A new plugin has been released that will soon be included with most sites I and others create. Chrome Frame. When visited by an Internet Explorer browser it will spawn a full screen frame with a copy of Google Chrome running inside it. If you are a developer of any sort you will recognize the time this will save, no more creating 4 different versions of a site to support all the different “features” of different versions of IE. If you’ve never heard of this then this news will likely mean very little to you, one day you will be asked to install a plugin to properly view a web-site and it will go from looking rather funky to a correct layout.

Google THANK YOU!!

Very brief background on the joys of this new plugin: IE 6 displays web-pages different than most every other browser on the market, unless you do one of 3 things:

1. use a very limited and ineffecient method of structure code
2. make a version of the page that will load ONLY for IE 6 users
3. use a hack such as IE-7.js to make it behave a little more like others

Now rinse and repeat for IE7, and if you want to use a new technology such as the HTML5 tag Canvas (which make very cool eye candy & interfaces possible) IE8

Since all other browsers draw their base from one of 2 sources Webkit (think Apple Safari & Google Chrome) and Gecko (think Firefox). That makes a potential of 5 different versions of a web-site being built so that it will display properly for everyone. There are standards that have been established by the World Wide Web Consortium which both Webkit & Gecko follow fairly well, including keeping up with new standards as they are released. IE…. well they pick and choose, and sometimes just play their own way, so chances are you are building 4 versions of a site to be displayed properly.

Now enter Google Chromeframe which you will be asked to install once through a single click and BAM… instant standards compatible displayed web-pages without the need to build 3 extra versions. For Web Developers the world over this is a happy day indeed, if you are looking to have a new web-site built then you can share the joy as the costs to build and maintain a site will be reduced to anyone that wants to use this new tool.

This is a short script I built for a project, ended up opting to use individual AJAX uploads rather than multiple uploads at once. Yet a script this useful deserves to see the rest of the world so I give you.

Multiple File Uploads with JQuery and Code Igniter

To get it running extract into the root directory of a Code Igniter installation, included are:

• example Controller
• Multi-Upload Library
• example view form & success page with results
• jquery multi-upload plugin

The upload library is based upon the CI upload library, it will check for attacks, and check whether the files uploaded are images or something else. You can restrict the files to any extension(s), if you need more security than that then I’ll assume you know enough to add in the function you need.

The beauty of this script is the simplicity, with a few lines of code you can allow for multiple uploads from a single page, then let this script handle the uploads and pass on information about everything that happened.

If you are not familiar with Code Igniter it is a rather lightweight PHP MVC framework. Which is a geeky way of saying that it is a programming framework that can save you time without eating your server. Of course the same goes for JQuery, which is for Javascript framework that will save you time.

If you have any questions please leave a comment or ask me through the contact form.