of it before! I realized that when anyone sends you a text message, they're actually sending it to an "e-mail" address, so to speak. Each mobile phone has its own address to receive messages. For example, number@provider. All I had to do is to determine which address my mobile phone had. The easiest way to obtain your mobile phone's address, is to send a text message to your e-mail address. The address that shows up as the sender is your mobile phone's address. That's it!

After obtaining your address, setting up the PHP is no big deal. The following code was inserted into the PHP code where I process, validate and mail the forms contents:

$cellreciever = "5555555555@provider.com";
$cellsubject = "Alert";
$cellsender = "";
$cellbody = "Someone submitted your contact form";

Interestingly enough, you can essentially put anything you want into the $cellbody handle, even $POST data (e.g., the name of the person contacting you). Just make sure the contents are under 160 characters, as that is the limit of SMS. Once that code is entered, all we need to enter now is the PHP command to mail this text message:

mail($cellreciever,$cellsubject,$cellbody,$cellsender);

That's it. I'm sure this can easily be adapted for any other server-side scripting language out there, so please, go ahead! Also, if you adapt this for any other language, please contact me and I'll add your code to this post.

Invalid code, fixed!

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

It was, in-fact, the way that Blogger had created some of its XHTML code. Disabling an option inside the Blogger configuration seemed to fix this problem.

UPDATED:
In order for Blogger to get rid of the invalid <div style="clear: both;" /> you need to go to: Settings > Formatting > Enable float alignment and set it to "NO." The reason this is coming up invalid, in my situation, is because the posts are entered inside a paragraph tag, where XHTML does not allow a div clear element, apparently. I suppose if I had images inside (which is what this option is there to handle), it wouldn't have any problems, though I can not be sure.

Blogger creates invalid code

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

It's kind of upsetting that such a popular web-based blogging platform would produce invalid XHTML code. Unfortunately as of now, I haven't heard any response from the support forums regarding editing these "tags" that you must enter into the template code, in order for these posts to display. I'm patiently waiting to see if there is anything I can do regarding this issue. If you personally use Blogger.com as your blog, please let me know if you have any solutions to this issue.

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Welcome to the Avenue Designers Weblog. We'll be using this section of our website to post about updates to the website (also see our RSS feed for website updates). Also, we'll write regarding web design and web standards, which is more geared towards fellow web developers.

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