zMastaa

In the UK this month lots of potential students will soon be receiving their a-level results, and a good number of them will not be thinking about university because they have been led to believe that they are going to end up with debts of £20000 or more.

Will somebody please explained to me what calculations these guys that release these figures to the press are doing to come up with numbers like this?

I’m in university now, tuition fees are £3,250 which is paid of by a student loan so a 3 year course makes that 9750 and 13000 for 4 years.

Then we add the optional maintainance loan to cover the living costs which is almost the same as tuition fees or higher if you decide to go to university in london (you can’t complain if you chose to go to a university in london). Making it around 9000 for a 3 year course, or 12000 for a 4 year course.

Now in total that a minimum of approx £18750 student loan debt. If it was any higher than 25k then there’s a 80% chance that it was by choice your university studies will cost you any more.

Also don’t forget that there is not much interest is to be paid on student loans except to match the rise with inflation. So you go to university, work hard, get a graduate job and you will be wondering why you ever got worried in the first place.

Im currently writing a search engine that uses a couple of jQuery UI autocompletes and comboboxes, and to spice things up a bit I thought I would add some kind of live updating script that shows the user how many results will be returned, depending on the current search settings BEFORE actually pressing submit/search

i.e.  the Autotrader car search does this pretty dam nicely.

This is my translation of this effect with jQuery and PHP/mysql

Note: This tutorial assumes you already have a form with jQuery auto-completes etc all with element id’s attached

First lets start of with the javascript that will be send the data to an external php file

 
 
function numRows() {
 
var querydb = $("formid").serialize();
 
$.ajax({
 
url: "checkNumRow.php",
 
dataType: "text",
 
data: querydb,
 
success: function(result){
 
$("#results").text(result);
 
},
 
});
 
}

The jQuery script is now ready to send a query to the php file checkNumRows.php whenever the function numRows() is called, it will also return the data to any tag named #results.

So now you want the function numRows() to be called whenever the user changes data on the unfinished form, simply add the following at the end of your javascript file

 
$(":checkbox, :radio").click(numRows);
 
$("select").change(numRows);
 
$("input").blur(numRows);
 
$("input").focusout(numRows); 
// I used focusout as well as blur because blur doesn't seem to 
// work well with auto complete input boxes
 
numRows();

Now that the javascript is ready you need to create a php file called checkNumRows.php and insert the following code below and populate it with your own code to search your database

 
/*
filename::checkNumRows.php
Build your mysql search string using $_POST["element.id"]
above this so hat you end up with something along the 
lines of
$sql = "MYSQL SEARCH STRING";
*/
$results = mysql_query($sql);
$numrows = mysql_num_rows($results);
if ($numrows=="1"){
// You can echo "insert html code here" to create something more complex
//  like the autotrader display
echo  $numrows . " result found";
} else {
echo  $numrows . " results matching the search criteria";
}

Now that is done your php file should be able to display the number of rows in your database depending on whatever your $_POST (the names of your form elements on your form) requests are.
For example a black three door car search might look like this

www.yourwebsite.com/checkNumRows.php?colour=black&doors=3
and should return something similar to
200 results matching the search criteria

Now this is done, back on the page with your form you just add this 1 line to display live results

Feel free to ask questions, I will provide as much help as possible

I am pleased to welcome you to the new design of zMastaa.com! This design as you can clearly see is much cleaner than the last! I will be tweaking things here and there, but for now please let me know if you see anything out of place, or any broken links.

Okay, I have truly been neglecting this blog, mainly because the design doesn’t suit my needs or the target audience.

Therefore I am now in the process of a total redesign of this blog so hopefully come back soonish and you may see the changes