I also was giving the example using jQuery DOM, therefore adding an unneeded dependency, which is never good.

With this post, I'm trying to fix that. Here's a real quick demo where you can see the usage. So without further ado here's the working code (hopefully in all browsers XD)

var dyna_tabs = {
    
    tabs: null,

    init: function (id) {
        var tabs = $('<div></div>').append('<div id="'+ id + '"></div>');
        $('body').append(tabs);

        var list = $('<ul></ul').append('<li><a href="#"></a></li>');
        tabs.append(list);

        tabs.tabs();

        // remove the dummy tab
        tabs.tabs('remove', 0);
        tabs.hide();

        this.tabs = tabs;
    },

    add: function (tab_id, tab_name, tab_content) {
        if (this.tabs != null) {
            if (this.tabs.css('display') == 'none') {
                this.tabs.show();
            }
            var data = $('<div id="'+tab_id+'"></div>').append(tab_content);
            this.tabs.append(data).tabs('add', '#' + tab_id, tab_name);
            this.tabs.tabs('select', '#' + tab_id);
        } else {
            alert('Tabs not initialized!');
        }
    }

};

Note: obviously, this code is just for demonstration purposes. The final implementation depends on what you are trying to do. Enjoy! ^_^

If you are a frequent user of CodeIgniter, I believe FormIgniter can really save you time. Of course, it makes several assumptions that you may, or may not be in agreement with. I wonder if the source code is available some where. You can find the CodeIgniter's forum discussion here.

Anyway, I exchanged some comments with the author, Oliver Rattue, and I think we agree that the next level in form generation is moving towards an active generator. I mentioned the possibility of using a DSL for creating forms (in a similar way that Haml is used for HTML), but so far it's just an idea. Let's see if I can find some "free" time. :D

<?php
class MY_Controller extends Controller {
    
    private $view = array();

    private $view_path = '';

    public function __construct() {
        parent::__construct();
        $this->init();
    }

    /**
     * Override this method in child controllers to call initialization 
     * routines.
     */
    public function init() {}

    /**
     * Set a view variable.
     *
     * @param string $variable Name of the variable.
     * @param mixed $value Variable value.
     */
    public function set($variable, $value) {
        if (!in_array($variable, array('page_title', 'view'))) {
            $this->view[$variable] = $value;
        }
    }

    /**
     * It sets the view path. Useful to call it on the init() method.
     * Do NOT put a trailing slash.
     *
     * @param string $path The path.
     */
    public function set_view_path($path) {
        $this->view_path = $path;
    }

    /**
     * Renders a view. 
     *
     * @param string $title The page title.
     * @param string $view Filename of the view without extension. It defaults
     *                     to the name of the current controller action.
     * @param boolean $return If true, returns the translated viewg, otherwise
     *                        just renders the view normally.
     */
    public function render($title, $view='', $return=false) {
        $this->view['page_title'] = $title;

        $view = empty($view) ? $this->router->fetch_method() : $view;
        $this->view['view'] = $this->view_path . '/' .$view;

        $this->view['_front']  = $this->view_path;
        $this->view['_action'] = $this->router->fetch_method();
        
        $this->renderme();

        $output = $this->load->view(
            'layout', $this->view, $return
        );

        return $output;
    }

    /**
     * Override this method for custom view initializations that need to be
     * done all the time. Perhaps not as useful as I thought.
     */
    public function renderme() {}

    /**
     * Info discovery method.  It's not that pretty. When inspecting CI objects
     * you can get a lot of recursion. :S
     *
     * @param Object $object The object to be inspected.
     */
    public function inspect($object) {
        $methods = get_class_methods($object);
        $vars    = get_class_vars(get_class($object));
        $ovars   = get_object_vars($object);
        $parent  = get_parent_class($object);

        $output  = 'Parent class: ' . $parent . "\n\n";
        $output .= "Methods:\n";
        $output .= "--------\n";
        foreach ($methods as $method) {
            $meth = new ReflectionMethod(get_class($object), $method);
            $output .= $method . "\n";
            $output .= $meth->__toString();
        }

        $output .= "\nClass Vars:\n";
        $output .= "-----------\n";
        foreach ($vars as $name => $value) {
            $output .= $name . ' = ' . print_r($value, 1) . "\n";
        }

        $output .= "\nObject Vars:\n";
        $output .= "------------\n";
        foreach ($ovars as $name => $value) {
            $output .= $name . ' = ' . print_r($value, 1) . "\n";
        }

        echo '<pre>', $output, '</pre>';
    }
}

With that out of the way, the benefit I get is an improvement in working with views, and some nice view defaults. Let me elaborate a little.

Usually, for all projects I will have a main layout file with the following, radically summarized, structure:

<html>
<head>
    <title><?php echo $page_title; ?> :: <?php echo $this->config->item('site_name'); ?></title>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="all" href="<?php echo base_url(); ?>css/site.css" />
</head>
<body>
<div id="wrap">
    <div id="header">
        <a href="<?php echo base_url(); ?>"><img src="<?php echo base_url(); ?>i/logo.jpg" alt="Logo" /></a>
    </div>
    <?php if ($_front == 'admin'): ?>
        <?php echo $this->load->view('admin/menu'); ?>
    <?php endif; ?>
    <div id="content">
        <?php $this->load->view($view); ?>
    </div>
    <div id="footer">
        <img src="<?php echo base_url(); ?>i/footer.gif" alt="" />
    </div>
</div>
</body>
</html>

You can see in the code pasted above, that I made the assumption that if using this controller, you will have a similar layout file called "layout.php" in the application/views directory.

By making this assumption, I can now render templates, and use child controllers in the following way:

<?php

class Test extends MY_Controller {

    public function init() {
        /* Load authentication? Start sessions? */

        /* Setting the view path could be useful for specific controllers */
        $this->set_view_path('admin'); // application/views/admin/
    }

    public function index() {
        /* Assumes the template application/views/index.php exists */
        $this->render('My Home Page');
    }

    public function another() {
        /* Renders the template application/views/test.php */
        $this->render('Another', 'test');
    }

    public function moretest() {
        /* Setting a view variable */
        $this->set('greeting', 'Hello there');
    }
}

Basically, the most interesting method here is render(). You can download the source as a text file. ^_^

This was (or maybe it still is) a fun quick project where I reached at some personal conclusions about the RSS parsing scene in PHP:

• Apparently, parsing XML was very hard in PHP4
• There are not a lot of RSS parsers in PHP
• I needed to filter specific items from the feeds, and did not find a way to do this (perhaps I didn't look that well)

Therefore, I created a custom toy parser that enabled filtering and formatting support. So now you will only see job offers that are location independent, or in other words, their location is set to "Anywhere". I'm currently grabbing the feeds from oDesk, Authentic Jobs, and Freelance Switch. I don't know if other interesting feeds are out there, so let me know.

Thanks to javascript, you can filter the results, or job items in a "live search" way. Also, the app keeps track of viewed items, and feed preferences. So head to the Jobs page, and enjoy.

I googled for a bit, before reading the source. So here's a way of NOT autoloading libraries in specific controllers: just overwrite the _ci_initialize() method to look like this:

<?php
    /*
        The only difference is that calls to _ci_autoloader() were removed.
     */
    function _ci_initialize()
    {
        // Assign all the class objects that were instantiated by the
        // front controller to local class variables so that CI can be
        // run as one big super object.
        $classes = array(
                            'config'    => 'Config',
                            'input'     => 'Input',
                            'benchmark' => 'Benchmark',
                            'uri'       => 'URI',
                            'output'    => 'Output',
                            'lang'      => 'Language',
                            'router'    => 'Router'
                            );
        
        foreach ($classes as $var => $class)
        {
            $this->$var =& load_class($class);
        }

        // In PHP 5 the Loader class is run as a discreet
        // class.  In PHP 4 it extends the Controller
        if (floor(phpversion()) >= 5)
        {
            $this->load =& load_class('Loader');
        }
        else
        {
            // sync up the objects since PHP4 was working from a copy
            foreach (array_keys(get_object_vars($this)) as $attribute)
            {
                if (is_object($this->$attribute))
                {
                    $this->load->$attribute =& $this->$attribute;
                }
            }
        }
    }
?>

You could also create a special Controller and extend from it to avoid repeating code. Why would you ever want to do this? Think about calling a CI controller and action from a cron job. Or an optimized version of any page that really does not need sessions nor authentication to be loaded.

I'm putting this out there not because it's a clever solution (it is not), but to hopefully save some time searching for that non-existent option to disable autoload for some controllers; at least I couldn't find it :(. So please let me know if that exists.

If you have worked with jQuery for some time, it is most likely that you already heard about jQuery tabs. They are a neat solution to some information display problems (e.g., when you are short on content space). They are pretty easy to install and customize (with the beautiful Theme Roller application). But what happens when you have to create the HTML code on the fly? Meaning, there's no pre-existing HTML structure for you to attach the tabs.

I resolved this situation by doing the following (of course, there must be better ways but I couldn't find them at the internets):

Add HTML content dynamically to be able to add tabs programmatically:

    var create_ui = function (tabs) {
        var dom = $.DIV({},
            $.H1({}, 'Whatever just for demonstration purposes', $.SPAN({}, 'version 1.0')),
            $.DIV({id: tabs}, '')
        );
        $('body').append(dom);  
    };

Initialize the tabs, and then remove the dummy empty tab:

    var setup_tabs = function (tabs_id) {
        var dom = $.UL({},
            $.LI({}, 
                $.A({href:'#dummy'}, '')
            )
        );
        $(tabs_id).append(dom);

        // this boilerplate code that can be helpful, otherwise remove it
        $(tabs_id).tabs({
            select: function (event, ui) {
            },
            remove: function (event, ui) {
            },
            show: function (event, ui) {
                if (ui.panel) {
                    console.log(ui.panel.id);
                }
            }
        });

        // remove the dummy tab
        $(tabs_id).tabs('remove', 0);
    };

And now you can add tabs programmatically:

    var tabs_id = '#my_tabs';
    var add_tab = function (id, name, data) {
        $(tabs_id).append(data).tabs('add', id, name);
    };

I'm using the jQuery DOM plugin to create HTML quickly. Most of the time, this is not a good idea, specially, for complex interfaces. Think about maintainability ;).

Happy hacking! =)

Assuming you don't even have Ruby:

$ sudo apt-get install ruby ruby1.8-dev rdoc1.8

Install Python pygments for highlighting your source code:

$ sudo apt-get install python-pygments

For some reason, gem didn't install any of the dependencies for mojombo-jekyll, so I did it manually, but later found out that I needed to add the github repository:

$ sudo gem sources -a http://gems.github.com

// now install Jekyll with dependencies auto-installed
$ sudo gem install mojombo-jekyll -s http://gems.github.com/

I was migrating from Wordpress, so I had to do the following to convert my posts to Jekyll:

$ sudo gem install sequel
$ sudo apt-get install libmysqlclient15-dev 
$ sudo gem install mysql
$ export DB=my_wordpress_db
$ export USER=dbuser
$ export PASS=dbpass
$ ruby -r '/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mojombo-jekyll-0.4.1/lib/jekyll/converters/wordpress' -e 'Jekyll::WordPress.process( \
 "#{ENV["DB"]}", "#{ENV["USER"]}", "#{ENV["PASS"]}")'

After all that package management, when I ran Jekyll for the first time, I got several error messages from Maruku. I went for the best option and installed the alternative: RDiscount.

$ sudo gem install rdiscount

Finally, I was able to view the generated site. After this oddisey I needed a rest, so I shutted down the computer and went to sleep.

Next, you will want the "Related posts" feature. I advice you to install the following (and save some headaches):

// You could also add these packages to the initial apt-get install
$ sudo apt-get install gsl-bin libgsl0-dev

Then, you need to install the Ruby GSL package from http://rb-gsl.rubyforge.org/. Extract the rb-gsl-xxx.tar.gz file and:

$ cd rb-gsl-xxx/
$ ruby setup.rb config
$ ruby setup.rb setup
$ sudo ruby setup.rb install

However, apparently the classifier gem has a bug, a quick google search produced: Patch for `build_reduced_matrix': uninitialized constant Classifier::LSI::Matrix (NameError) but I opted for a slighly different code:

if $GSL
  u * GSL::Matrix.diag( s ) * v.trans
else 
  u * Matrix.diag( s ) * v.trans
end

Now, when you run Jekyll with the --lsi switch, it is like 100x faster. (I might be exagerating.)

If you want a go at styling the pygmentized code, you can get a base style by executing:

$ pygmentize -f html -S colorful -a .highlight > syntax.css

Finally, this is how I run Jekyll:

// For writing/developing
$ jekyll --pygments --rdiscount

// For previewing the site (but I prefer to setup an apache vhost)
$ jekyll --pygments --rdiscount --server

// Final site generation
$ jekyll --lsi --pygments --rdiscount

It has been a great ride, and is still going on. In that period of time, I've learned a lot by just attempting to do things never tried before, mostly because I didn't need to solve that kind of problems, or was being lazy.

Before that, I was (mostly) a PHP developer on the road to self-destruction. Turns out, knowing only PHP (or only one language for that matter) doesn't make you a good developer. In fact, not even an average one. I do love PHP, but it's really just fluff. There are far more interesting problems, which can't never be solved with just one tool, waiting for whoever comes first. (And, sadly, there are also urgent problems of great scale which the majority of people prefer to ignore.)

I could have shorten this catharsis-like post by just echoing a rarely heard quote: “Do not fall into the error of the artisan who boasts of twenty years experience in his craft while in fact he has only one year of experience - twenty times.” But I didn't.

Awesomely, is never too late to correct your path.

One of the common errors that new users of ZF get, is the "Invalid controller specified" error. Which means exactly that. But what happens when you did make sure that you setup the controller directory, and you created the controller in that place?

The answer is a question: are you following the ZF Controller naming conventions?

Here they are for your enjoyment:

For a controller to be resolvable, its filename must be in the following format:

XxxxxxxxController.php

where "X" represents any capitalized letter, and "x" any lowercase letter.

So, let's say you have a controller that provides SOAP functionality: you can't name it SOAPController.php, you must name it SoapController.php. A very small difference to have in mind that can save you from multiple WTFs. This information refers only to filenames. Not the class names that are in the code.

Hopefully, by doing this little post, this knowledge has been imprinted on my brain. I have my doubts.

%% Hostname {hosts, ["ns-interns02"]}. [/code] is a valid DNS name. I didn't try with with the default value of localhost.

From the Cowboy Bebop Anime soundrack.

The idea is nothing original, what is interesting is the execution of the idea. In my opinion, Mibbit is a lot more attractive to the common Java chat interface, and it seems an embedded version of the client will be available in alpha soon! You can read more about Mibbit, in the blog.

I wonder if the developer of Mibbit will provide some way to customize the interface, and extend the standard functionality of IRC beyond chat, and private messages. I can imagine a plugin that allows file transfers from 1 user to all, or between users; for example.

Easy Money.

Easy money, or easy success, or easy "something". Due to world segmentation, one spectacular original idea might not reach every part of the world simultaneously. Besides, there's always the language barrier. So present the same idea, service, or product localized, and you have considerable hopes of achieving the same success in your location, city, country, etc., right?

Of course, doing any kind of startup as your first one, will give you a lot of experience so it will have, whether you success or fail at it, positive effects.

However, originality is one of the constant traits in successful startups. If you're the kind of person who has mastered the art of learning from other person's mistakes and success then, why would you ever want to invest your time in an already beated to death idea?

Working on something that nobody has ever done before, something that could change the status quo for some context, something that solves a current problem, something original; is not work at all. It is passion. And passion is one of the essential driving forces of startups.

It baffles me seeing a lot of job offers where the job is to clone a site. From my freelance web developer perspective, it's a bit dissapointing. Fortunately, almost everybody can start a startup. I know I can. Just waiting for the right idea. An original idea, that is.

References

Things that make me laugh, and sometimes cry: Exposed: The 7 Most Blatant Web 2.0 Rip Offs Web 2.0 in Germany: Copy/Paste Innovation or more? Cloning Web 2.0: A Look at Copycat Applications Making a Copycat Site? At Least Copy an Idea That's Working Copycats: Top 10 International Facebook Clones