I'm guessing that most web developers with a few years of experience have at least one nightmare client. I'm currently struggling with a total arse of a project. This one in particular was originally built some years ago by a predecessor of mine who, to be fair, was fairly lazy in a lot of respects.
During a meeting with one of my clients, she noticed that the mouse and keyboard we were using were wireless. I guess she'd never seen a wireless mouse before:
"Oooh, this mouse has no ropes!"
I honestly have no idea how I kept a straight face.
One of my clients has a rather large shop, with in excess of 40,000 products over a couple of thousand multi-tiered categories. Recently the company's website started to run slowly, seemingly at random times of the day. The reason was surprising.
"I want the logo changing of course... I want it to... Umm", (looks blankly for a few seconds), "umm... web two point zero".
Thank God it's Friday.
I've just had an interesting discussion with one of my accounts managers which raised the question: when do you say 'no' to a client's request?
I've just had a nightmare of a development problem. In a nut-shell, I've had to import data, (specifically content articles), from one server to another.
This is normally not a problem, but in this instance the source database had each article's content split into multiple 'page' rows. Also, the source database was developed and hosted by another company. They refused to install PHPMyAdmin, (for "security" reasons), and would not give me FTP access. All I had to work with was a terrible database admin system which they'd cobbled together.
My plan was to dump the data into a new database on our server, manipulate it there, then move the shiny clean data over to the live system. Things did not go to plan...
What it is with web designers and gradients? Oh yeah, rounded gradient edges, they're the worst. Bloody designers, I ask you...
I like to use alternating row columns in tables. If the tables in question are static HTML then updating the row colours, (when adding/removing/shifting rows), can become a real chore.
Using some of the wonderful W3C DOM Methods within Javascript I came up with a simple function to do all the work for me.
I have a Compaq Presario F500 laptop, which comes with a built-in Broadcom wireless network adapter. Vista Home Premium came pre-installed, but the system only has 1Gb of RAM, which is the it's maximum.
Vista is so power-hungry that things were never going to go well. The straw which broke the camel's back came one Sunday afternoon when I was surfing the web while listening to music on WMP. I navigated to a site with an embedded flash video and the system froze, completely. I rebooted and tried again but got the same problem, the system was totally maxing out. It's worth mentioning that I already had Aero and all the fancy, (read sparkly; pointless), effects turned off. I came to the conclusion that Vista had to go.
I remember back when I as learning PHP I had to write a directory "spider" function to list the contents of a directory. (Including sub-directories).
The approach I took involved reading the initial contents of the base directory into an array. The plan was then to loop through the array adding any sub-directories, (and their files), recursively.