September 24th, 2007
OK, these are the laziest of possible posts, but there have been a few things I’ve found in the last few days that I wanted to bring up.
- 7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails.
- Jim O’Halloran has been blogging about CodeIgniter a bit recently, including Building a Complete CodeIgniter Application (there are several parts to this, so go read it). Nice work Jim!
- EE Design has started a rebuild/refresh/whatever and the site is starting to come alive again. I wish the same could be said of the awesome Jambor-EE, but they haven’t updated in 8 months… ;(
- glider.js is out, and looks sexy as hell.
- More impressive in my mind is ModalBox which I intend on utilizing shortly. Looks great, and is built on Prototype/Scripto, which is my JS library(ies) of choice recently.
- Mobile Web Design was released, and I was fortunate enough to have EllisLab provide me with a copy. There’s some real gold in there, and while I’m not doing anything explicitly mobile at the moment, I know this book will end up being one of those “keep going back to” texts that we all have.
Continue reading “Few notable links recently”. Posted in
CodeIgniter, Noteworthy, PHP with 5 comments 
September 23rd, 2007
One of the signs of an application’s popularity is when a community and books start to spring up around it. The CodeIgniter community has never been questioned, and now it also has a book to accompany it. CodeIgniter for Rapid PHP Application Development. The book is written by David Upton, who has a clean, friendly style. His writing is clear, and examples are plentiful.
I’ve got a copy, and in fact, during the early stages of the books development, I had an opportunity to do some reviewing (with Rick Ellis). So let’s get this out of the way now shall we. Should you buy this book?
Continue reading “Review: Codeigniter for Rapid PHP Application Development”. Posted in
CodeIgniter, Education with 4 comments
September 18th, 2007
I just took some time to put up some forums dedicated to BambooInvoice support, feature requests and general chat. Feel free to drop by and have your say!
http://forums.bambooinvoice.org/
Continue reading “BambooInvoice forums”. Posted in
BambooInvoice with no comments
September 17th, 2007
Leslie Camacho and Derek Jones deliver what might well be the funniest thing I’ve seen in months. A funeral for Internet Explorer 6.
I personally believe that internet ISP users are unable to do so… um… because some people out there in our internet don’t have browsers… and ah… I believe our education such as Firefox… for the children
Classic!
Go watch it now.
Continue reading “I personally believe, like, such as, and… Internet Explorer 6 is dead!”. Posted in
Browsers, ExpressionEngine with 1 comment
September 14th, 2007
There’s a new release of BambooInvoice available. To update, do a full backup, then replace all files except your config directory, and then run the update script.
I really wanted to get 2 new features in there before I released this version, but as the changes started mounting, and my time started dwindling, I figured I should just get this out there. Most notable is the reduced code (mostly due to the new CodeIgniter Session Library) and the final-I-swear-its-squashed-now-and-will-never-return fix of your company logo not appearing on the PDFs.
Under the hood, there was substantial restructuring of the database (do a backup both before and after you update), some speed enhancements, some file restructuring, and most importantly, I’ve laid some foundation for the some new features that I think will be a big hit.
The 2 new features planned for the next release:
1) Itemized invoices (you know… 1 “item” at “unit cost” type thing); and
2) Sexier PDF invoices. Here’s a preview so far.
I’m not totally sold on it… but anything beats the boring invoice I’ve been using so far. I’ve been also thinking about building in some type of invoice template system, so that people could submit their designs, and they could be offered as add ons, or installation time choices perhaps… not sure about that one yet.
With respects to the itemized invoices, this database changes this time around include a new field (“itemized”) for this, and I’ll probably just store things in a serialized array. I’ve been playing with the javascript I want to use to add in the extra items, and this will be really the first feature that Bamboo will have that will only be accessible to javascript-enabled users. I don’t feel this conflicts with accessibility though, as non-js users will still be able to use the traditional form. It will simply be an enhanced experience for js users.
I’ve also been asked if I’d be willing to set up support forums for Bamboo. I’d be an idiot to burn the goodwill of people who want to help (public thanks go to Marc Arbour for his role in this regard, and for his evangelising of BambooInvoice. Thanks Marc… I appreciate it).
To that end, one of the things I’ve been thinking about lately is the installation and update procedures. BambooInvoice is at the point now where it is not longer only attracting CodeIgniter/ExpressionEngine/PHP nerds; and as people with less technical experience start using it I want the experience to be as positive as possible for them. I’d welcome (with open arms) and suggestions for improvements in this area.
Continue reading “BambooInvoice 0.8.2 released”. Posted in
BambooInvoice with 15 comments
September 13th, 2007
Interesting problem I encountered this morning. I needed to make a case sensitive search through MySQL. So consider this search.
SELECT * FROM people WHERE field LIKE '%Derek%'
This will match
but I only was interested in exact matches. Ah right! MySQL cases are case insensitive by default. Hmm… how to get around this one?
So begin the search… which brought me to a MySQL docs page called Case Sensitivity in Searches. Buried in that page is this little gem.
If you want to make this search case sensitive, make sure that one of the operands has a case sensitive or binary collation.
But then all their examples suggest changing the collation with the “COLLATE” argument. Then something from years gone by clicked in my head, and I remembered forcing the result to binary, which led me to write this query.
SELECT * FROM people WHERE BINARY field LIKE '%Derek%'
Works a charm, so I wanted to document it (for my benefit), and share it on blog (for anyone reading this).
And now that I’ve got my result, this pretty much ends my investigation into this, so if anyone cares to shed more light, or share a “proper” way of doing this, please just comment below!
Continue reading “Case Sensitive in MySQL searches”. Posted in
PHP with 2 comments
September 12th, 2007
CodeIgniter developer Michael Wales started an interesting kind of tutorial today, as he live blogged it.
I think we’re all familar with Live Blogging, the act of updating a specific blog posts continuously through an Expo or something of that nature. Today I’m going to try something a little bit new here - a live tutorial. We’ll be creating a very basic blog using the CodeIgniter framework - I’m not going to run through Installation of a web server or anything like that. Just make sure you have a fresh install of CodeIgniter up and ready to go.
Interesting work Michael, and I hope we see more of this!
Continue reading “Quick Link: Live Blogging CodeIgniter tutorial”. Posted in
CodeIgniter, Quick Links with 1 comment
September 08th, 2007
If you’ve been reading this blog, then you know I was off hiking around Costa Rica for 2 weeks. Well, despite an overpowering urge to pack up and move there, I survived and made it back. Actually, I got back late Wednesday, but I’ve been spending every free moment of my life catching up on “stuff”. Its incredible that despite more or less getting all my business in order before I went away*, that I still have such a backlog of stuff to do . I don’t think I realized exactly how much time I spent on BambooInvoice... until I came back to 2 weeks of backlog. I’ve tried hard to get all caught up, but if you’ve written me in the last 2 weeks and you haven’t heard back from me yet, hang tight… I’m still working my way through some of those.
We were supposed to be back a day earlier, but literally as we started the boarding process for our plane a small 6 or 8 seat jet came in for a landing on the only runway at the airport, and blew out its front tire, crashing in front of us. It was pretty hairy, but nobody was hurt. It did however close down the airport for a day. We were flying with Air Canada, and frankly, they did right by me. While the situtation sucked, they did their best. They shuttled us to a beautiful hotel, put us up, bought us dinner and breakfast, then shuttled us back to the airport for the first flight the next morning. I’m going to write them a thank you letter… generally when people write its only to complain, so it might make their day to hear from a happy customer. That said, they did subject me to Spiderman 3 on the way down (ugh), so maybe the karma balances out :) I ignored most of the in-flight entertainment and read Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods” and “Neverwhere”. I loved them both. I also bought “Good Omens”, but haven’t been able to get it out of Joanne’s hands…
I’ll be writing more about the trip in the upcoming week, but I’ll file the entires under “personal”, and clearly outline that if you’re here for CodeIgniter, ExpressionEngine, or other geekery, then you can skip those entries. There are lots of pictures and great stories: I was telling Derek Jones, that if you’re really good in this lifetime, you get resurrected as a squirrel monkey. Those guys have so much fun!
So I’m alive and kicking, recovering from a minor sunburn, trying to lose the 20 pounds I must have put on (despite all the hiking, the food and drink was amazing), and ready to tackle life again.
*save 1 very major project launching this week
Continue reading “Back from Costa Rica”. Posted in
Personal with 7 comments
