Recently I had an issue where the telephone number simply did not appear on a website we had developed. The “Call us” text appeared fine, but the number itself didn’t.

This strange phenomenon was occurring on the strange world of iOS. Windows and Android seemed to resistant to this issue. Even Mac’s desktop version seemed fine. Just iPhones and iPads.

Now the text itself was nothing strange. Just a simple <p> tag with a <span> to add some styling, which included some padding, a background and font size and colour. The rest of the styling appeared, even for the telephone number. The box appeared with padding and appeared the correct size. But the essential part, the text, remained elusive.

Turns out that as part of the iOS operating system, it turns telephone numbers into links so that you can click on them and call them. Because the main part of the style sheet turned links the same colour as my background, it was causing the text to change colour.

So if you are having issues with text not appearing on iOS devices, you need to add styling to your <a> tags and make sure they override any inherited styling you have.

Fix websites missing telephone numbers on iOS

Recently had a problem with uploading a new php file to a server, and it turned out that Notepad++ was only adding LF to the end of each line, and not CRLF.

 has a quick and easy way of fixing all your problems.

Notepad++ CRLF instead of LF

Admittedly, this probably doesn’t come up a lot for people, but recently I have been creating a project management system for someone and am trying to make it as user-friendly as possible using all my known tricks.

I want to use an Include function for PHP when a page loads, but this page doesn’t include functions because it's also called by 

. So I simply just want to call this page and display the output.


The only problem is that I send it $_GET variables via the URL when I call it using jQuery. If I try the code below, it doesn’t work, because it is actually looking for a file with the exact name, and not clever enough to work out they are extra variables I am sending it.

Using $_GET with php Include() function

Recently I needed to find out the element index of a List element when clicked.

I managed to come up with the code that enabled me to do that using 

First, you need to set up your HTML code with an id of ‘bourne’. You don’t have to use bourne, use whatever you like.

You can see above that I have created an 

Get a <li> elements index value on click with jQuery

A website that I recently found very useful was the 

It basically sets up a test area for you to try out simple bits of code, saving you the time or creating a test area.

It also has the nice feature of being able to set up as different versions of HTML, and also include different versions of Jquery, saving you the time of setting up a head section of a page, uploading to a server, or inserting the include scripts for the javascript.

Online Testing With jsfiddle.net

This is a quick and very basic crash course for someone new to Linux administration. The following commands should get you through navigating files and simply finding your way around the operating system.

One option that might be useful if you are stuck is to follow a command with –help. This will display the help page for that command if you have the correct command.

It’ll show you any requirements when running that command, or show you extra options.

Linux Crash Course

thought that it would be useful to inform my visitors of a neat little program that you might find useful.

I like working on my computer with a movie or video in the background, but flicking between screens means that it’s a hassle to keep the movie windows on top.

 allows you to quickly keep a window on top with a simple shortcut.

This program requires no installation, it’s a simple .exe that runs straight away.

A very neat bit of program that allows you to keep your selected window on top while you flick between Explorer, your web browser and your email.

Windows 7 Keep On Top

Ok, so the title may not explain what this post is about, but hopefully it covers the basics.

Recently I have been rewriting a website, adding smarted code and classes. One of the new features I have added is 

. While this in itself is not new, it was new to this project.

One page contained a form with a collection of Checkboxes. They were converted to use the Jquery UI format, as shown in the code below:

Hopefully, you can understand the above, it’s not doing much, basically, it’s part of a PHP loop which is looping through some results and creating a checkbox for each one. 

 is a PHP variable which contains a unique name for each one.

Toggle Jquery UI Checkbox Array

A couple of times I have had to deal with images in my code. Recently I had a project that needed the user to upload an image, which then needed to be scaled down to fit an area. Below I detail the calculations that I used.

For this demonstration, we will be using an image with a pixel size of 300 x 320. We want to scale it down to an image size of 155 x 200. This size would allow us to scale an image for a regular passport image of 35mm x 45mm.

The first thing you need to do is work out which side will be scaled down the most. Use the following to work out the percentage of the scale.

Now we can see that the Height is bigger than the width percentage-wise.

Calculations To Scale An Image

Below is a script to allows you to run a precheck function in Javascript, preventing the form from being submitted if you detect a problem.

First, in a separate, external Javascript file, copy the below script:

The above code is checking a checkbox value in the sent form to see if it has been selected. If it has, then we are okay to submit the form, otherwise, it displays the message box.

Now we need to tell the form to run this function instead of the normal submit.

My programming musings that nobody else reads