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When I repeatedly code something, even if only a few times a year, I eventually get disgusted with myself for not having written a function to do the work for me.

Well, below is such a function.

The JavaScript function will format the date and/or time according to your formatting codes. When you call the function, tell it the id value where to publish the result, and how to format the result.

That's pretty much it.

Of course, there are things to consider while getting up to the last step. Mostly, it's how to specify the format you prefer (do you want to print "January" or "Jan", or "01" or "1", for example). I'll address formatting shortly.

An anchor link is sometimes referred to as a scroll-to link or a jump link. The anchor link scrolls the web page to the spot on the page that has a matching id attribute.

To clarify, an h3 tag might have an id="my-spot" attribute. Thus, clicking a link with a #my-spot anchor (<a href="#my-spot">) will scroll the browser window to the <h3 id="my-spot"> tag.

First, the basic "how it works."

You have a form field.

You have a link (or image, button, div, …)

When the link is tapped, the form field is filled in.

That's the essence of how it works.

I used this for new bookkeeping software. It needed to email someone after I updated records. Well, I wanted to view the email first to verify all the data the email should have actually was present.

But I got tired of typing in my email address and then typing in their email address. Every day.

I made two buttons. One for "Them" and one for "Me." When I tap a button, the correct email address is filled into the address field. Yummy.

Other ways the idea might be used:

• Prefill a subject field depending on whether "I have a sick bird" or "I have a sick fish" was tapped.
• Fill in a field according to tapped preference. Color, shape, location, … .
• Prefill an email content box depending on whether the email is a love letter or a breakup letter.
• …

You can automatically scroll the content of a div to the bottom. Generally, this would be done for user convenience.

I had need for that functionality just this morning. It is the reason for this article. My thought was that some of you would appreciate knowing how to do this.

A built-in JavaScript function allows your web page to send a quick message to a URL on the same domain.

Data isn't actually required. You may wish to touch the page or script without sending anything.

No response is received from the page or script. But data may be sent. If sent, the data size is limited to about 64k.

The beacon may be used to:

• Log a page load.
• Record clicks on certain links.
• Make a note when a user requests the full size of an image.
• Cause a script to send an email.
• Other uses you would find handy to have available.

Code examples are further below. First, here is the format for using the function.

navigator.sendBeacon(URL,OPTIONALDATA)

Apps that request things from your website have an IP address. The IP address tells the website where to respond to.

The requesting app generally is a browser. It may be a robot or spider. It might be a VPN website app. Whatever it is, the app asks for something from your website.

When asked for something by a browser or other app, it is typically either a request for a response from PHP or other software on your website or a request for a web page available at your site. Additional requests may be made (images, CSS files, videos, …) to complete the construction of a web page.

All of that, everything, requires an IP address to send stuff to. The app tells your website the IP address to use, and your website sends its response to that IP address.

For a simple rotate, I generally use the CSS rotate property. I specify how many degrees or what fraction of a turn, and I'm good to go.

Images can be rotated. Paragraphs, divs, even entire tables can be rotated. To rotate individual characters, they need to be in a div (or a table or other block container). To rotate a character within a line of text, specify the display:inline-block; CSS declaration for the div containing the character.

All checkboxes of a set can be made to conform to a controlling checkbox.

In other words, when the controlling checkbox is tapped, all checkboxes of the set are checked or unchecked according to the state of the controlling checkbox.

The functionality can be desired when there are many checkboxes in a set. I recently needed such functionality.

A dashboard I'm making is being coded to export a table from database entries. The columns to include in the table are specified with checkboxes. Instead of requiring the user to tap 10 times to select all columns, I made an "ALL" checkbox to do it.

Have you experienced your website suddenly giving error messages when you use https:// URLs? Many site owners have.

When that happens, it's almost a certainty that the domain's SSL certificate has expired. It is also almost a certainty that the website owner was unaware of the certificate's expiration date.

The software with this article, SSL Certificate Check, was written to do a quick check on a domain's SSL certificate. The software reports the certificate's expiration date.

SSL Certificate Check will check the certificate expiration date only on domains with a valid certificate. Expired certificates are no longer valid. If you don't have a valid certificate, then you already know something is wrong because https:// URLs don't work.

ASCII quotes are what you see when you work with plain text software (not unicode text). Something like this:

He said, "You've got 'spicies' in your pie."

Typographical quotes are sometimes called educated quotes or curly quotes. The ASCII quotes in the above example converted to typographical quotes looks like this:

He said, “You’ve got ‘spicies’ in your pie.”

Notice that the ASCII apostrophe is also converted. It became a typographical apostrophe.

Wanted: When a mouse hovers over an image, the entire image becomes larger.

This article describes how to do an image zoom. It uses CSS. But no JavaScript.

Also of note is that this is a hover effect. That means a mouse pointer must be available to hover over the image. Generally, multimedia phones and tablets don't have a mouse pointer.