Dan's blog

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

Dan — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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 5th 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)

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 — 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 — 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.

Links

Flickr picks #2: Snow

Dan — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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

Free subversion repository hosting accounts

Dan — Sun, 17 May 2009 13:17:10 +0000

I've come across a few subversion hosting services which offer free accounts so I thought I'd share the links. Most of these seem to offer a limited free account and a range of paid accounts. If you're working with subversion a lot and you come to rely on them then you may want to upgrade in the future - at least you can try them out first for free. However, if you're developing one or two projects on your own you may be happy to stick with the free account. These details are for the free accounts only, and most offer a lot more for the paid account (for example, SSL access, more users, repositories, etc.).

Service	Storage space	Active projects/repositories	Users	SSL
Beanstalk	100mb	1	3	No
ProjectLocker	500mb	Unlimited	5	Yes
Slik SVN	10mb	1	1	Yes
Springloops	100mb	3	Unlimited	No
Unfuddle	200mb	1	2	No
XP-Dev	500mb	Unlimited	Unlimited	No

These details are only up to date as of when I submit this post so make sure you have a look through the links to see what you're getting. If you're looking at hosting an open source project you may want to look at Google Code (http://code.google.com/projecthosting/) and SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net/).

Firefox not checking spelling as you type

Dan — Sat, 16 May 2009 19:07:52 +0000

Firefox has a handy feature which can check your spelling as you type in forms. To enable this go to Tools > Options > Advanced > Browsing and check 'Check spelling as I type'. If this still isn't working you may need to install your dictionary (even if your dictionary is listed under Tools > Options > Content > Languages). To do this, go to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browse/type:3 and download your language, install and restart Firefox. You should now have many squiggly red lines in your forms as you type (ok, maybe that's just me :o) ).

Atlantis silhouette during solar transit

Dan — Sat, 16 May 2009 10:30:25 +0000

This image shows the space shuttle Atlantis in silhouette during solar transit on Tuesday 12th May 2009. Pretty cool!

Photo Credit: (NASA/Thierry Legault)

Thierry made this image using a solar-filtered Takahashi 5-inch refracting telescope and a Canon 5D Mark II digital camera. Photo Credit: (NASA/Thierry Legault)

Spotify world of music

Dan — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 12:11:33 +0000

Spotify is an online music service which allows you, much like Last.fm, to stream music to your computer via a downloadable app.

You can play individual tracks or build, share and collaborate on playlists. The free version allows you to listen to unlimited music with the occasional ad. They come up about once every 4 or 5 tracks so it's not too intrusive. You can also buy a day pass for 99p which gives you an ad free service for the day or sign up for a premium account and get unlimited ad free listening for £9.99 a month.

So far I'm very impressed with the service. It has almost everything I want to listen to and the best bit for me is that you can build custom playlists and share them with people or collaborate and build them together.

Because music is social, Spotify allows you to share songs and playlists with friends, and even work together on collaborative playlists, Friday afternoon in the office might never be the same again! We’re music lovers like everyone else.

We want to connect millions of people with their favourite songs by creating a product that people love to use. We respect creativity and believe in fairly compensating artists for their work. We’ve cleared the rights to use the music you’ll listen to in Spotify.

From http://www.spotify.com/en/about/what/

Spotify has a very simple interface, similar in a way to iTunes:

The player allows you to search by artist, album or track, then filter the results down. You can then create a playlist (on the left of the app) and drag your tracks in. You can select the playlist and make it collaborative so other people can change it or just leave it locked. Each playlist has a URL which you can give to other people using Spotify and they can open and play the playlist too (or add tracks to it)!

Head over to their site for more information:
http://www.spotify.com

Hitachi DZ-HV565E High Definition (1080p) SD Video Camera

Dan — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 17:26:16 +0000

I've been looking through some of the little HD SD-based camcorders recently and I came across the Hitachi DZ-HV565E in Argos. However, this video camera seems to be a bit of a mystery online, there just isn't much information about it, I couldn't even find any test footage on YouTube.

Anyway, I took the plunge and bought one from Argos today and so far I've been very impressed. The manual states that the camera is "exclusively available through Argos" which is probably why there isn't much information about it online. I did manage to find some information about the HV564E (http://mackney.com/blog/2008/12/hv564e-hd-sd-video-camera.html), which, apart from the back of the viewfinder, looks the same.

Here's a quick run through some of the key points in the DZ-HV565E specification:

1080p high definition
5x optical zoom
Automatic and Manual focus
5 mega-pixel still camera
2.5 inch screen
Web cam mode
3 led lights on the front for filming in low light
Various recording settings, including night mode
Macro mode
Removable rechargeable battery
Sound and video outputs for playback directly to a high definition TV (cables too)

What you get

I was quite impressed with the feel of the camera. It's quite small, not pocket small, but not as bulky as some DV based video cameras.

In more detail

When you start the camera up you are greeted by a bizarre tune and the menu operates with a confirmation beep which you will be happy to know you can disable.

The camera has three modes: video, stills and sound recording. For a low price camera (£117) it comes with a lot of settings which you might not expect. It can record in resolutions of 640x480 (VGA), 1280x720 (720p) and 1440x1080 (1080p) with each resolution offering quality levels of economy, standard and fine. The video recording modes also range from fully automatic to user specified with pre-sets for portraits, night, sport, landscape, sunset, beach/snow and spotlight. The white balance by default is set to automatic (and this seems quite responsive) but there are also options for daylight, cloudy, florescent 1 & 2 and tungsten. The camera will also let you shoot in several colour modes: standard, vivid, black and white, and sepia tone. Contrast and sharpness can also be set to standard, hard or soft.

I guess most people looking at this sort of range of camera just want to point and shoot, and the automatic modes seem to make this quite easy, but it's nice to know that you can customise other things if you want to.

The stills mode lets you select ISO ratings of 64, 100, 200, 400 and auto. There's an image stabilization mode available, and you can also capture pictures in single or continuous mode.

Here's a quick video I made today. This was recorded in the highest quality mode (1080p fine) in the landscape setting. At the time of the video it was midday, fairly cloudy and very windy:

Visit the link below and select "watch in HD" to see the video in full quality:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=nhLtn03MHhw

Here's a quick panoramic I filmed in Norwich:

Visit the link below and select "watch in HD" to see the video in full quality:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqluxGE-JKk

I hope this has been helpful for anyone who is trying to find out a little more about the camera. I'll post some more videos when I have made some and I'll also try and upload some photos taken with the camera. Please feel free to post any questions in the comments too.

Product page on the Argos website

Outlook calendar problem - all appointments recurring forever

Dan — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 20:42:13 +0000

I came across a strange problem with Outlook Calendar recently where every appointment which was added to the Calendar and then edited suddenly repeated forever! A scary concept! It seemed to be related to a piece of software called 'OutlookAddinSetup'. From what I've read (http://www.eggheadcafe.com/software/aspnet/2901239...), this seems to be something which comes installed with Dell computers. After I uninstalled this program (from Control Panel, Programs, Uninstall a program) the problem has stopped and events only occur once. If anyone knows what the program is supposed to do please drop a comment below :)

CodeIgniter 1.7.0 Released

Dan — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 09:30:56 +0000

It's that wonderful time again! CodeIgniter 1.7.0 has been released, so it's time to upgrade.

http://codeigniter.com/user_guide/installation/upg...

Upgrading looks fairly straight forward - here are some notable changes (http://codeigniter.com/user_guide/changelog.html):

Sessions

The Sessions class has been updated so that any custom data being saved gets stored to the database rather than the session cookie (assuming you are using a database to store session data), permitting much more data to be saved.

New form validation class

Some changes/additions to the new form validation class:

Simplifies setting rules and field names
Supports arrays as field names
Allows groups of validation rules to be saved in a config file
Adds some helper functions for use in view files

The old Validation class is now deprecated. It will be left in the library folder for some time so that existing applications that use it will not break, but you are encouraged to migrate to the new version.

PHP Style Guide

There's now a PHP Style Guide (http://codeigniter.com/user_guide/general/stylegui...) in the User Guide. Although this doesn't affect working code it's just good practice to make sure you have a regular style to your code, especially when writing libraries that others will use.

Well done to everyone who has been working hard on this :)

Diggnation - Live from London, 10th October 2008

Dan — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 17:50:25 +0000

I went to the Live Diggnation at the end of the Future of Web Apps Expo. Excellent show - I really hope they come back again next year! :) (video below)

Here's the video from the recording!

Flickr Picks #1: Autumnal selection

Dan — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 11:46:30 +0000

Here's my first "Flickr picks" picture selection. Every now and then I'm going to pick some photos from Flickr with a particular theme. I thought some nice autumnal pictures would be a good place to start as it's one of my favourite seasons for taking pictures (winter being the other).

The great thing about autumn is not only the colours from the leaves but also the moody weather - rain one minute, sun the next - it really creates a stunning atmosphere.

Double Bows
by Nicholas_T


Spotlight
by Nicholas_T

Full Moon
by joka2000

Just before it rained
by @Amit

Sous les pavés...
by Raphael Goetter

golden autumn
by sashomasho

Golden light on a frosty morning
by net_efekt

Hazy morning
by Per Ola Wiberg (former ponanwi and Powi)

two golden things
by foto3116

Autumn Sky
by mrhayata

Autumn Crashes Down On Us 1
by opticalreflex

Autumn Leaf
by Sister72

rain
by Wolfgang Staudt

Protecting a Drupal site from hotlinking

Dan — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 19:40:36 +0000

What is hotlinking?

Hotlinking, sometimes called image leeching or hot linking, is where another website embeds an image which is stored on your web host. So, for example, if you want to add an image to your website, you can upload the file to your web host then embed the image into your HTML referencing the source for the image as the location of the file on your web host. When someone accesses the HTML page where the image is embedded the file will be downloaded from your web host. If you don't protect against hotlinking, someone could embed that same image on their web page, which means that every time someone accesses their page, the image will be downloaded from your web host and drain your bandwidth. Don't do this, it's not cool and some sites see it as stealing.

How do I know if someone is hotlinking to my site?

Sadly, unless you go looking for this you may never know. One indicator could be that you suffer a sudden surge in bandwidth. I say bandwidth, not traffic, because stats tools such as Google Analytics may not pick this up because they only register web pages, not images. For argument's sake, I'm considering bandwidth as pure data transfer and traffic as people who are visiting your site and reading your web pages. Drupal's access statistics may also not pick this up as they will only register page hits. It may be picked up if you are using the private download method. However, people may still get around this by linking directly to the file.

The best place to check for hotlinking would be your web host's web stats package. In my case, as I'm using an Apache server with Plesk, I'm using Plesk Stat. This logs access at a lower level so I can see everything that hits the server. Somewhere in the stats package you should find 'referrals'. This shows where other sites have linked to your site, which also includes embedded images. You could go visiting the referrals looking for an image, but unless any really stand out I wouldn't bother - the best thing you can do is just to protect against the hotlinking, which we'll look at next.

How do I stop hotlinking?

Once again, it's htaccess to the rescue! With Drupal there is a default htaccess file in the root directory of your site. We're going to leave that be. I'm assuming that all of your images are stored in the /files folder, so this is the folder we will protect. There is already an htaccess file in there, so we just need to add a couple of lines to say not to serve images if they are referred from other sites. Here's a sample htaccess file showing how to do this:

SetHandler Drupal_Security_Do_Not_Remove_See_SA_2006_006
Options None
Options +FollowSymLinks
# Block hotlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(.*\.)?yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpeg|jpg|gif|png)$ http://yourdomain.com/nohotlinking.gif [NC,R,L]

Just to recap, this is the htaccess file that goes in your /files directory, not your root directory. This works by saying allow any blank referrals (some browsers do this, so just to be safe), allow any referrals from yourdomain.com, block any image files (the ones I've specified) and return http://yourdomain.com/nohotlinking.gif instead (which will show on the site trying to hotlink). The reason we add this to the /files folder instead is because if you add this to the root folder htaccess file the nohotlinking.gif will also be protected and try to redirect to itself, causing an infinate loop - so it won't work. Now just create an image called nohotlinking.gif and place it in your root folder - this will be the image people see when someone trys to hotlink.

Images which are part of your theme will not be protected by this method. If you want to also protect your theme images, you will need to add the same htaccess file to your theme folder.

Thanks to a tutorial on altlab.com for the info on this - which also has a really helpful tool for testing if you have this set up correctly.

Please feel free to post any comments below.

Dreamweaver closes straight after opening

Dan — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 18:29:18 +0000

This really is one of the strangest software bugs I've come across!

The Problem

Dreamweaver crashes and won't open again. When you try and open Dreamweaver it just closes straight away, with nothing more than a glimpse of the splash screen.

The Solution

One of the CSS files in the site you were working on has a file size which is a multiple of 8kb (mine was 24kb). You can try anything; rebooting, reinstalling, but Dreamweaver won't play ball if the file is still there. You need open the CSS file in another text editor and add a few dummy lines of comment text to increase the file size slightly; you should then find Dreamweaver will open again normally.

Thanks to David Powers for this. Please feel free to leave any comments below.

First flight for the Flexifoil Buzz

Dan — Mon, 05 May 2008 19:25:49 +0000

Took my little Flexifoil Buzz (Petrol) out for a fly today. Pretty cool kite actually. It was a little smaller than I had imagined it, but it's very responsive even under light winds, and very nippy once the wind picks up.

Strange MSN Login problem (Login error code 80048834)

Dan — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 11:40:52 +0000

No idea what this means, but I thought I'd post it in case anyone else was having the same problem - don't you just love spurious error codes?

I was trying for a while to sign on to MSN messenger but I kept getting error code 80048834 (ohhhh...that one....). After some help from Google I came across a forum post where a couple of people were having the same issue. Anyway, for people skimming this post I'll jump straight to the solution...

Fix

Go to http://login.live.com, login, accept their terms, then try again. I did this and I was taken to "Page not found" at http://storage.msn.com (which I still can't access), but at least I can now login. There was a post on the Microsoft Communities website maybe shedding some more light on the issue - it seems it could be something to do with the time on your PC being incorrect.

Please feel free to any any comments below.

Welcome Drupal 6

Dan — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 22:20:26 +0000

Drupal 6 was released today! After having a play with the beta and release candidates...well, I don't have to say; this really is a phenomenal release! Here are some of my favourite new features which I'm looking forward to using:

Extended logging - You can set Drupal for OS level logging
Batch API - A progress bar can track tasks running in the background through multiple HTTP requests
Scripting from the command line - This is really cool! You can now run Drupal code through the command line
Forum improvements - Granular permissions can allow more control over forum moderation
Sticky table headers - Does what it says on the tin
Drag and drop features - Again, the tin...
CSS only theming - Define regions etc. in .info files without writing any php code, then set styles in CSS

Well done to everyone who has been clearly working hard on this!

Talks begin on Drupal 7

Dan — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 19:49:20 +0000

It's incredible how rapid the development of Drupal has become. Drupal 6 is only just around the corner and we're already talking about what improvements and features we'd like to see in Drupal 7! Drupal 5 has been absolutely fantastic. I've found it not only a great content management system, but also an excellent framework for building applications.

Anyone who wishes to officially request a new feature for Drupal 7 may do so on the Drupal website by submitting a new issue. Some things I'd like to see would be:

Some kind of media management system - not just for images, video and audio but maybe also PDFs and other attachable or embedded content
More core forum features
Built in WYSIWYG editor as I almost always use TinyMCE, which is great, but it would be nice not to have to install and upgrade it separately from the core
Improved node access control system
Automatic upgrade of core system and modules
Site backup for both files and database

Email access becomes slow when lots of messages are left on the server

Dan — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 15:14:45 +0000

I noticed recently that if you're using POP with leave mail on server (LMOS) enabled, authenticating and downloading new messages can become progressively slower. So much so that the email client can even time out, leaving the mailbox locked so you can't even log in again for a while.

What is POP?

POP stands for Post Office Protocol and it's how email clients like Outlook Express and Thunderbird are commonly configured to collect messages from a mailbox. One of the advantages of POP is that a connection to the server is only required when messages are being checked/downloaded to the email client. Once this is complete, the client can disconnect and continue to read/reply/delete messages 'offline'. Once a message has been downloaded and stored on the client a message is sent back to the server telling it to delete the message. This means the only place the message now exists is on the client, not the server. If you want to also be able to download the same message on another machine, you will need to leave the message on the server.

What is 'Leave Mail on Server' (LMOS)?

This is the feature which stops the client deleting the message from the server so that the next client to log on will still be able to download the same message. Instead of deleting the mail from the server some mail clients will mark the message as 'read', which can be a handy feature, but this is non-standard and doesn't really help with this slow down problem.

Why does checking for email become progressively slower with LMOS enabled?

In the POP sequence the mail client will request a Unique ID List (UIDL) which lets the client know what messages are in the mailbox. As messages have been previously left on the server, the mail will accumulate over time and the UIDL will get bigger and bigger and will take longer to check which message IDs the client hasn't already downloaded.

I noticed that the primary email client (the one which was set to delete the messages after download) seemed to access the mail quite rapidly - it only seemed to impact the clients which had LMOS enabled. I guess this could be because the primary client just downloads the accumulated messages (which in itself takes a long while) where as the LMOS enabled client will check all the messages and wait for the ones which it hasn't already got.

To fix this problem the mailbox simply needs to be kept more tidy, either by leaving the messages for only, say, 7 days (to give the other clients a chance to download the messages too), or just regularly purging old messages from the mailbox.

Dan's blog

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

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Shawn Frayne talks about the windbelt

Gallopin' Gertie

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Free subversion repository hosting accounts

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What you get

In more detail

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CodeIgniter 1.7.0 Released

Diggnation - Live from London, 10th October 2008

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Protecting a Drupal site from hotlinking

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How do I know if someone is hotlinking to my site?

How do I stop hotlinking?

Dreamweaver closes straight after opening

The Problem

The Solution

First flight for the Flexifoil Buzz

Strange MSN Login problem (Login error code 80048834)

Welcome Drupal 6

Talks begin on Drupal 7

Email access becomes slow when lots of messages are left on the server

What is POP?

What is 'Leave Mail on Server' (LMOS)?

Why does checking for email become progressively slower with LMOS enabled?

References