Garrett Winder

This week in mobile

2012-02-23T00:00:00+00:00

This week in mobile

There’s been some really great links floating around the internets this week in mobile. Enough to dust the cobwebs off my site and link to five:

And for a bonus, here’s the post from 1991 where Tim Berners-Lee turned on the internet! (Hat tip to cool guy Chris Rowe for the find)

EEUK 2011 - Going mobile

2011-08-27T00:00:00+01:00

EEUK 2011 – Going mobile

Tips, techniques and tactics for going mobile with ExpressionEngine.

Photo by Joel Bradbury

Current status of mobile
Native v.s. web
Dedicated or responsive?
And how ExpressionEngine can help ease the pain

EEUK11 presentation – Going mobile (pdf)
Going mobile with ExpressionEngine (Tutorial on .net magazine)

I’ve condensed them down quite a bit so if you’d like the originals, shoot me an email at gw [at] garrettwinder [dot] com.

Generating share links in your ExpressionEngine templates

2010-12-06T00:00:00+00:00

Generating share links in your ExpressionEngine templates

Making custom links for sharing content is always an annoying process. Go to each service you need, try and figure out how to pass information to it via a URL. Rinse, lather, repeat.

Below I’ll document some of the most common share links and their basic URL structures, and then I’ll show you how we can easily implement this into an ExpressionEngine channel entry page.

Now that we’ve got the basics out of the way, let’s convert this into an ExpressionEngine gangster rap. I’ll assumes you understand the basic ExpressionEngine variables. I’m also going to assumes your channel entries are located at domain.com/segment_1/url_title/ (you can easily change this to fit your needs). Here’s the code that would go in your individual channel entry pages:

Very straight forward – we’ve got a channel loop that’s based off of our current channel entry (pulling the url title from segment_2). We’re using ExpressionEngine variables to generate the URLs and titles in the share links. For Twitter, I’m using the categories variable pair for hash tags. For Posterous and Instapaper I’ve added a fictional excerpt field to the optional selection and description params.

Obviously, you don’t need to use all of these, just plug-and-play the links you want to put on your own site. One final not, for the twitter link, I’d recommend using a shorter url. You can either use some sort of url shortening plugin or easily role your own short urls like this. Enjoy!

ExpressionEngine short urls

2010-12-05T00:00:00+00:00

ExpressionEngine short urls

When I was making my site I wanted to be able to have short urls to post to Twitter, etc. without having to deal with the hassle of buying another domain name. There are quite a few ways of doing this but I ended up taking the /template_group/entry_id approach because it’s easy and sexy.

The first thing I did was setup a new template group. For example sake, I’m going to name this template group ‘b’ (short for blog). I’m also going to pretend our actual blog posts are located at /blog

Once you’ve made the new template group, ‘b’, open up the index file and paste the following code in there:

This is pretty simple stuff. First we make a variable called ‘my_channel’ that points to our blog channel (it’s all about the reusable code people, use preload_replace like it’s your job). Then, we make sure we have a segment_2, if not, we redirect to the main blog page. Lastly, we use an ExpressionEngine Channel loop based off of the entry_id (which is pulled from segment_2) and redirect to its “long url”, /blog/url_title

To show your short url on your actual entry pages, just throw something like the following in the blog entries template (inside the channel loop):

Short URL: {site_url}/b/{entry_id}/

Tada – now you’ve got yourself a really simple branded short url, none of that bit.ly crap!

EE info template

2010-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

EE info template

I wanted a simple way to access site information like template names, channel names, custom fields, etc without accessing the control panel so I threw together these templates w/ the ExpressionEngine Query Module to show all of that data (I’m no SQL expert, so the queries may not be up to par… but they work). There is a template for EE1&2 and you can download them on github.

Download ExpressionEngine EE-Info Templates on github

ExpressionEngine 2 TextMate bundle

2010-11-12T00:00:00+00:00

ExpressionEngine 2 TextMate bundle

I went ahead and took the liberty of updating Chris Ruzin’s wonderful ExpressionEngine TextMate bundle to ExpressionEngine 2. Really all that needed to be done was update the documentation links in the ‘Documentation for Tag’ file, change every weblog reference to channel, delete a few oldies and add a few newies. So, here it is:

Download ExpressionEngine 2 Textmate Bundle

If you find any errors or anything just let me know and I’ll try and get them updated as soon as I can. Again, I wouldn’t have known how to do this without Chris-who-has-no-contact-info-on-the-internet’s bundle for ExpressionEngine 1.x so 99.9% of the credit goes to him.

Note : This bundle is based off of ExpressionEngine’s core functionality and does not include any 3rd party add-on integration. If you want a bundle with all the bells and whistles, checkout this one .