DerekAllard.com : CodeIgniter, ExpressionEngine, and the World of Web Design

Happy New Year!

January 01^st, 2007

Happy new year to everyone!  I’m testing out a new feature to the blog that lets me say when posts should become visible (I hadn’t bothered building that into this until now).  I hope you’re looking forward to an exciting 2007!

Continue reading “Happy New Year!”. Posted in Noteworthy, Personal with 3 comments

Passing Disallowed Characters through the URL in Code Igniter

December 30^th, 2006

One of the very nice things about CodeIgniter (and really all the PHP frameworks I've looked at) is the built in security tools. For example, CodeIgniter automatically cleans cookies, sessions, user input and URLs in addition to coming with a host of other built in tools to make your job in securing your application as easy as possible. But, like all good things, there is a trade off. In the case of security, the trade off is convenince. The more secure, the less convenient. Since security isn't really something we can compromise on, clever developers need to find alternate ways of implementing common things. CodeIgniter for example limits the characters that one can use in a URL to letters, numbers, and "~, %, :, _ and -". A good collection sure, but what if you need to pass other characters, such as "(, ), =" or even spaces? Here's how I did it.

Continue reading “Passing Disallowed Characters through the URL in Code Igniter”. Posted in CodeIgniter, How-To with 1 comment

Captions in HTML Table Class

December 26^th, 2006

After a recent request for this, I’m re-posting the code to generate table captions in Code Igniter that I originally posted in the forums. Using it is very simple:

$this->table->set_caption()

Continue reading “Captions in HTML Table Class”. Posted in CodeIgniter with 1 comment

Tagged by Matt with Five Things

December 22^nd, 2006

Ack, that scoundrel Matt has tagged me with the five things meme. Make me do more work will he!

1. I'm an enviro-nerd. My degree is in Environmental Studies, I own a hybrid car, we compost nearly everything that will rot (ew, that didn't sound good) and secretly I get joy from only putting out a few wraps of plastic every other week. Also, it gives me an excuse to just keep re-using the same jokes over and over... I'm really just "recycling".
2. I was spit on once by the singer Jewel during a yodel. Seriously, it was before she had gotten her first album out, and she was playing at a local beer pub in Toronto, "C'est What". Not typically my style of music, but she was great. One of the things she did was a song that involved her yodeling, and right in the middle of it, a big spit flys out and lands on my leg. There were only a few dozen people in the place... she stops the performance, says "I'm so sorry", then picks up her guitar and keeps going!
3. I'm a cat person. You know dog-people and cat-people? I don't dislike dogs, I just like cats. C'mon, its hard not to respect any animal that arrogant.
4. I'm 1 course away from finally getting my Master's of Education. I'm honestly sick of it. A good friend told me getting a post-grad degree while running a business would be a "triumph of tenacity over reason". He was right.
5. I've only ever had 1 bottle of "Bud" in my life. Budweiser is among the nastiest stuff I've ever tasted. That said, I'm a self-admitted beer connoisseur snob. I'm hoping my wife gets a keg of St. Ambrose Blond for christmas as a "joint gift"... of course if she does we probably won't make it to New Years.

I'm tagging a few of the commenters on my blog! Yannick, James, John, Scott, and I'm using this opportunity to kick Ankur's butt to get a site up already.

Continue reading “Tagged by Matt with Five Things”. Posted in Personal with 6 comments

Small(ish) DerekAllard.com Site Updates

December 20^th, 2006

Yeah this pushes the definition of noteworthy, but this is just a quick note. I’ve made several small but important changes to the site. Most of them will appear cosmetic (for example, the footer is shortened). I’ve also added cookies to remember the name, email and website you entered if you left a comment, so you don’t need to re-enter that every time you want to comment (thanks Jason for the suggestion). I’ve also streamlined the approval process and added some additional spam comment protection. You should generally find now that comments are approved very quickly (often instantly).

Thanks to everyone who’s been contributing. I really appreciate it.

Continue reading “Small(ish) DerekAllard.com Site Updates”. Posted in Noteworthy with 1 comment

Top 8 Code Igniter Wiki Resources

December 18^th, 2006

One of the reasons I started getting active in the Code Igniter community was because of... um... well, the community. The people who are active are such interesting people, who give a lot of themselves back into the framework. You only need to look at the very active forums to see this happening. Community contributions are cropping up all over, including CIForge.com, as well as numerous independent efforts to educate and evangelize. People from all walks of life are drawn to Code Igniter, presumably for the same reason I was. It just plain rocks. It helps you build faster, it helps you build more organized, and it helps you build more securely.

In fact, CI is so sweet, that you could download the framework and never visit the site again, and be instantly more productive... but if you really want to push the bounds, then you need to spend some time in the community wiki. The wiki is a mysterious, fantastic place - and if you can sort through the disorganization and flux, there are some real treats in there. In fact, nearly every project I've built has used something from the wiki^*. So in no particular order, here are my top eight, wiki resources.

Continue reading “Top 8 Code Igniter Wiki Resources”. Posted in CodeIgniter with 11 comments

Conditionally Sticky Sidebar

December 07^th, 2006

If you use pretty much any browser except IE 6 (more on that later) when you visit this site, you've probably noticed that the dark-grey sidebar scrolls with you just until the banner and menu are off the page, and then locks itself into position or "sticks". When you scroll back to the top, if the menu and/or banner need to be seen again, the sidebar politely resumes its normal scrolling duties. Go ahead, try it now, I'll wait. Fun isn't it? I've had a number of people comment on that, so I thought I would outline how I accomplished it.

Continue reading “Conditionally Sticky Sidebar”. Posted in Browsers, Javascript with 13 comments

Quick Link: Firebug 1.0 is out in beta

December 04^th, 2006

One of my favourite Firefox extensions has just released a new version. Firebug announced today that the 1.0 version is out now in beta, and even more importantly, has been released under the same open source license as Firefox itself. From the site: Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

Fancy-pants DOM features abound, and the usual AJAX debugging goodness is in there. Thanks go to Joe Hewitt.

Continue reading “Quick Link: Firebug 1.0 is out in beta”. Posted in Browsers, Quick Links with no comments

Building an RSS Feed in Code Igniter

December 03^rd, 2006

I've had a few requests asking how I built my RSS feed since I'm using a custom built Code Igniter blogging system. Actually, it was pretty straight forward, but I thought I'd take a few moments to outline step by step how I did it.

Continue reading “Building an RSS Feed in Code Igniter”. Posted in CodeIgniter, How-To with 5 comments

Derek Action Figure

November 30^th, 2006

Let me reveal the Derek Allard Action Figure^™ to the world! Yup, that's right, an action figure! Kung-fu grip and everything. Well, not really kung-fu grip. I guess that'll be kind of obvious when you look at the pictures below. Jennifer Dungan is a former student of mine who now earns her living as a freelance web designer/developer. Despite being busy coding up actionscript wizardry, she finds time for her hobbies. Now some people (not me I swear!) would say that this is an unusual hobby... but its hard not to admire the talent, skill and patience that goes into a project like this.

Check out the images to see what I mean! But first, let's get one thing absolutely clear... this is a Derek action figure, not a doll!

Continue reading “Derek Action Figure”. Posted in Education, Personal with 14 comments