Do you use Spotlight a lot on your Mac? Well, Alfred app might be an app for you. I started using it a week ago and love it ever since.

• It’s fast,
• it does more then Spotlight, like calculations,
• it looks good,
• it’s free*

To use Alfred with the ⌘ + Space shortcut, you first have to switch the shortcut of Spotlight to another one, before you can change it in Alfred.

*) you can optionally buy an upgrade for even more features. I’m still pleased with the free version.

1. Open Automator and choose a new Workflow
2. Add a ‘Run Shell Script’ action
3. Add to following script in the textbox: “/usr/local/bin/python /path/to/sickbeard/sickbeard.py -d”
4. Save the workflow as an Application in the SickBeard application folder
5. Goto System Preferences > Accounts > User > Login Items
6. Add the Application you just created with Automator

My personal favorite is the single project per repository, because I like the separation of projects, having (somehow) meaningful revision numbers and portability in sense of moving repositories around or backing them up.

But my colleague pointed out some pros for his preferred method: one repository for multiple derived projects. For example, you can more easily merge changes (made in different projects) back to the “base” project.

While googling for some best practises, I saw that the internet is pretty devided. Time for a poll for my fellow developers: what’s your personal preference?

Feel free to elaborate your answer in the comments below.

Back in February 2011 I also received a nice “Thank you”, when I shared the snippet with someone on stackoverflow. So this little snippet must be useful to other people. Reason for me to finally put this on my blog:

<?php
 
/*
 * Sort a multidimensional array on a column
 *
 * For example:
 * <code>
 * <?php array_qsort2($users, "username", "ASC"); ?>
 * </code>
 *
 * @param array $array array with hash array
 * @param mixed $column key that you want to sort on
 * @param enum $order asc or desc
 */
function array_qsort2 (&$array, $column=0, $order="ASC")
{
    $oper = ($order == "ASC")?">":"<";
 
    if(!is_array($array)) return;
 
    usort($array, create_function('$a,$b',"return (\$a['$column'] $oper \$b['$column']);")); 
 
    reset($array);
}

First things, first. Why should you use Eclipse for you PHP development? There are some things why I like this so much. First off, it’s completely free and you get a lot of features. Secondly, it’s platform independent. Also, it’s extendable with plugins, which I’ll cover some later on in this article.

Although some aspects of Eclipse might feel a little slow to some of you, it is nothing compared to the features it brings you. So if you haven’t tried it yet, or have tried it but didn’t quite get the feeling of it, feel free to follow my instructions and give it a(nother) shot!

Let’s begin.

Download and install Eclipse

For our installation we use the latest (3.7 when writing this article) Eclipse version—which, if you haven’t already downloaded it yet, you can download here:

http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/

Make sure you grab the Classic version of Eclipse.

Next, unpack the archived package to a location on you hard drive. I usually put this in my Applications folder. Now launch Eclipse.app—you will see the following window.

Select a location for you workspace. Please choose wisely because all files of all your PHP projects will be stored here (you don’t want to run out of MB’s, right? And of course you make sure the location is backup’ed once in a while, right?).

Press Ok. You’ll see the following screen.

Click the Go to workbench arrow-icon. Your workspace is loaded.

Download and install PDT

Help > Install New Software. Click on the Add… button. For the Name enter PDT and for the Location enter http://download.eclipse.org/tools/pdt/updates/3.0/milestones/.

Click Ok.

Now select the PHP Development Tools (PDT) All-In-One SDK and click Next.

Follow the instructions and PDT will be installed.

Configuring Eclipse

Time to do some reordering of the various tabs and panels—of-course I can’t tell you how you like it best, but this is how I like it most.

Let’s begin with opening the PHP Perspective. Go to Window > Open Perspective > Other. Select PHP and click Ok. You can now close the Java Perspective by right-clicking on it and clicking Close.

Notice that I closed the Type Hierarchy panel, moved the Outline panel from the right side to the left and moved the Task List to the bottom. Of course you can always reopen—via Window > Show View—and rearrange the tabs to your likings.

Ok, this was easy, right? Now let’s do some configurations. Open the preferences.

The following settings can be very important when you are working in a team, with other members.

Goto General > Workspace and choose the Text file encoding and New text file line delimiter. I prefer UTF-8 and Unix line endings. Make sure that all your team members are using the same settings, so you won’t run into problems later on.

An other setting I always do is Suspend all validators—while working with Eclipse I noticed it regularly felt unresponsive, this happend when it was validating project files, especially with large projects. With all validators suspended this was no longer the case.

Goto Validation and check Suppend all validators.

Another—yet personal—preference is turning off code folding. While using Eclipse I found the code folding feature pretty buggy. When copying some code it would not always get the complete function. Althought this might have been fixed in newer versions of Eclipse.

Goto PHP > Editor > Code folding and uncheck Enable folding.

There is also this thing in Eclipse that’s called Hyperlinking. When you hover over a function name while holding a Modifier Key, like ⌘ or OPTION, it will get a underline and you can click on it to navigate to the function. This always happened to me on accident while I wanted to copy some text (this probably has to do with the way how I select text, holding various modifier keys, like SHIFT or ⌘, in combination with arrow keys). Anyway I always turn the feature off. You can do this as followed.

Go to General > Editors > Text Editors > Hyperlinking and uncheck Enable on demand hyperlink style navigation.

Next, a setting that your coworkers will love you for when working with version control. When you create a new project in Eclipse it will create a few files and directories where it stores some project related settings. Normally Eclipse wants to commit these files to you version control system. Can you think of what will happen when your coworker is also using Eclipse and updates his working copy and all his settings are overwritten? Exactly—to prevent this from happening you can tell it to ignore the specific resources.

To do this go to Team > Ignored Resources and add the following patterns:

• .settings
• .buildpath
• .project

Ok, we are done here for now—let’s continue.

The following setting has to do with the same resources as we just ignored for version control systems. As default Eclipse hides all resources in the PHP Explorer. This not very handy when you want to edit a .htaccess file. Let’s work on that.

Close the preferences window—if you haven’t already. Now open the contextmenu of the PHP Explorer, click on Filters….

In the following window that opens uncheck .* resources. Next, check Name filter patterns and enter the following the input box: .settings, .buildpath, .project.

Click Ok.

Ok, well done so far. Let’s continue with setting up the search. When you are developing on a project you regularly want to search—at least I want to. There are two possibilities, first you want to search inside the current document or secondly, you want to search inside the complete project/workspace. The first option works just fine in Eclipse, you press ⌘F, type your query and hit return (although you might want to check Wrap search and Incremental). The second option on the other hand works different. Try it: press CTRL + H. The following window opens. 

As you can see there are a lot of tabs. I prefer to customize this, as I don’t need all of them except for the File Search tab. Also while these tabs are active Eclipse somethings might switch to a tab based on the current context, this might confuse you when you are expecting to search through files, instead of something else. To change this you can click on Customize…

Uncheck all options except File Search and press OK. Now when you want to search, just press CTRL + H, type the query and hit return. You can also first select some text in the document and hit CTRL + H, the query will then be selected text and you only have to hit return.

Well done. You’ve now tackled most of the inconveniences that Eclipse has on default. Let’s continue with some useful plugins.

Plugins

One of the pros of using Eclipse is the support for plugins. You can install plugins as follows.

Goto Help > Install New Software. Click on the Add… button. For the Name enter the name of the plugin and for the Location enter the url of the Update site and click Ok.

Select the items you want to install, click Next and follow the instructions. After installing a new plugin it is best to restart Eclipse.

Subclipse

Subclipse is a plugin for using SVN in Eclipse. It takes care for all SVN actions like, update, commit, checkout etc.

Update site: http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.6.x

One note on installing this plugin: I had to change the SVN interface in order to make it work on my OSX install.

Goto preferences > Team > SVN > Select SVNKit (Pure Java) as your Client. If it is not there, you have to install it (see the update site).

EGit

Rather using GIT instead of SVN? EGIT is a Team provider that does just that. You can browser repositories and push and pull changes from them.
You might want to check out the extensive User Guide.

Update site: http://download.eclipse.org/releases/indigo

FileSync

FileSync is a plugin that automatically syncs changed files to a preconfigured location on your harddrive. I use this plugin at work—where we work on a remote server—to sync changes to a mounted network drive.

Update site: http://andrei.gmxhome.de/eclipse/

PHP Tool Integration

This plugin adds some very useful tools to Eclipse. Tools that PHP Tool Integration includes are:

• PHP_CodeSniffer
• PHPUnit
• PHP Depend
• PHP Copy/Paste Detector

These tools can help you write better PHP code.

Update site: http://www.phpsrc.org/eclipse/pti/

AnyEdit

This plugin was brought to my attention by @pkruithof. AnyEdit adds several new tools to the context menu of text- based Eclipse editors, to output consoles, to Eclipse main menu and editor toolbar. AnyEdit contributes also Import/Export working sets wizards.

AnyEdit helps to keep your code free of any trailing whitespace.

Update site: http://andrei.gmxhome.de/eclipse/

Workflow tips

So, now that you have setup Eclipse for PHP and installed some plugins, I would like give you some final workflow tips. Actually these tips are the things I like most of working with Eclipse.

Keyboard commands

SVN workflow

I have taught myself a nice workflow: whenever I have made some changes to my code, and am ready to commit, I review all my changes. And it’s very easy using the Eclipse synchronize view:

Right-click the name of the project > Team > Synchronize

The synchronize view opens. It shows you all the files that are changed, compared to the revision you checked out. Now double-click the first file in the synchronize view. A compare-editor opens. This gives you a nice view of all the changes in the file. By clicking the Next difference (yellow down arrow) icon, you step through each change for each file. By reviewing every piece of changed code, you see errors, missing comments, etc. right away and you can easily fix them.

Text compare

Eclipse has a very powerful compare editor. You can compare files with each other or you can compare against a certain revision. While comparing you can make changes on the fly. I use this function quite often. To start comparing two files:

Select two files > Right-click a selected file > Compare With > Each Other.

You can now scroll through the files or jump to the next difference by pressing the Next difference icon in the top right of the editor.

Final words

I hope you found this article useful (please “like”, if so). I must admit that Eclipse has a tough learning curve, but once you get to know all the features it will become hard to code without it.

Feel free to ask me any questions or to send me suggestions. You can always contact me or leave a comment below.

DOTA 2

About a week ago I read on the interwebs about a sequel of the famous Warcraft III mod: DOTA. It came to my attention because Valve (who’s working on the sequel) organized a championship, called The International. Sixteen of the worlds’ best DOTA teams entered in the championship and all matches were broadcasted live throught the DOTA2 website. The winning team won $ 1,000,000 USD.

Well, I watched some matches and they got me all excited for DOTA2. So now the waiting game begins, because DOTA2 is scheduled for the beginning of 2012. If I’m lucky they let me in for the beta, that should start in about a few weeks (sign-up here if you want to).

Take a look at this finale match to see what DOTA2 is all about:

Battlefield 3

Another game that got my attention is Battlefield 3. While not having played Battlefield since Battlefield 1942, I’m every excited to get my hands on this new version. Check out the awesome graphics for yourself:

Battlefield 3 will be released on October, 27th.

Minecraft 1.8 “Adventure update”

Of course I couldn’t let this one pass. Everybody who is into Minecraft is waiting for this. Notch and his coworkers are working on all the new features (rivers, villages, combat, more) and regularly releasing some screenshots to the public. The waiting game for this one will at least be to somewhere around september.

Check out these screenshot of upcoming features I’ve collected:

Although they can be powerful, they can also be pretty bad. Not all plugin writers are experienced programmers, which can lead to bugs and performance issues. An other thing with plugins is that you have to maintain them by updating them regularly, and with regularly I mean really often…

For some simple features it is just better to write them yourself in your functions.php, or a single custom plugin. Here is a list of simple mods that don’t need plugins.

Add special user capabilities

If you’re using WordPress for client websites like me. You might have assigned the client the ‘editor’ role, instead of the ‘administrator’ role, so they can’t change important settings that break the WordPress install.

There are some features that you would like to have available to your clients, but that aren’t when they have the ‘editor’ role, like the Widgets page under Appearance.

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$role_object = get_role('editor'); // get the role
$role_object->add_cap( 'edit_theme_options'); // add a capability
$role_object->remove_cap( 'edit_theme_options'); // remove a capability

For a list of all available capabilities you can read here.

Adding custom post types

Custom post types are a powerful feature of WordPress, which allows you to have other types then Posts or Pages. For example, if you have a website that sells books, you need a way to enter those book details.

Here is a template you can use to add custom post types. Just replace ‘book’ with any other type you want. Of course you can also add multiple custom post types.

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/*
* Register the custom post type for book
*
* @return void
*/
function register_post_type_book()
{
  $labels = array(
    'name' => _x('Books', 'post type general name'),
    'singular_name' => _x('Book', 'post type singular name'),
    'add_new' => _x('New Book', 'performance'),
    'add_new_item' => __('Add Item'),
    'edit_item' => __('Edit Item'),
    'new_item' => __('New Item'),
    'view_item' => __('View Item'),
    'search_items' => __('Search Items'),
    'not_found' =>  __('No items found'),
    'not_found_in_trash' => __('No items found in your trash'),
    'parent_item_colon' => '',
    'menu_name' => 'Books'
  );
  $args = array(
    'labels' => $labels,
    'public' => true,
    'publicly_queryable' => true,
    'show_ui' => true,
    'query_var' => true,
    'rewrite' => array(
      'slug' => 'books',
      'with_front' => false,
    ),
    'capability_type' => 'post',
    'hierarchical' => false,
    'menu_position' => null,
    'supports' => array('title','editor', 'thumbnail', 'excerpt')
  );
  register_post_type('book', $args);
}
add_action('init', 'register_post_type_book');

More on custom post types here.

Add image sizes

Most website designs have images displayed at multiple sizes. You might—for example—show a posts’ featured image in a slideshow at a bigger size then when you show it in a listing. Wordpress makes it easy to define multiple image sizes. Just add the add_image_size function call to your functions.php. The first parameter is an identifier for this image size, the second and third are the dimensions and the last parameter indicates if the image should be cropped.

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add_image_size( 'book_thumb', 170, 120, true );
add_image_size( 'book_normal', 337, 470, true );
add_image_size( 'book_slideshow', 440, 310, true );

To use the new image size in your templates you can add the following code.

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the_post_thumbnail('book_slideshow');

Custom MCE buttons

WordPress comes with a full featured WYSIWYG editor by default. Although that might be nice for experienced users, most clients I work for don’t that have this experience. They like to give their texts funky colors, even though that doesn’t match with the overall webdesign. That’s why I normally limit the some of the editors functions.

Here is a template that limits the available blockformats, like H2 and H3 blocks, and disables the forecolor option.

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function custom_change_mce_buttons( $initArray )
{
  //@see http://wiki.moxiecode.com/index.php/TinyMCE:Control_reference
  $initArray['theme_advanced_blockformats'] = 'p,h2,h3'; // limit the available blockformats
  $initArray['theme_advanced_disable'] = 'forecolor';  // disabled forecolor
  return $initArray;
}
add_filter('tiny_mce_before_init', 'custom_change_mce_buttons');

Change Contact Info Form

Each user in WordPress have it’s own contact information. On default there are fields for AIM, Yahoo IM and Google Talk. Well, these services feel a bit old-school and you might want to add some new ones to the list—like Twitter and Facebook.

Here is a simple filter function that just does that:

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function new_contactmethods( $contactmethods )
{
  $contactmethods['twitter'] = 'Twitter'; // Add Twitter
  $contactmethods['facebook'] = 'Facebook'; // Add Facebook
  $contactmethods['linkedin'] = 'Linkedin'; // Add Linkedin
  unset($contactmethods['yim']); // Remove Yahoo IM
  unset($contactmethods['aim']); // Remove AIM
  unset($contactmethods['jabber']); // Remove Jabber
 
  return $contactmethods;
}
add_filter('user_contactmethods','new_contactmethods',10,1);

Adding shortcodes

Shortcodes are cool. They allow you to add “special stuff” to posts or pages inline. For example: insert Adsense blocks into you posts or insert a (contact)form inline.

Here is my adsense shortcode:

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/**
 * Insert adsense into you post or page.
 *
 * Usage:
 * 	[adsense align="left|right" slot="00000" width="100" height="100"]
 *
 * @param array $atts
 * @param mixed $content
 */
function adsense($atts, $content = null)
{
	$nlbr = "\n";
 
	// set defaults
	extract(shortcode_atts(array(
        "client" => 'ca-pub-000000000000000',
        "slot" => '00000000000',
        "width" => '200',
        "height" => '200',
        "align" => '',
    ), $atts));
 
    // alignment
    $style = "";
    switch($align) {
    	case "left":
    		$style.="float:left; margin-right: 10px;";
    		break;
    	case "right":
    		$style.="float:right; margin-left: 10px;";
    		break;
    }
 
    // output ad code
	$retval = '<div style="'.$style.'">' . $nlbr;
	$retval.= '<script type="text/javascript"><!--' . $nlbr;
	$retval.= 'google_ad_client = "'.$client.'";' . $nlbr;
	$retval.= 'google_ad_slot = "'.$slot.'";' . $nlbr;
	$retval.= 'google_ad_width = '.$width.';' . $nlbr;
	$retval.= 'google_ad_height = '.$height.';' . $nlbr;
	$retval.= '//-->' . $nlbr;
	$retval.= '</script>' . $nlbr;
	$retval.= '<script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"></script>' . $nlbr;
	$retval.= '</div>' . $nlbr;
 
	return $retval;
}
add_shortcode("adsense", "adsense");

Learn more about shortcodes here and here.

Customizing the Admin Help texts

The default contextual help texts of WordPress aren’t always that helpful, especially when you’re developing WordPress sites for clients. You might even want to add some additional help information about certain pages.

Here is a function to get you started:

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/**
 * Customize contextual help texts
 *
 * @param string $contextual_help
 * @param string $screen_id
 * @param string $screen
 */
function my_contextual_help($contextual_help, $screen_id, $screen)
{
	$help_text = "";
	$debug = 0; // toggle this to find out which $screen_id a certain page has
 
	switch($screen_id) {
		case "dashboard":
			$help_text = "<p>Welcome to the Dashboard, hier ziet u een overzicht van alle pagina\"s.</p>";
			break;
		case "upload":
			$help_text = "<p>Hier kunt u afbeeldingen beheren.</p>";
			break;
		case "edit-page":
			$help_text = "<p>Hier kunt u paginas beheren.</p>";
			break;
		case "page":
			$help_text = "<p>Hier kunt u een pagina bewerken.</p>";
			break;
		default:
			$help_text = ""; // remove default Wordpress help text
 
			if ($debug) {
				$help_text = $screen_id;
			}
			break;
	}
 
	// at least add a support text to every help text
	$help_text.= "<p><em>For questions you can see our <a href=\"http://support.webcreate.nl/knowledgebase\" target=\"_blank\">Knowledge Base</a> or you can contact us at <a href=\"mailto:support@webcreate.nl\">support@webcreate.nl</a>.</em></p>";
 
	return $help_text;
}
add_action("contextual_help", "my_contextual_help", 10, 3);

Final words

These are just some of the mods you can do without plugins. Of course there are a lot more. Do you have any favorite mods/snippets of your own?

Until recent years I’ve always used a nickname on the internet. In fact, I was trying to leave no traceable ”fingerprints” on the web. Where others started sharing their real name, their photos and whatever more on upcoming social networks. I’ve always withhold myself from that kind of sharing. Every account I created on a website, every IRC channel I entered and every game I played, I would use my nickname. I had a strict rule not to share any photos or other personal information on the web.

As I said, it’s only since recent years that I started using my real name. I guess it started with Facebook. It might have started a while before, but Facebook really pushed it through.

This change also came with the idea that I actually wanted to be found on the internet, in a good way. When people search my name, I want them to find the work that I’ve done, the things I wrote and so on. You could call it personal branding, if you like. If you would do a search for my real name on Google four years ago, you would only find a handful of page’s. If you run the same search query today there are about 500 pages having my name on them.

I still have some rules about sharing information about me, but they have become less strict. Nowadays I click the connect-with-facebook-buttons all the time, knowing that it will link my real name to the website. But sharing personal photos for the public is still a no-go.

Of course you could ask yourself why I am so protective about my personal information. Well it’s about privacy. Others say “I’ve nothing to hide“, but I don’t believe that. I think everybody has something to hide, but you might only find out what that is when it is too late.

What about you? Let me know in the comments below.

Let me give you a little tour of some the creations that exist on our Minecraft server.

We first started on a vanilla server setup and didn’t use any /give commands. So we had to harvest all our resources by hand. Now, since a few months we moved over to a bukkit server setup with some plugins, like permissions, essentials and backup. We now use the /give command generously.

Update: Version 2 is released, check it out at infiniteajaxscroll.com.

I am proud to announce my first official open-source jQuery plugin release. Infinite Ajax Scroll is a plugin that turns you existing pagination into an infinite scrolling one, with ease.

Features

• Infinite scrolling increases usability for you visitors, by removing an extra click
• Increase average time spent on your website by visitors
• Graceful degration for browsers without JavaScript
• Allows for multiple instances, like for posts and comments
• Easy to implement
• Clearly coded and well documented
• Similar technique as seen on Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader and many more…

How it works

After you have installed IAS you have to define a few regions of your webpage.

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jQuery.ias({
  container 	: ".listing",
  		// Enter the selector of the element containing
  		// your items that you want to paginate.
 
  item		: ".post",
		// Enter the selector of the element that each
		// item has. Make sure the elements are inside
		// the container element.
 
  pagination	: "#content .navigation",
		// Enter the selector of the element that contains
		// your regular pagination links, like next,
		// previous and the page numbers. This element
		// will be hidden when IAS loads.
 
  next		: ".next-posts a",
		// Enter the selector of the link element that
		// links to the next page. The href attribute
		// of this element will be used to get the items
		// from the next page.
 
  loader	: "images/loader.gif"
		// Enter the url to the loader image. This image
		// will be displayed when the next page with items
		// is loaded via AJAX.
});

IAS will now handle your webpage as follows:

1. Monitor the scroll event for reaching the last item element
2. Insert a loader image
3. Load the next page using AJAX
4. Insert each new item after the last item

You can check out a working example here.

For more information about the plugin visit the Infinite Ajax Scroll website.

Happy scrolling!