I’ve seen some funky solutions to this problem, including using a hidden submit button which appears first in the form, but I’ve found the following works fine – change all the submit buttons that you don’t want to be default to normal buttons, i.e., type="button" instead of type="submit", and use their onclick events to submit the form. For example:

<form id="myform" method="get">
<!-- Not the default button -->
<input name="b1" type="button" onclick="this.form.submit()" value="B1" />
<!-- The default button -->
<input name="b2" type="submit" value="B2" />
</form>

1. Make a sweet little 16×16 PNG favicon in your favorite paint application
2. Butcher it into an ICO file using favicon.cc
3. Upload both files to your web server
4. Stick the following code in the HEAD section of your webpage

<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="favicon.png" />
<!--[if IE]>
	<link rel="shortcut icon" type="image/x-icon" href="favicon.ico" />
<![endif]-->

5. Reassure yourself that IE users are pretty used to a sub-standard web browsing experience, and won’t be bothered by the lack of proper transparency or 24bit color in the favicon they see

What you need is a little bit of Javascript to check for unsaved changes and warn the user before they leave the page if they are going to lose their work. Gutuma uses something like the following:

var is_post_back = false;
 
window.onbeforeunload = function (ev)
{
  var html = document.send_form.msg_html.value;
  var subject = document.send_form.msg_subject.value;
 
  if (!is_post_back && (html != "" || subject != ""))
    return "Your message will be lost if you leave this page.";
}
 
function cancel_unsaved_warning()
{
  is_post_back = true;
}

The cancel function is called in the onclick events of any buttons on the page which do a POST back to the page, and thus won’t lose the user’s work. This is the best way I think to cancel the warning message as setting window.onbeforeunload = null doesn’t work in IE6, and returning anything from the onbeforeunload handler results in a warning message (even null or false), so you have to use some logic to avoid a return statement altogether. Weird but it works.

UPDATE 11/09/08: I’ve just discovered that IE treats javascript: hrefs as navigations away from the page and fires the onbeforeunload event. So you can’t call a javscript function like

<a href="javascript:myfunc()">Link</a>

without seeing the above warning message about leaving the page. But you can get around this by using the onclick attribute:

<a onclick="javascript:myfunc()" href="#">Link</a>

If you’ve come across an “Access to restricted URI denied” error then you’re probably having the same problem. The solution is to use a proxy on the domain where the AJAX controls are hosted. This proxy receives the HTTP requests from the AJAX controls and can forward them on to the other domain.

For an example of how to do this, you can check out guproxy.php which is my simple single file PHP script for forwarding AJAX requests (from the SACK AJAX library) to the AJAX interface of Gutuma. As a security precaution it limits forwarded requests based on the destination url, and the filters the POST variables to those used by Gutuma.  Other solutions I’ve seen don’t do this and thus leave your proxy script open to abuse.

<?php header('Content-Type: application/x-javascript'); ?>
/**
 * This file is a server-side merge of first.js and second.js
 *
 * ------------------------------ first.js -------------------------------
 */
 
<?php echo file_get_contents('first.js'); ?>
 
/**
 * ---------------------------- second.php ----------------------------
 */
 
<?php echo file_get_contents('second.js'); ?>

This simple approach could be used where you’ve got a lot of JS files and you want to speed up access times.

I might not be in Central Africa right now, but one thing I can do at the moment is assist groups in developing and maintaining websites. Most people don’t use a fraction of the bandwidth, disk space, databases that their hosting offers, so it makes sense for someone like me to offer to host websites on my own hosting.

So I went looking for a nice domain name, and was well pleased to find ijuru.com available. Apparently all the 4-letter domain names have been bought up so I think a catchy 5-letter name is a good find.

Having setup a few Wordpress blogs recently, and having found it vastly superior to Blogger, I decided I wanted my own!. After a bit of googling I figured out how to migrate my posts and comments from Blogger to Wordpress. The import function built into Wordpress was giving me timeouts, but I found this guide which describes the magic trick to make it work

1. Setup a temporary wordpress.com blog
2. Import your posts from blogspot into that
3. Export your posts as a WXR file from that
4. Import into your new wordpress.org blog
5. Delete the temporary wordpress.com blog

Course all the shiny blog software in the world can’t make this blog interesting unless I keep posting…

A beautiful Julia fractal from (-0.11555683009253867, -0.6497149749107873)

When I’ve done a bit more work on it you should be able to save images as JPGs, but that requires making signed applets, and I’m getting bored again…