CodeIgniter 1.7 by Jose Argudo Blanco and David Upton

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: ...

22 December, 2009

Flickr picks no2: Snow

We’ve had a lot of snow over the past few days making for some beautiful, bright snow photos. Great Braxted Park. Stuart Axe, on Flickr Star Burst! Scootzsx, on Flickr

20 December, 2009

Firefox or Chrome

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.

13 December, 2009

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

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what I’ve found is that by default I am shown the news feed which shows the most relevant information, but it’s often out of date, sometimes by a couple of days.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. ...

22 November, 2009

Goodbye, Drupal Zen Classic theme!

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! ...

21 November, 2009