Recently I wrote up a list of 10 web developer tips for the 

 on Instagram and their 67 thousand followers. You can find that 

 on Instagram while you are there, as they are both great accounts.

Having reached out recently to a few other social accounts to see what I could offer, Ben, who is the awesome guy behind the account, suggested a way to help him focus on providing info to the vast number of followers he had, and this was his idea.

The tips on that post are the same as below, but they go into a little more detail than an Instagram picture description allows.

Running your own site, and keeping it up to date, forces you to be the user. It’ll force you to learn new skills, like analytics, browser issues, server management etc. Not only that, it’s great to have a portfolio.

10 Web Developer Tips

Most people on their way to work carry some sort of bag. I, as a developer, am no different. Some of the stuff I carry around will be common things you’d expect someone spending most days at a 9-to-5.

But I believe I carry around a few things that only a techie or nerd would carry around. I thought it would be a good idea to share some of the things I have kept in there. You can compare with me and see if I’m doing something different, or maybe you have some suggestions as to what I can add?

So, without further ado, let’s get it all out on the table.

I thought I should actually start with the bag because it’s more important than you think. It needs to be comfortable when it gets heavy. It needs to be able to fit all your gear. Compartments are important, and it also needs to look half-decent. I nearly said cool, but I don’t think I ever look cool.

What does a developer carry around in a bag?

Sometimes, after updating or installing Package Control in Sublime, the install option seems to be missing.

Make sure it is not listed under ignored packages within your User Settings.

Fix missing Package Control install in sublime

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

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

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.

Pre Check Form Before Submit

Selecting a range from a table is easy in MYSQL. Say you want to bring back results that you are paginating. Bringing back thousands of results is inefficient and needless.

MS SQL there isn’t a simple way of doing this. The best way I have found, or my colleague Daniel has found, is to wrap a select statement inside another statement.

Above is our full statement returning all our results. First, we need to add a row number which will allow us to know the result's position.

Category: Quick Tips.