I’m in love. It’s so simple to use, and provides seemingly endless flexibility. It’s a great feeling to know all of my code is contained in logical places, which has increased my developing speed temendously. CodeIgniter uses the Model View Controller (MVC) architectural pattern and despite this being the first time I’ve really used it, it was very quick to understand.

I’ll write more about my experiences with CodeIgniter soon, but I suggest any PHP developer to head on over to the CodeIgniter site and download the latest version, and drop me a comment to let me know what you think of it!

While working on a personal project this evening, I wrote a small function to group a list of results by the first letter of each record.

As simple as it may be, I think it’s very effective in breaking up a long list of results and it’s very easy to implement.

First up I defined a list of names in an array, and then sorted them alphabetically.

Next I created a function called ‘group_by_first’. Here’s my code, I’ll explain what’s going on underneath.

Line 1: Here we name the function and add a parameter that stores the current record

Line 2: Creating a global variable named $cur_first (current first letter), which will be empty to start with

Line 3: Here I define a variable called $get_first, and retrieve the first character from the current record. For example, if we’re on ‘Bruce’ then $get_first will store ‘B’

Line 4: Comparing the current letter group we’re in with the first letter of the current record. If they don’t match, that means we’ve run out of records that begin with that letter and we’re ready to make a new group

Line 5: Echo out a div with some styling, and the first letter of the current record. The inline CSS is there purely for demonstration, please rememeber to define a class in your stylesheet!

Line 6: We’ve added a new group, so now we’ve got to tell $cur_first that we’re on the next letter in the list, which we do by assigning it the value of $get_first

Line 8: Finally, we echo out the current record

All we’ve got left to do now is to run each element of the array through our function!

And here’s a basic example of it in action.

With some better styling I think that this can be an elegant solution for breaking up your lists of records.

The O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004 was the first notable use of the term, where Tim O’Reilly described it as:

Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.

While I truly believe in the Internet as a platform (just look at how Google are dominating the online applications market), the rules for success are rather blurred.

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I believe your website background can be a fantastic advertising space, as Gamespot have just shown this morning with their stunning Lego Indiana Jones background.

I think that the background looks fantastic, and it was a clever move to incorporate it into their flash banner as well. This is something Gamespot do often, and I know many other sites, especially in the gaming and video sharing world, do the same.

Changing the background of your site to reflect what’s currently happening is a great idea. It keeps your site looking fresh, it can bring in revenue and you don’t compromise your content.

If you’ve seen any more examples of this strategy please leave a comment and let me know!

The main route of communication between you both is the comments under each post, so why not pretty them up a bit?

In this article I’ll show you the various CSS styles you need to change, and I’ll also explain how I added the custom background when I reply to comments on my own articles.

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In your Wordpress admin interface, navigate to Presentation > Theme Editor and then select Single Post from the right menu. The ’single.php’ file will appear in the editing window.

The first change is to replace the second line:

<div id="content" class="widecolumn">

with

<div id="content" class="narrowcolumn">

Once that’s done, scroll to the bottom of the page and find the line <?php get_footer(); ?> and replace it with:

And that’s it! Your sidebar will now appear on every page of your Wordpress blog.

For those who have not heard of Google 20% time, a quick rundown. Google 20% was created to allow employees to focus on what they’re really passionate about. Many Google products and services were born through this, including Google Suggest and AdSense for Content.

Here at our studio we’re all for it too! I started off spending 20% of my week learning PHP, MySQL and anything else that tickled my fancy. While we definately saw how powerful a tool this could be, we recently pushed it even further.

We’re getting increasingly busy lately and as such this 20% time started to take a back seat for me. I’d feel bad if I was reading up on the latest Facebook app when there was work that I knew had to be done. I had a chat with my boss and he suggested that I work from home one afternoon a week. Again, I didn’t feel quite right taking up the offer but we decided to give it a trial run.

Wednesday afternoon rolled around and I went home, laptop in hand, ready to spend the afternoon developing my knowledge. Thursday morning I came in with a new product which several clients have already bought into! Having that space at home without the telephone going, or Outlook constantly telling me that I have more work, allowed me to be more creative and gave our company a new product to sell.

I’m thoroughly enjoying spending this time to better myself and I can’t recommend it enough!

Yesterday Imre visited the Internet World exhibition in Earl’s Court, London. We attended a couple of seminars on Web 2.0 and found some very interesting ideas and suggestions.

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I set a new year’s resolution to redesign and clean out my blog, and I’m almost done!

Please check back soon for my thoughts on web design and gaming.