Dragnet Systems has launched a new website for Estuary Wholesale Suppliers who are an electrical equipment supplier based in Limerick, Ireland.

The site itself is a very simple design with the focus very much on getting the information across in an easy, uncluttered way. The site was built by our designer Raul and the tech was handled by Sinead. I think they both did a fantastic job getting this site out the door considering that they have other projects on the go as well.

My next project should be launching around April 20th if everything goes to plan. It's a brand new concept for booking a taxi for businesses and I can't wait until the site goes live when I can talk more about it.

It's been a long time coming but today is the day that Dragnet Systems finally launches its newest micro site for Hertz Europe: Hertz4Ryanair.com. As you can tell from the screenshot above this new site was designed very much with Ryanair and Hertz in mind. The style and approach to the design also follows on from our Hertz Aerlingus project we released 6 months ago - HertzFlyDrive.com. There is a nice clean interface for selecting your cars and accessories that we think really add to the overall user experience. It is also a much faster booking process for booking your car compared to the micro site that this replaces.

This little feature can be very handy if you want to auto scroll the page to a particular section. I have used this previously on sites where I want the user to be shown error messages that are on top of a large form. So instead of the user clicking submit and nothing happening the user would click submit and if there were any errors the page would scroll to the error messages on the top of the form.

To achieve this effect create a javascript function like this:
(Thanks to David King from OneDayLater.com for the Opera fix for the button click event!)

function goToByScroll(element) {

    var el = $.browser.opera ? $("html") : $("html, body");
    el.animate({ scrollTop: $(element).offset().top }, 'slow');
}

Now call the above function whenever you want the screen to move to a point. For our example we will scroll on a button click or from a link click using the code below:

$(document).ready(function () {

        //scroll if link click to section2
        $('#Section1 a').click(function (evt) {
            evt.preventDefault();
            goToByScroll('#Section2');
        });
        
        //scroll if button click to section 1 
        $('#SubmitForm').click(function (evt) {
            evt.preventDefault();
            goToByScroll('#Section1');
        });
});

[Feb 24 Update] Looks like we're back in business. Needed to re-install BlogEngine before I could get it to work and then I had to remove the old theme my site had as it was not compatible, which is a shame. Looks like the theme situation for BlogEngine hasn't improved much since my post 6 months ago on where to get good blog engine themes.

Just a quick mention to let you know that the comments system is down on my site at the moment. I'm not sure what happened but I think it has something to do with my failed attempt at upgrading to blog engine 1.6 last weekend. I will take a look into upgrading to BlogEngine 1.6 again over the next few days if I have time. I will also upgrade my server to IIS 7 with my provider...which should be fun if any past upgrades are anything to go by :D

At the moment I am currently very busy finishing up a big new project for Hertz. It should be going live in around 2 weeks. Once it's up I should have more time to blog about all the new jquery techniques I've learned during developement.

If you have a checkbox on your form that has to be selected before you want the user to continue you can use jquery to check if it has been selected by doing something like the following:

$(document).ready(function () {

        $('#SubmitForm').click(function () {
            if ($('#Terms').attr('checked') == false) {
                alert('please select the terms and conditions before continuing.')              
                return false;
            }
        });
    });

Your html form must have a checkbox with an id value of Terms to match the javascript above.

    Please accept our terms and conditions

    
    

If it is crucial to have a checkbox ticked before continuing in your website or app you should validate on the server side as well but the above script should help to get you started.

Click here for a simple demo of this in action.

<shamelessPlug>I've been meaning to setup my own domain name for a while now. During December last year Blacknight.com were offering .ie domain names for only €2.99 so I couldn't resist and bought richardreddy.ie.

The site design is using BCProducties' vCard template which was given away for free for January to members of ThemeForest. If you're quick you might still be able to download the file for free here.

Over the coming days I will update the work section of the site so that it contains details of my latest work. It's nice to finally have something a bit more professional to use rather then reddybrek ;)</shamelessPlug>

It's a new year and thankfully the work inside in Dragnet Systems shows no signs of slowing down. VGWines.com is a brand new online store for an existing wine retailer based in Kerry, Vanilla Grape Wines Ltd.

To read from a Web.Config file using C# is very easy to do. Let's say we have an appSettings tag in our Web.Config that holds the website title. Inside in our web.config you would have something like this:

To get .net to read this value all you need to do is add this to your code behind page on your site. Be sure to add the System.Web.Configuration namespace as this is not added by default.

using System.Web.Configuration;


//read in the SiteName tag from web.config
string MySiteName = WebConfigurationManager.AppSettings["SiteName"];

If you want more details on how to read from web.config please see my earlier post here

You might also want to write to your web.config file to allow the end user to update this data. To do this you must ensure that the Network Service user (or the ASP.NET user on WinServer 03 or earlier) has modify permissions on your website root folder.

Without the correct permission you will get the following error if you try to add the code below:
An error occurred loading a configuration file: Access to the path 'c:\inetpub\wwwroot\yourwebsitefolder\py39wsfg.tmp' is denied.

Assuming you have setup the correct permissions this code below will allow your web app to write to the web.config file.

//update the SiteName tag in web.config with a new value

Configuration config = WebConfigurationManager.OpenWebConfiguration("~");
config.AppSettings.Settings["SiteName"].Value = "New Site Name Value";
config.Save(ConfigurationSaveMode.Modified);
ConfigurationManager.RefreshSection("appSettings");