Blog

I’ve been a big fan of Clay Shirky since I read ‘Here Comes Everybody’, and he’s recently been featured on TED talking about how the open source model of organising, or self organising, groups of hundreds of people can be an incredibly powerful way of producing software, not just technically but democratically. Specifically, he references Git, which unlike many other Version Control Systems (VCS), operates in a distributed way, that is there isn’t one central place or repository - everyone who is participating has access to all the source code and all the source code history....

Most modern browsers, such as Firefox 15, Chrome 21 and Internet Explorer 9, have a nifty spell-checker built in to help us ‘auto-correct’ generation write, but when you install the CKEditor some of this functionality is hijacked by the default javascript used by the text editor. Fortunately, if you’re using CKEditor for Drupal, it’s a quick fix to get the browser default spell-checker working again. If you’re not using Drupal you may still be able to apply the fix by noting the configuration settings and using them in your setup. ...

I’ve just released a new Math CAPTCHA Library for CodeIgniter, which can use plain text English words for numbers and random question phrases. It’s also supports multiple languages (as it uses the core language library) and both addition and multiplication. It’s still in the early stages so it needs to be put through its paces, but hopefully the CodeIgniter community will find this a nice alternative to the regular image CAPTCHA or simple math CAPTCHA. ...

You may have recently noticed that lots of Google search results now show profile pictures of authors alongside the result for the page. I think this adds a nice element of trust to the link, as you can see the person who wrote the page and you can be pretty sure the content comes from a person as opposed to a content aggregator or such like. As always, there’s no exact formula to controlling the search result information, but Google has published some advice for setting this up for your blog or website. ...

The jQuery UI library doesn’t support touch features by default, so trying to use the slider or drag and drop on the iPad won’t work. Fortunately, all that’s required to get this working is a small hack - enter jQuery UI Touch Punch. ...

I decided to write an extension to the CodeIgniter core Output library as it’s great for working with cache but doesn’t contain any mechanisms for clearing or managing the cache. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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....

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. ...