Tapfish is a game where you can buy, raise and sell fish - like a tamagotchi, all grown up and moved to the smartphone platform (and prettier!) You can play quite a bit of the game without paying for anything - so much in fact that I got quite into it. When you consider that I've played daily for 6 weeks, 10 quid for the add-ons that will let me play more of the game seems reasonable.

Often these types of games are quite aggressive in the way that they take your money from you - you can only play a little bit, or the game just stops completely until you pay. This one though uses a nice combination of gamification and playability to bring you to the point where you don't resent parting with the cash.

With any freemium model, you will always have users who will never spend money at all, and people who complain that it's a rip-off. Striking the balance however is really tricky, and honestly? I think this game got it right.

* when I say quite a bit, I mean I'm completely addicted to tapfish and have played it every day even including getting married and going on my honeymoon!! So yes, quite playable.

Lorna is an independent web development consultant, writer and trainer, open source project lead and community evangelist. This post was originally published at LornaJane

When browsing the moo.com site (it is usually best to hide all payment cards out of reach before doing this!) I had seen the postcards that they make and decided this would be a great way to send a small selection of photos to a few people. Once we got the "official" photos in, I ordered some postcards, and I think they turned out rather well!

I've been working on getting a selection of these sent out to various people - a bit like writing the Christmas cards all over again really :)

We don't have photos up in our home (literally, not at all. We do have maps though!) however I wanted us to have something of our wedding day to have around to remind us of the day. While looking around on the moo site (told you this works out expensive) I saw this frame for mini moo cards. Since I'm an engineer married to an engineer, anything requiring a screwdriver makes a good present!! I took a selection of the photos from the wedding and cropped them in the correct ratio for these tiny cards (2.5:1 if you're interested), taking a small slice out of each shot (probably these make no sense if you weren't there or haven't seen the photos) with more photos than he'd need for the frame so that he could choose.

The cards:

The finished frame:

My stationery worship tendencies were made complete when I realised that the box the frame ships in has printed on it a pattern to cut out a stand for it - what a great idea :)

I've been ordering business type things from moo for ages, they always claim it takes them 10 days to ship anything and then deliver it all in four days, for reasons I can't understand (more than once I've ordered from elsewhere because I need it faster). It was quite fun to make personal things too, I've never had a good excuse to do that before and I loved how it all turned out - the mini moo card frame was particularly fun.

I also treated myself to new business cards (with rounded corners!) so if you see me at a conference any time soon, you can get one of those too :)

Lorna is an independent web development consultant, writer and trainer, open source project lead and community evangelist. This post was originally published at LornaJane

Design Patterns and OOP

I like design patterns and the joy of teaching this is that it helps to stop some of the big words and unfamiliar terms in object-oriented programming from seeming like rocket science. Most people will quickly tell me "oh, I've been using this all along!" - which is exactly the point :) Teaching a few design patterns also gives a great vehicle for teaching some of the advanced OOP concepts in a more interesting way than "this is an interface".

Databases and PDO

Web developers don't know what they don't know about databases! Being able to join multiple tables with different types of join and aggregate data correctly allows you to learn how to normalise data and not be afraid to implement the schema changes. I like to teach how to do this and get everyone confident with it all. The PDO extension is a fabulous way of working with databases and I think the prepared statements are in everyone's interests, so that forms a good part of the course too.

PHP Tools

A course for all the allied skills you need - configuring apache, a bit of linux command line, quality and performance tools (xhprof, php code sniffer, api documentation, and more) are all included. There's a splash of source control (because it is the basis of all things!) and we also talk about strategies for deployment (with phing as an example) and managing things like configuration management and database schema changes. In a one-day course there isn't time to teach unit testing or continuous integration properly but they do get a mention and I try to point interested parties in the right direction for more information.

PHP Courses

If any of the above sound interesting and you want to come and learn this stuff with me for a day, you can book the courses through NTI. Feel free to ping me with questions, comments, or tell me why this isn't the right topic for you - always interested to hear others' viewpoints.

Lorna is an independent web development consultant, writer and trainer, open source project lead and community evangelist. This post was originally published at LornaJane

Akismet is the first plugin I install on any wordpress site (in fact, doesn't it come enabled by default these days?) - it does a great job of catching comment spam without me having to moderate every message. It was pretty clear however that it wasn't checking the forms from the Contact Form 7 plugin by default. On closer inspection it turns out that:

• there is good documentation on akismet and contact form 7
• when you mark any field to be checked by akismet, then you get the additional feature that all the fields in your form are concatenated together and checked as "content" by akismet as well
• the ordering of the directives in the contact form tags does matter, I needed mine before the watermark

At this point, things improved and akismet caught quite a lot of the spam - but not all. The things it couldn't catch were one-word clear nonsense entries - so I kept on looking and found the contact form 7 honeypot plugin.

The honeypot is a field which is designed to catch bots - they will typically fill in any field they see, regardless of whether they should do so or not! When you generate a honeypot field for your form, you get a field which is hidden and has the instruction "leave this field blank" in it. Humans can either not see it, or can read the instructions - but a spamming machine will fill it in. For better results, rename the field something other than "honeypot"; if you view the source on the contact form on the bottom of this page, you can see mine is called "country" - and that seems to work pretty well.

Given the ugliness and sheer unusability of the captcha, I am all in favour of other solutions and these worked well on my own site so I thought I'd share!

Lorna is an independent web development consultant, writer and trainer, open source project lead and community evangelist. This post was originally published at LornaJane

For anyone who hasn't been keeping track, I've been dating the same man for a very, very, VERY long time. Kevin and I met at university and were friends for a while first before we started to date - in 2000, when I was 19. We went on to obtain matching "his and hers" degrees (we actually both have a 2:1 MEng in Electronic and Computer Engineering from York, graduating in the same year!), and both graduated and moved to Oxfordshire to pursue careers in software. Since then we've moved more times than I care to think of, bought a house together (on the fourth attempt - I've been blogging long enough that you can read about that if you like), and basically grown up a lot.

The wedding was arranged at relatively short notice - I surprised everyone including myself by proposing and we were married precisely 10 weeks later (it is absolutely possible to organise a wedding on that kind of turnaround. Be decisive and remember that actually, only a few things are really important). Neither of us really likes crowds or being the centre of attention so we'd always thought that a wedding wasn't for us ... I am so glad now that we realised we could do it any way we wanted!

So we had a small gathering, at a lovely venue local to our home in Leeds, with immediate family and a couple of friends, and a wonderful meal. We kept the elements of the traditional wedding that we wanted to - a best man, bridesmaids, the dress, the photographers, the rings. The things that don't mean anything to us, we just eliminated - speeches, dancing, large numbers of people.

Roundhay Mansion sits in a lovely park in Leeds and it's a place we visit often. Despite getting married in January in Yorkshire, the weather was nice enough for a few outside photos. Admittedly it was *freezing* but the cloak you see in the pictures was pure wool and I was also wearing woolly socks and my "wedding wellies" under my dress so those (and perhaps the excitement and the champagne) meant I was warm enough even if nobody else was :)

"Happy ever after" seems like a lot to ask, especially when things have run so smooth for us so far, but I am wishing for the grace, wisdom, and small dose of luck that will allow us to negotiate all the twists and turns that lie on the path ahead of us.

Lorna is an independent web development consultant, writer and trainer, open source project lead and community evangelist. This post was originally published at LornaJane

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<errors xmlns="http://schemas.google.com/g/2005">
  <error>
    <domain>GData</domain>
    <code>sslRequired</code>
    <internalReason>SSL is required to perform this operation.</internalReason>
  </error>
</errors>

Closer inspection shows that for one of the google endpoints, I had a prefix of http:// rather than https://. Those single-character bug fixes that take hours to find are my favourite!

Lorna is an independent web development consultant, writer and trainer, open source project lead and community evangelist. This post was originally published at LornaJane

My own talk is "Time and Money"; both are pretty important concepts to have a handle on when you are in business, either as a freelancer or when starting or helping to start a bigger business. Even as an employee, these are really important concepts to understand; most of what I learned about business I learned working with business people in the jobs I had beforehand.

Time is important because we need to figure out how much we have and how to share it around. Money is important because we all like to get paid. I'll be sharing my own tactics for keeping both of them under control so I hope you'll join us!

Lorna is an independent web development consultant, writer and trainer, open source project lead and community evangelist. This post was originally published at LornaJane

not at a branch head

I had cloned my repo locally, pulled in changes from someone else, committed, merged and pushed them back into my main repo, along with a couple of other changes. What I had not realised I needed to do was hg update to get those changes applied! As soon as I did that, the files were updated and and everything was happy again; I was able to tag and deploy.

I don't do a lot of collaboration in mercurial and clearly I don't do enough branching, however I found it difficult to find any documentation on this error message so I hope it helps someone!

Lorna is an independent web development consultant, writer and trainer, open source project lead and community evangelist. This post was originally published at LornaJane