Spacebug Open Source Initiative

Open source presentation at the Wellington Architect forum

Amir Shevat — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 02:09:57 +0000

Just finished my presentation on Open source and Architecture in the Wellington Software Architect Forum.

We have covered these topics:
1) Definition, Licensing & players
2) Open source based architecture examples
3) Best practices
4) ROI, TCO and other TLA
5) Open source tools for architecture
6) Want to be an open source developer?
7) Future FOSS trends

You can download the presentation here.

IPWEditor - In-Place WYSIWYG Editor 1.2 Released with TinyMCE support

Amir Shevat — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 07:59:20 +0000

IPWEditor provides easy in-place editing for Web pages with a layer of WYSIWYG. It allows you to seamlessly replace text on Web pages with inputs for on-the-spot editing.

Up until now IPWEditor has integrated only with FCKeditor. The major feature in this release is integration with TinyMCE, a popular WYSIWYG editor.
Developers can now choose to run IPWEditor with either FCKeditor or with TinyMCE editor using the same IPWEditor code.

Drupal crashes when adding module in Modules admin screen

Amir Shevat — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 00:11:23 +0000

Drupal is a popular CMS that enables 3rd party development of extensions such as themes and modules. In order to get a good value site out of Drupal you need to install several modules and theme that provides functionality such as cool look and feel, SEO improvements, support for content types such as images and a lot more.

The problem:

When adding several modules to Drupal you try to enter the “modules” page in the administer menu and Drupal crashes with this error:
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 1476899 bytes) in . . .

How to SELECT a Random Record in SQL

Amir Shevat — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 09:40:05 +0000

Sometimes we need to retrieve a random entry from the Database. An examples for that could be trying to display "random posts" or "a random image".

Some developers pull some or all of the records and then preform the randomization in the application tier (AKA in code).

In most cases letting the Database return random eateries could prove to be a better option performance-wise.

Here is how it is done:

IPWEditor - In-Place WYSIWYG Editor 1.1 Released

Amir Shevat — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 08:28:58 +0000

IPWEditor provides easy in-place editing for Web pages with a layer of WYSIWYG. It allows you to seamlessly replace text on Web pages with inputs for on-the-spot editing.

As reported by some members of the community, due to jQuery issue with IE 7, IPWEditor 1.0 had some issues around IE usability.

Thanks to these inputs and some refactoring around the jQuery limitation, these issues were resolved in this IPWEditor 1.1 release.

Make ThickBox Work with Other JavaScript Libraries / Resolve ThickBox Conflict Issues

Amir Shevat — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 07:45:37 +0000

ThickBox is a cool visualization tool based on Jquery JavaScript library. ThickBox helps you display photos in a cool way and is useful in many web projects.

The problem

ThickBox does not work when the HTML pages has other JavaScript libraries such as Mootools.

Debuging the error reveals this:
$(domChunk) is null

AutoSnippet - automatically generate HTML and javascript code snippets

Amir Shevat — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 08:33:24 +0000

Code snippets posted online are a great source of knowledge and simple way to share experience and to reuse code. As developers we always look to see if there is a 'code example' which we can modify to our needs. As bloggers we find code snippets very useful to get our information out to the readers.

The problem is that creating these code snippets is a complex and cumbersome task. You need you replace all the < with &alt, wrap the code in <pre> and <code> tags and then use a Syntax Highlighter to make our code look nice. Every time we change or fix the code you need to reiterate this process.

AutoSnippet solves this problem by automatically generating the code snippet from the source code (HTML, CSS and Javascript). No more cumbersome repetitive tasks and no more inconsistencies between example and real code.

In this article I will show how to generate automatic snippets for your blog and source/code websites.

How to check where your site visitors come from using javascript

Amir Shevat — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 08:35:48 +0000

Where do my visitors come from? That is always a question bloggers, site owners and advertisers want to know. Knowing who has referred the visitor to my site tells you a lot about that visitor. This information might help you drive better, more finely tuned content to this user.

Demo

IPWEditor - In-Place WYSIWYG Editor with FCKeditor and JQuery Editable

Amir Shevat — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 05:35:07 +0000

An In-Place editor, such as jQuery Editable plug-in, lets you seamlessly replace texts on web pages with inputs, for on-the-spot editing (see example 1). WYSIWYG editors, such as FCKeditor, provide easy, word-like editor on the web (see example 2). Basically, the two are advanced User-Interface JavaScript tools that help users edit content on the web in an easy, intuitive and productive way.

Wouldn't it be great if we combine the two to create a really cool, web 2.0 user experience for editing content on the web? Unfortunately, FCKeditor and Editable are not fully compatible and some tweaking is required to make them interoperable.

In this article will demonstrate how, with little modification, FCKeditor can be integrated into Editable to create an In-Place WYSIWYG editor (see example3).

Real-life Relationships with Xbox

Amir Shevat — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 07:05:22 +0000

A human interaction system is made possible with Natal, a system developed for the Xbox 360.