In a previous tutorial, I showed some inventive uses of the PHP rand and switch functions. You can do all this (and more) with JavaScript. So, for the sake of balance, here is how you make a Magic 8 Ball in JavaScript. Continue reading »

Websites love to greet their users when they log in. A personal welcome like ‘Hello, Betty’ or ‘Hi, Donald’ makes a user feel at home, but most websites don’t need user registration. There is an extremely simple way to add a touch of sparkle to your welcomes, though, by turning your ‘hello’ into a ‘good morning’, ‘good afternoon’ or ‘good evening’. Continue reading »

I was recently reading David Thorne’s frankly hilarious antics with a Magic 8 Ball. He spent a day responding to every question with a randomly-generated phrase using the famous fortune-telling toy. But why buy a Magic 8 Ball when you can make it at home for free with a little bit of PHP code? People will be flocking to your website for this kind of advice.The Magic 8 Ball offers 20 possible answers; ten are positive, five are ambivalent and the rest are negative. In this tutorial we will use the original (and best) answers. Continue reading »

Happy new year! 2012 brings joy and merriment – but many blogs are missing out because they are stuck back in the last year. Actually, many websites are stuck in whatever year their design came from because their owners do not know how easy it is to keep their copyright declarations up-to-date so you never have to change it manually. It just takes one tiny little line of code. Continue reading »