Dan Murfitt's blog

Book review: OpenCart 1.4 Template Design Cookbook by Tahsin Hasan

Dan Murfitt — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 12:03:29 +0000

OpenCart isn’t a system I’ve used before but Packt Publishing asked me to review OpenCart 1.4 Template Design Cookbook by Tahsin Hasan for them so I thought it’d be a good opportunity to learn more about an ecommerce shopping cart system. I spend a lot of time working on PHP/MySQL applications, including Drupal and CodeIgniter, but I haven’t used OpenCart before, so I’m coming to this book and application completely new.

OpenCart is a complete ecommerce shopping cart solution, with features including multi-currency support, product ratings and reviews, downloadable products and a discount coupon system, and it is of course customisable and templatable. OpenCart 1.4 Template Design Cookbook promises to help you get to grips with the basics of template design, as well as styling search results and customising the design of the administration panel to match either yours or your clients’ brand.

The book starts by walking you through the installation of OpenCart and some of the general configuration changes you may need to make in the process. OpenCart has an automatic installation script so this should be fairly straightforward for anyone who has installed a PHP/MySQL application before. The graphics tutorials in the book use GIMP - an open source graphics editing package - which is great if you’re learning as you can follow the tutorials and practice without having to buy any commercial software upfront.

The first major design chapter is ‘Chapter 3 - Layout Structure’. Here you will be guided through creating a new theme, modifying its styles using CSS and some basic banner placement. The book explains that OpenCart uses a Model-View-Controller (MVC) layout, and it’s important to understand this as it’s a very common application design pattern. Naturally, the focus is on the ‘View’ part, which manages the presentation of the application.

The book is very clearly laid out, with essential keywords highlighted, lots of code examples and screenshots showing how, for example, CSS changes affect the presentation of the store. The book is intended to be read while you’re setting up your store or building your theme, as the examples walk you through the process and the approach is very didactic.

The book expects you to have some HTML and CSS knowledge, but there are also areas which include PHP code, such as traversing arrays and printing variable values, so some basic PHP knowledge would be helpful. There is also some light JavaScript use in the form of including jQuery libraries. You can probably get by with little or no JavaScript knowledge, just by following the walkthroughs, but again, some prior knowledge of JavaScript would also be of help.

If you’re new to OpenCart, or have some knowledge and want to create your own theme, this book will guide you through the process with lots of examples, as well as ideas and best practices.

Thanks for reading my review, I hope you found it helpful and if you have any comments on OpenCart, this book or this review, please leave them in the comments section below - as always I’d love to hear your views.

'Close Account' options for web applications

Dan Murfitt — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 15:22:36 +0000

It's very rare that I come across a web app which allows me to close my account. Granted, it's not a feature you want to encourage people to use but if people want to stop using your app then they'll probably just abandon the account anyway. From a user's perspective I like to feel in control so being able to close an account, even if I don't chose to do so, can be quite reassuring. However, I think there are also some advantages for developers and stakeholders to benefit from by implementing a 'close account' feature.

First of all, you probably don't want to lose users - you want them to keep using your app and tell all of their friends. But sometimes things don't always work out this way, and although you may be getting lots of people sign up to your app, are they coming back to use it weeks or months down the line? Knowing how many new accounts doesn't really help unless you also know how many are leaving. Adding a 'close account' feature will give you an insight into how long people decide to keep using your app before they walk (and they'll probably do that whether you allow them to close their account or not).

You might also be able to get some feedback by adding a small form or comment box asking why they are leaving. If they are leaving because something isn't working as expected, they will probably tell you and you'll have a chance to put it right. By doing this it may also be possible to convince people to stay by making the process interactive, learning why they want to leave, and hopefully giving them the information they need to change their minds.

Finally, going back to my first point from a user's perspective - people like to feel in control. They may have created an account and misspelled a username or just don't require it anymore, and in an age where so much of our information is online, it reassures people that they can remain in control of their data.

I'd love to hear what your experiences are with building account closure features into your web apps and why you have or haven't chosen to do so. I don't think every app or site should (or shouldn't) have this feature, but these are just some possible advantages from a developer and user perspective. Please feel free to leave comments using the link below.

Blog from the iPhone to your Drupal blog with BlogPress

Dan Murfitt — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 19:39:37 +0000

There are a couple of apps which can post to Drupal as well as the majority of other popular blogging platforms straight from your iPhone: iBlogger and BlogPress. I'm writing this from BlogPress on my iPhone, but the app also supports the iPad for all you lucky folks out there. With BlogPress you can view previous posts, save drafts, upload images to Flickr or Picasa and upload movies to YouTube, all of which can then be embedded straight into the post. Drafts can be saved to the app and are stored on the iPhone or can be stored on your Drupal site. No more excuses for not having enough time to blog!

If you know of any other apps for blogging from the iPhone, especially to Drupal, please add them in the comments below. Happy remote blogging :)

Upcoming book review: OpenCart 1.4 Template Design Cookbook by Tahsin Hasan

Dan Murfitt — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 14:35:31 +0000

Packt Publishing kindly asked me to write another review for an upcoming book: OpenCart 1.4 Template Design Cookbook. The book covers a range of techniques for customising the header, footer, store navigation, creating dynamic content, custom error pages and sitemaps. The author, Tahsin Hasan, is a fellow CodeIgniter developer and has worked with other PHP frameworks such as Zend, Symfony and CakePHP.

I’ll be posting the review in the next few weeks. In the meantime, here is a link to a sample chapter: Chapter 3 - Layout Structure.

Create amazing explorable panoramas on the iPhone with Photosynth

Dan Murfitt — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 15:57:52 +0000

I've just been playing with Photosynth for the iPhone. It allows you to take multiple pictures from different angles then stitch them together to make a 3D, explorable panoramic. So what's so different about Photosynth? Well, you can also create 'Synths' which are 3D spaces made up of images from not only different angles but different locations. This means you can take a picture of a building from different sides and Photosynth will work its magic and make it into a 3D model which you can explore.

Here's a panoramic I created while standing in the same place:

Here's a synth which someone has created from different angles and locations.

Photosynth is a free app available for the iPhone 3G4, iPhone 4, iPad 2 and 4th gen iPod Touch. Enjoy!

Optimising Drupal performance

Dan Murfitt — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 10:02:34 +0000

There are a few great out of the box performance tweaks which Drupal offers to speed up page loading times and minimise server load. First of all, these tweaks wouldn't suit every site. You need to first think about how much traffic you currently get and how often our content changes. You don't necessarily have to add or amend a page for content to change; people can post comments and interact with your site in ways which change the content displayed. This will make a difference to how you chose to optimise your Drupal site performance.

When caching is enabled in Drupal (Administer > Site Configuration > Performance) your pages will be dynamically generated the first time they are hit and then subsequent visits to that page will be loaded from the stored cache. This will speed up page loading times because Drupal doesn't have to pull all of the content together from the database each time. However, new content won't be shown until the cache has expired and is regenerated. It's worth noting that cached pages are only displayed to anonymous users, so if you are testing this out and logged in to your site, you probably won't see any performance differences. In this case you will need to logout, then you will see you site's cached content.

What is 'minimum cache lifetime'?

This determines how much time should pass before cached content is regenerated from the database. If you set this to 1 day, and you change one of your pages, the cached version of your page will remain the same and the changes won't be visible to anonymous visitors for at least 1 day. If you don't change your content that often or you don't get many comments this may be a good idea, as it makes, in many cases, a noticeable difference to page loading times. If you get lots of comments or you are updating on a daily basis or more, you may wish to decrease this limit to something more reasonable. The trick is to get the time as close as possible to how often your content changes.

Page caching and the CAPTCHA module

If you are using the CAPTCHA module it's also worth noting that this will disable caching for any pages where a CAPTCHA challenge is present. In this case it would be a good idea to put your comment forms on a separate page from your content (Administer > Content Management > Content Types [Content type] > Comment Settings > Location of comment submission form > Set to display on separate page).

Bandwidth Optimization

These settings will aggregate CSS and JS files to reduce the number of hits required to load a page. This can make significant difference on high traffic sites because it reduces the number of HTTP requests. Many themes and modules include CSS files and if you look at your page source (with these options disabled) will see the number of linked CSS and JS files required for each page load. With both of these optimization options enabled you will see just one CSS and one JS file linked to in your page source. These linked files, with optimization enabled, will include all CSS and JS code previously loaded but in one file rather than (say) 10.

If anyone knows of any good Drupal performance modules or any other tweaks please feel free to post them in the comments below.

Fighting blog comment spam

Dan Murfitt — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 20:21:43 +0000

I've noticed a recent influx of blog spam which seem, to some degree, relevant to the content it's posted on. I think spammers are composing comments targeted to specific subject areas and then searching the web for content on that subject so that when they post the comment it appears at first glance to be genuine. Of course the most telling part is the totally unrelated link to men's watches or postal degrees which seem somewhat out of place in a comment on a php web development framework. Nevertheless, if you're not careful the comments can slip through the net and appear on your blog. The other issue which has become more of a problem lately is the spammer's ability to evade CAPTCHA challenges. I've increased the level of noise and distortion for the CAPTCHA challenge on this blog but some still get through. It's as if there is a person actually typing in a response to the challenge, in which it won't be of much help. There are a few ways in which you can help fight, reduce and manage blog spam, because let's face it - it's not going to stop entirely. So let's have a look at some quick first pointers.

Filter out HTML 'a' tags

HTML 'a' tags can be used to mask the location of links and there's really no need for people in comments to use them. Instead, use an automatic filter which converts http:// strings into clickable links. This way people can see exactly where they are going to go if they click a link, and spammers can't hide links behind text relevant to the subject of the comment. Also publish the fact you are doing this as it may act as a small deterrent.

Moderate comments

If you really want to feel in control of what content is allowed to be posted to your blog, moderate the comments. Many content management systems will allow this function and as long as you don't get too many comments it shouldn't be too difficult to keep up with.

Use a comment spam protection service

There are services available which will screen your comments for you in a similar way to email spam filters and determine, based on a spam scoring system, whether the comment is spam or not. One which I've found is quite effective is Mollom (http://mollom.com). This has both free and enterprise services for use on blogs and more.

Add a CAPTCHA challenge

You can't always rely on CAPTCHA, but it will most definitely reduce the amount of spam which gets through so it's always a good idea to protect your comment forms with CAPTCHA as a first line of defence.

Spam is never going to go away - in fact, it's probably going to get more sophisticated, so it's a good idea to keep an eye on the spam which doesn't get through on your blog by accessing your logs, look for trends (especially in the search engine referrals) and try to stay ahead of the game by figuring out why the spammers ended up on your site and what they tried to do to evade your anti-spam mechanisms. Please feel free to leave a comment if you have any tips or techniques which you use to help reduce or manage spam.

New 'Mix Radio' on Last.fm

Dan Murfitt — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 10:05:01 +0000

Since Spotify I've slightly neglected my Last.fm radio favouring playlisted music over radio style chosen tracks, but I may start using the Last.fm radio again since they've introduced the new 'Mix Radio' station. It's a great way to discover new music without being overwhelmed by too many unfamiliar tracks.

What is 'Mix Radio'?

Mix Radio combines:

New recommendations (similar to the 'Recommendations' station)
Tracks by artists in your library that you haven't scrobbled before and
Tracks in your library that you already know.

Last.fm is great for listening to music when you don't know what you want to listen to or you want to hear something you haven't heard before but you might like. The new 'Mix Radio' station does the job nicely, and if you hear something you really don't like just skip it or, if Last.fm completely misjudged your taste, ban it and Last.fm will learn what you don't like. Last.fm is great for all music fans so if you haven't used it before I'd definitely recommend giving it a try – it's free and can be accessed from the website, through the free downloadable player, through Android and iPhone mobiles and even through many new DAB/Wi-Fi radios.

For more information on the new 'Mix Radio' station from the official Last.fm blog, visit:
http://blog.last.fm/2010/10/29/mix-radio-a-new-radio-station

Qwiki: Information Experience

Dan Murfitt — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 10:13:42 +0000

The recent TechCrunch disrupt award saw startup Qwiki win disruptive product for their information experience website which seeks to change the way we consume information. This is the kind of thing which we've seen in movies for years but Qwiki is making this experience a reality by pulling together information from various sources and presenting it in a much more experiential way. This sort of delivery is probably well suited to that kind of research where you hear a term you haven't heard before and you want to know more. You'll probably start by typing the term into Google then sift through the (usually first result) Wikipedia page followed by image search and/or movies etc. What Qwiki does is pull all of this together for you so you get an instant overview of all the information in a much more 'lean back' way.

The video below is a demo of the product at TechCrunch Disrupt 2010. If you'd like to sign up for their invite-only alpha test head over to Qwiki.com. They also have a few sample Qwikis live on the site.

Qwiki at TechCrunch Disrupt from Qwiki on Vimeo.

Sorting the garden out

Dan Murfitt — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 17:32:22 +0000

My dad came over today to help sort our garden out. We wanted to open the end of the garden up to grow some colourful plants and maybe add a few solar lights. The end of the garden was previously segmented into smaller pieces, with a raised patch with a few shrubs and some fenced off stones.

Here you can see we started to knock the wall down before but had to put it off for a while as the foundation of the wall went quite deep. Quite satisfying work, knocking a wall down!

Once we broke into the wall foundations we managed to pull large chunks of the wall up without any problems. All that's left to do is tidy up!

Here's the finished result - a nice patch of soil ready for a few layers of colourful plants and some solar lights.

Foursquare Vs. Gowalla

Dan Murfitt — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 22:08:27 +0000

With recent news about Facebook’s new ‘Places’ feature it looks like location based social networking could become the next big thing over the next couple of years. In case you can’t wait for this to be fully rolled out and you want to give one of the established location based social networks a try, here’s some background info.

What is a location based social network?

Facebook and Twitter allow you to share messages, photos, links, etc. with a network of friends or followers. Location based social networks operate in a similar manner - however they are location centric, so instead of sharing a message with a photo attached, you share a location, with a message (and possibly a photo) attached. One strange difference is that both these social networks (Foursquare and Gowalla) have the feel of a game, which I don’t get from Facebook or Twitter. Foursquare allows you to earn badges for checking in. For example, check in at a location more times than anyone else and you become the mayor. With Gowalla you can drop and collect items. For example, you may have a teddy bear which you can drop at a location, then some one else can pick that up and view a history of the bear and see who else has owned it in the past. It can then be taken to another location and dropped off and the journey continues. These features add an element of fun when connecting with your friends, comparing items and badges, but they also have a commercial implication for businesses. Some businesses are starting to sign up and give (for Foursquare) the mayor a special offer (like a free coffee) for just checking in more than anyone else. This incentive could encourage people to visit a location as often as possible to gain the mayor status. These services also offer the potential to offer businesses statistics on their customers (where they’re from, where else they go, how long they stay, etc.).

So, which should I join, Gowalla or Foursquare?

That’s probably down to preference, as they are both very similar. I’m going to try both and see how I get on. Personally, from just going through the apps briefly, I prefer the look and feel of Gowalla.

Kevin Rose is an investor in both Foursquare and Gowalla, so here’s a quick video of him talking about how these work and some of the features.

Here’s another video reviewing the iPhone and Android apps for Foursquare and Gowalla.

Privacy

If you are about to sign up to these apps make sure you review the privacy details carefully. The concept of location based services opens up various causes for concern, as you are telling the world where you are and when. Make sure you share this information carefully and with only whom you chose.

Book Review: CodeIgniter 1.7 Professional Development by Adam Griffiths (Packt Publishing)

Dan Murfitt — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 20:14:21 +0000

CodeIgniter 1.7 Professional Development by Adam Griffiths is a great introduction to CodeIgniter - and the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern in general - for intermediate and advanced PHP developers. I was asked to write a review of this book by Packt Publishing and this is now my third CodeIgniter specific book which I've studied. I’ve been working with CodeIgniter on several projects for over two years now so I’ve become quite familiar with the framework, but I’m always interested to see how other people approach problems and use the libraries available. There’re always a few hidden gems which are waiting to be discovered!

The book is aimed at confident PHP developers who can build fairly complex applications but are looking at using the very lightweight and powerful framework, CodeIgniter, to speed up and structure the development process. The book promises to give you enough working knowledge to use CodeIgniter to build virtually any web application, though covering all of the advanced subjects associated with CodeIgniter, building reusable libraries and creating mini applications. If you currently write PHP applications, have some knowledge of object oriented programming concepts and want to be able to build larger applications in an organised and structured way, you should be able to follow this book without any problems. This book also covers using third party services to authenticate users for your application, such as Twitter oAuth and Facebook Connect, so if you’re also interested in integrating these services into your application you will find this very useful.

CodeIgniter has a set of coding guidelines which are recommended when building your application. Your application will still function if you don’t follow the guidelines, however it may cause confusion if working in teams or revisiting old code. This book follows the guidelines and even spends a few pages at the beginning getting you used to the correct and incorrect syntax so that you don’t start off with any bad habits. Another advanced element of the book is Chapter 7, Building a Large-Scale Application. This walks you though some of the issues associated with large, heavily accessed applications, such as managing bottlenecks, caching and managing multiple instances of your application. This sort of streamlining is important for applications which are expected to receive heavy amounts of traffic and can make a big difference to the performance and user experience. Another subject which will help you take your applications to the next level is covered in Chapter Eight, Web Services. This shows how you can create RESTful web services to interact with many web application APIs (for example, posting / getting tweets from Twitter, etc.). You can also build an API into your application to allow other services to interact with it. These chapters are walked through in detail and the full code is presented at the end so you can give it a try yourself.

Overall I thought this book managed to get a lot in for its size (compared to a lot of programming books!) and it covered everything you’ll need to start working with CodeIgniter and build large scale applications, reusable code, and integrate with third party services (and let third party services integrate with your apps). I would certainly recommend this book to any php developer who is looking at stepping into the world of CodeIgniter and maybe even beginner CodeIgniter developers who want to advance and start building larger scale applications.

Sample chapter

Chapter 3: Form validation and database interaction

Another CodeIgniter book review on the way

Dan Murfitt — Sat, 08 May 2010 09:32:22 +0000

I'll be posting another CodeIgniter book review for Packt Publishing shortly: 'CodeIgniter 1.7 Professional Development' by Adam Griffiths.

I'm really looking forward to reading this book, in particular the chapter on user authentication through Twitter and Facebook Connect.

Sample chapter

Chapter 3: Form validation and database interaction

Beautiful time lapse video of Tokyo

Dan Murfitt — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 08:30:22 +0000

I just saw this great time lapse video of Tokyo! I especially like 1:56 when the planes are coming in. Great choice of music too! Nice work!

Get up and go from Stefan Werc on Vimeo.

Android 2.1 (Eclair) for T-Mobile G2 Touch (HTC Hero) possibly coming soon?

Dan Murfitt — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 09:58:30 +0000

Well, it's now April and many T-Mobile G2 Touch owners are waiting for the Android 2.1 update for their handsets, although all is still quiet on the news front. The last update from T-Mobile I saw was back in February when T-Mobile announced that they will be releasing "a firmware upgrade in April for the T-Mobile G2 Touch". We're all hoping that this will indeed be the Android 2.1 Eclair update we've been waiting for. There are some rumours out there as to the exact date and content of this release, but none of these are confirmed, so all we can do is play the waiting game for now.

I'll be checking the Android Updates section on the T-Mobile website throughout the month to see if anything appears, Eclair or otherwise.

Please feel free to leave a comment if you know anymore about this. Thanks.

Trying out Mollom for Drupal

Dan Murfitt — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 07:39:08 +0000

I've decided to give the web service, Mollom, a try since my CAPTCHA, which I kept tweaking to the point where I nearly couldn't read it, was letting me down. The problem with CAPTCHA is it logs how many form submissions it blocks, which is great, but this doesn't necessarily mean SPAM submissions; it could be frustrated people not being able to post a comment on your blog. Mollom works by analysing the form submission for SPAM patterns, then determining whether it is suitable or not. It's quite strange to see my forms without a CAPTCHA underneath, but I should know soon enough how well the service works as I have many form submissions blocked by CAPTCHA each day.

Mollom is available for Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla! and many more CMSs. It also has developer libraries for PHP, Java, Ruby, Python and many more.

Book review: CodeIgniter 1.7 by Jose Argudo Blanco and David Upton (Packt Publishing)

Dan Murfitt — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 19:53:27 +0000

The CodeIgniter framework is a secret weapon for many web developers as it allows you to quickly build complex web applications in a structured and organised way. I started using CodeIgniter over a year ago now so I've approached Packt's CodeIgniter 1.7 by Jose Argudo Blanco and David Upson as a way of expanding upon when I've already learnt from the user guide, forums and a book which I had previously read from Wrox called Professional CodeIgniter by Thomas Myer.

This book not only introduces the CodeIgniter framework but also the MVC design pattern in general, which CodeIgniter and many other frameworks are based on. It offers a good comparison of other open source technologies, including Joomla and CakePHP. You may notice that it's odd to include Joomla in this as it's a Content Management System (CMS) and not a framework, but this is entirely the point of the comparison and I like that this is covered because if you need a CMS, use a CMS – you don't need to build one all over again. However, if you need a framework, and the chances are that you do, why you would choose CodeIgniter (and, to be fair, why you may choose to go with CakePHP instead). It's good to understand why you are going to be using a framework and what the advantages are before you get your teeth into the code, because otherwise you may not take advantage of all the features and for me this is probably one of the best reasons to read a book like this before and while learning a technology.

The book outlines that it will take you through the framework's main features and also explains what goes on “under the hood” by using practical examples and code illustrations, which you would naturally expect from this sort of book. This book is aimed at PHP developers who want to adapt to a more structured and organised way of building web applications. It states that by using CodeIgniter to build websites it will help save you time, make your site more robust, achieve more sophisticated coding and make coding fun again rather than a chore. It is aimed at developers who are new to CodeIgniter, with only a prior knowledge of PHP and HTML required (although, probably SQL too).

If I was reading this book not having used CodeIgniter before I would have found it very useful as it's very easy to follow, provides convincing arguments for the features of the framework and has plenty of practical examples throughout. However, reading it as someone who has been using CodeIgniter for a year or so it didn't add quite as much as I was hoping for in terms of new ways of doing things. That's not to say that there wasn't anything picked up from this, but probably not as much as you'd expect if you were reading the book for that reason. I would like to have seen a bit more on how to plan the building of an application as I feel this is where a book can really add more value than just learning from the user guide and forums. If you've got a complex problem to solve it's not always possible to jump straight into code – it needs to be thought through carefully to make sure you get the best possible design and to save yourself time in the long run, and by choosing to use a framework there is a level of expectation of convention and structure, not just in code but in approach also (something I was expecting to learn more about).

The database Active Record design pattern is covered in a lot of detail and this is probably one of the key reasons that you may choose to use a framework like CodeIgniter as it saves a lot of time writing complex database queries, keeps the query itself easy to understand, and it creates a level of database abstraction which is handy if your application needs to be compatible with more than one type of database management system.

Overall, the book pretty much covered everything I expected it to from explaining the MVC concept upwards. I managed to gain a few little gems and see how other people use the framework to tackle problems, although, as I mentioned before, it would have been nice to have a few tips on planning the application out. I would recommend this book to people who are starting out with CodeIgniter and have no other prior knowledge of MVC frameworks as it's very thorough and covers everything you need in a practical and enthusiastic way. If you're approaching it having used CodeIgniter for a while or another similar framework you could probably get by just fine by using the user guide and forums.

If you're interested in reading a sample chapter of this book Packt have kindly made available Chapter 3 (Navigating Your Site) to give you a taste of what it's about. There's also a full table of contents to show the complete structure of it. If you're interested in buying this book it's available directly from the Packt website for £22.49 (or $35.99) (at the time of writing this).

I was asked to write this review by Packt Publishing so I've tried to be as objective as possible and I hope that it helps you gain a good perspective of what the book is about. If you'd like to leave any comments on this review or book please feel free to drop them into the form below.

Drupal Editor for Android

Dan Murfitt — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 23:03:27 +0000

I've just installed the Drupal Editor app for Android and this is my first 'test post' if you will. It's quite a simple app that connects to your Drupal site through the core blog api module. It then shows a list of all Drupal blogs and allows you to view, edit or delete the posts. You can also post new entries and assign taxonomy terms to them. It's simple and gets the job done!
To install this app search for 'Drupal Editor' on the Android Market. Enjoy!

'PHP Nature' missing from 'Project Natures' in Aptana Studio 2.0

Dan Murfitt — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 22:50:33 +0000

For some reason, even though I have the PHP Development Tools (PDT) installed in Aptana Studio (2.0), I'm not able to select 'PHP nature' in the 'Project natures' of an imported project. I can start a new PHP Project which will have the 'PHP nature' selected as primary nature, but this doesn't even appear as an option in imported projects. The only two natures that are available are 'Remote Nature' and 'Web Nature'. The 'PHP nature' adds some really useful functions, like grouping my @todos into Aptana's Tasks view and also other handy things like auto-completing PHP docblocks.

To get the 'PHP nature' associated with your imported project you can manually edit the .project file which Aptana creates in your imported project directory so that it contains the 'PHP nature'. To do this, add the following code between the <natures> tags in your .project file:

<natures>
   <nature>org.eclipse.php.core.PHPNature</nature>     
</natures>

You may need to re-load Aptana to refresh the project but you should now find that your imported project has a primary 'PHP nature' set.

Note: Please do this at your own risk; although it worked fine for me I don't know if it will cause any side effects to the project or Aptana.

Location based reminders

Dan Murfitt — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 20:19:36 +0000

Reminders, whether from calendars or todo lists, are typically time based, so they will remind you to perform an action at a desired time. However, I've just discovered location based reminders or 'geo-reminders' and this could possibly be my favourite life hack! When I say discovered, I actually had the idea when I got home from the supermarket having forgotten several necessities, but naturally this has already been thought of and many location based reminder apps already exist.

Location based reminders are reminders which, instead of alerting you at a set time, alert you when you enter a set location. So, you may set a reminder to 'buy more bread' for when you are next at the supermarket, or 'call John' for when you get in the office. This means you will be alerted when you are at the place where you can action the reminder. This isn't designed to replace time based reminders, but instead work along side. You could also (in theory) combine the two by setting a reminder to 'buy birthday card for Sam' when you are in town around the 5^th of June.

So, without further ado, here are some apps which I have found that support location based reminders:

reQall (iPhone and BlackBerry)
Geominder (Symbian Series 60 smartphone devices)
Proxido (iPhone and Android)
SynchroSpot (Android)
iArrive (iPhone)

If you know of anymore notable location based reminder apps please feel free to drop them in the comments below.

Post blog articles to Twitter with Feedburner's Socialize feature

Dan Murfitt — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 18:14:54 +0000

A friend of mine recently told me about Feedburner's Socialize feature, where you can aggregate RSS feeds and post the links to Twitter automatically. This is quite a neat feature as Feedburner can also include some of your content in the tweet, create hashtags from the post categories and create inline hashtags from the categories and words in the title and post. Check out this feature by logging into your Feedburner account, selecting the feed you want to use, then go to the 'publicize' tab along the top then the 'socialize' tab along the side.

Here's how your tweet will appear:

CodeIgniter 1.7 by Jose Argudo Blanco and David Upton

Dan Murfitt — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 20:10:14 +0000

I was recently sent a copy of a book from Packt Publishing to read and review called CodeIgniter 1.7 by Jose Argudo Blanco and David Upton. I'll be interested to see how the book compares to what I've learnt so far about CodeIgniter (>1 years experience CodeIgniter and >4 years php) and see what else it can offer, especially in terms of planning and managing application projects. The description on the Packt Publishing website says:

"This book explains how to work with CodeIgniter in a clear logical way. It is not a detailed guide to the syntax of CodeIgniter, but makes an ideal complement to the existing online CodeIgniter user guide, helping you grasp the bigger picture and bringing together many ideas to get your application development started as smoothly as possible.

This book will start you from the basics, installing CodeIgniter, understanding its structure and the MVC pattern. You will also learn how to use some of the most important CodeIgniter libraries and helpers, upload it to a shared server, and take care of the most common problems. If you are new to CodeIgniter, this book will guide you from bottom to top. If you are an experienced developer or already know about CodeIgniter, here you will find ideas and code examples to compare to your own."

~~I'll be posting a review of the book on my blog shortly.~~ This review is now online.

Flickr picks #2: Snow

Dan Murfitt — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 15:00:51 +0000

We've had a lot of snow over the past few days making for some beautiful, bright snow photos.

Firefox or Chrome

Dan Murfitt — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 14:36:20 +0000

Here's an edgy stand-off I find myself in the middle of every so often – Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox as my default browser. From a day to day, quick browse, everything is on the web perspective I'd have to say I prefer Google Chrome. It's fast(er), simple and gets the job done. However, from a web developer perspective Firefox has the add-ons that you so sorely need. I've tried designing a Drupal Zen sub-theme with Chrome's 'inspect element' feature but it's not as comprehensive as the Firebug add-on for Firefox which I couldn't work without. However, when I want to check my daily barrage of social sites Chrome shaves off valuable seconds. For today, I'll leave Firefox as my default browser simply because of the add-ons – they're useful, I need them and I don't mind sacrificing a bit of speed.

Facebook News Feed and Live Feed. What's all this about?

Dan Murfitt — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 10:49:57 +0000

I've been switching between Facebook's two feed modes, live feed and news feed, for a while now and up until now I didn't really know why. Facebook introduced these options a month ago and it's been confusing users ever since. So, what I've found is that by default I am shown the news feed which shows the most relevant information, but it's often out of date, sometimes by a couple of days. That's not good. Then you go to the live feed, which seems to be up to the minute but is bloated with Farm Ville and whatnot. That is also not good. The terminology "news feed" and "live feed" are also quite confusing, as you'd expect the "news feed" to be up to date and the "live feed" to be relevant.
I think people expect to go to one place and be shown the latest, relevant information rather than have to compromise between the two. The news feed bases its choices of what it considers interesting by looking at what type of content is posted, who posted it and how many people are commenting on it (see http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=408). Before this, you could control what is interesting yourself (and if you still can, I can't find how) by selecting types of content to show and also which friends to show more or less of (with granular control over this in turn).
One thing you can do to get live relevant information, which you have selected yourself, is create a friend list. With this you can group together selected friends and these will appear as an extra option under your news feed. To do this, go to: Friends > Lists (on the left) > Create new list, then give your list a name and select which friends are to be included. Now you should find the list appear on the left menu of your home page under news feed.

Goodbye, Drupal Zen Classic theme!

Dan Murfitt — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 15:46:51 +0000

The Drupal Zen sub-theme, Zen Classic, is to no longer be included with the Zen theme download. The Zen theme will now purely be a theme framework and starter kit. If the Zen Classic theme is to be continued it may be done so as a separate project. Although many people said it was bland I quite liked the simplicity of it, but since it's been removed and I've been thinking of redesigning my site anyway maybe this was the kick up the butt I needed to put pencil to paper!

In terms of Zen sub-themes there are a few available to download from the Drupal website: http://drupal.org/node/340837

There's also a list of sites implementing Zen over at: http://groups.drupal.org/taxonomy/term/5171

Twitter and the short URL conundrum

Dan Murfitt — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 21:09:22 +0000

Although the spam seems to be dying down a little on Twitter since they introduced their 'report as spam' option I'm still a little cautious about clicking some shortened URLs - SO many of the links seem to lead to spam (spam and more spam). The whole concept seems to have gone full circle as well with people using extensions like Long URL Please to make the short URL long again. Although I think this is a good a useful add-on, the whole process seems a little excessive. I can see benefit in using shortened URLs in printed media but, when it comes to the web, why are we making links short just to make them long again? I guess Twitter has a big part to play in this by restricting messages to only 140 characters, but surely there's got to be a better way?! With this in mind, I've been trying to get some perspective on the issues. Shortened URLs:

You can't see where the link is going to take you (without a plugin)
Because most are obscure, they are difficult to remember
Multiple links may be created to the same resource
Added overheads in the redirection process
People can track who has visited the link
Spam links look the same as legitimate links

With this in mind
Maybe Twitter could implement a better way for sharing links without using shortened URLs. If links could be 'attached' to tweets and replaced with a token in your message then it would be like wrapping an HTML 'a' tag around some text. You would be able to see where the link is taking you and the message is still short (or even shorter, as there is no more http://).

Social Media Revolution

Dan Murfitt — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 19:08:44 +0000

Very interesting, thought provoking video. We are well and truly hooked into social media - there's no turning back now!

Source of video and data

http://socialnomics.net/2009/08/11/statistics-show-social-media-is-bigge...

Spotify mobile demo for Google Android

Dan Murfitt — Thu, 28 May 2009 22:02:27 +0000

Very smart demo of the up and coming Spotify client for Google Android. Also featuring offline sync. Check it out!

Windbelt electrical wind powered generator

Dan Murfitt — Sat, 23 May 2009 10:27:17 +0000

A few years ago Shawn Frayne came up with an ingenious way of generating electricity on a smaller scale than wind turbines by using vibrations rather than rotary power. His invention, called the windbelt, works by oscillating a pair of magnets through a metal coil at the end of a belt which vibrates as wind passes over it. This physical phenomenon is know as aeroelastic flutter and it's the same principle that caused the Tacoma Narrows Bridge to collapse. Prototypes have generated 40 milliwatts in 10-mph wind, making the windbelt 10 to 30 times as efficient as the best microturbines.

Shawn Frayne talks about the windbelt

Gallopin' Gertie

Here's a clip of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge (Gallopin' Gertie) twisting and vibrating under 40mph winds.

Sources

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4224763.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroelasticity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma_Narrows_Bridge
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma_Narrows_Bridge_Collapse
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMojRXK14jU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-zczJXSxnw

Dan Murfitt's blog

Book review: OpenCart 1.4 Template Design Cookbook by Tahsin Hasan

Links

'Close Account' options for web applications

Blog from the iPhone to your Drupal blog with BlogPress

Upcoming book review: OpenCart 1.4 Template Design Cookbook by Tahsin Hasan

Other links

Create amazing explorable panoramas on the iPhone with Photosynth

Links

Optimising Drupal performance

What is 'minimum cache lifetime'?

Page caching and the CAPTCHA module

Bandwidth Optimization

Fighting blog comment spam

Filter out HTML 'a' tags

Moderate comments

Use a comment spam protection service

Add a CAPTCHA challenge

New 'Mix Radio' on Last.fm

What is 'Mix Radio'?

Qwiki: Information Experience

Sorting the garden out

Foursquare Vs. Gowalla

What is a location based social network?

So, which should I join, Gowalla or Foursquare?

Privacy

Links

Book Review: CodeIgniter 1.7 Professional Development by Adam Griffiths (Packt Publishing)

Sample chapter

Another CodeIgniter book review on the way

Sample chapter

Beautiful time lapse video of Tokyo

Android 2.1 (Eclair) for T-Mobile G2 Touch (HTC Hero) possibly coming soon?

Trying out Mollom for Drupal

Book review: CodeIgniter 1.7 by Jose Argudo Blanco and David Upton (Packt Publishing)

Drupal Editor for Android

'PHP Nature' missing from 'Project Natures' in Aptana Studio 2.0

Location based reminders

Post blog articles to Twitter with Feedburner's Socialize feature

CodeIgniter 1.7 by Jose Argudo Blanco and David Upton

Links

Flickr picks #2: Snow

Firefox or Chrome

Facebook News Feed and Live Feed. What's all this about?

Goodbye, Drupal Zen Classic theme!

Twitter and the short URL conundrum

Social Media Revolution

Source of video and data

Spotify mobile demo for Google Android

Windbelt electrical wind powered generator

Shawn Frayne talks about the windbelt

Gallopin' Gertie

Sources