Easy printer friendly pages

You don’t need to muck around with JavaScript, page redirection or PDF integration just to make your XHTML web pages printer friendly.

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Structuring the page title tag

While it’s quite normal for website page titles to incorporate the site name, there are a couple of differing opinions on how this should be structured. One school of thought suggests that the site name should have prominence, like this:

<title>site name - content heading</title>

The other school of thought considers the actual content heading to be much more important, like this:

<title>content heading - site name</title>

Both methods are in widespread use. So, which is better?

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Stupid defaults in web forms

One of the more important decisions in software application design is that user choices in forms should have default values, where possible, and those default values should be the most likely ones that most users would want chosen.

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PHP last day of the month calculation

Here’s the easiest way to output the last day of any month using PHP:

function lastday($month = '', $year = '') {
   if (empty($month)) {
      $month = date('m');
   }
   if (empty($year)) {
      $year = date('Y');
   }
   $result = strtotime("{$year}-{$month}-01");
   $result = strtotime('-1 second', strtotime('+1 month', $result));
   return date('Y-m-d', $result);
}

We found it useful for reporting purposes when filtering data purely for the “current” month but by specifying the month and year arguments, you can use it for any month of any year.

Please note that the output is in IS0 8601 international date format. If you need anything else, modify the last line to suit.

Email pet peeves

Peggy Duncan over at Fastpitch writes about email pet peeves that cause stress in the workplace. If you found our post on email etiquette a little disdainful, have a read of Peggy’s article.