Preamble: I’m a huge fan of Alfred App. This post isn’t about Alfred per se, but if you’re a Mac user, do yourself a favour and grab a copy. There’s a free version, and the “powerpack”. The powerpack is what is needed to follow the rest of this post.

Recently I’ve been tackling a lot of projects where the state of the app when “logged in” was different then if you were “logged out”. In order to test the app in both phases, I spent a lot of time flipping between staying logged in, and also launching the site in private mode (or in Chrome, “Incognito”). To help speed up the process, I wrote a few extensions for Alfred to automatically launch my browsers in private mode.

The extensions support Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera.

Here’s what you’ll see now:

Grab the extensions and play around: alfred_private_mode_extensions.zip. Installing them is super easy, open Alfred’s preferences > extensions, and just drop them one at a time onto the “Drop to Install” box.

A project I’m working on needs a monthly calendar. Naturally, I’m using CodeIgniter as the base of it. Here’s the default CI-based calendar:

and here’s what I ended at (you can grab the files (CSS, config file, sample controller/view) below).

Firefox 3.6 was released today. I love it. Love it. One thing I wasn’t crazy about was a behaviour change when opening links in new tabs. Before 3.6, they opened at the end of the tab row, but now they open beside the tab you are currently on. Want to change it back?

• “about:config” in your address bar.
• search for “insertRelatedAfterCurrent”. The full config is “browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent”.
• Set it to “false” (just click it until it toggles).

Enjoy!

Just a quick tip, I needed to get the value of the selected radio button from a radio group using jQuery. While several custom selectors are available for forms, there isn’t a simple way to do it that I could find. I ended up using a solution that I quite like, and wanted to share.

Have I mentioned that I love jQuery?

Edit: This entry was directly attacked by the robots, and all comments were lost. Please leave one again if you left it earlier, and accept my sincerest of apologies.

George Ornbo over at ShapeShed (an EE shop, go admire the majesty) wrote a cute introduction to the PHP "if" statment. If you can't have fun with your code... well, then you just plain can't have fun.

I get a fair few requests from designers asking for help with basic PHP. So I'm going to write a series on very basic PHP. It is not hard so let's start with a robot and the if statement.

Not normally worthy of a mention, but he uses robots to explain, and everyone knows I'm a fool for robots; but also offers this masterful bit of PHP code (slightly altered, for brevity).

Why do I get the sense that this title is going to get me banned from Google?

For some work I’m doing right now I needed the current time output into the input field that the (excellent) jQuery datepicker uses, but I don’t need it selectable by the user.  The default format is

but can be formatted using the formatDate parameter.  The list of formatting options is considerable, including predefined setups for ATOM, COOKIE, ISO_8601, various RFC dates, RSS, TIMESTAMP and even W3C.  Unfortunately none of the predefined formats, nor the large list of date components includes time.

Read on for my solution to this dilemna.

Instant message has become a part of my daily life.  I use it pretty much non stop for work, and my work involves writing a lot of code.  It isn’t uncommon for me to send something like

I like iChat (Adium of course is the old favourite, but hasn’t been used much since I moved to Leopard and Apple improved iChat so much), but sometimes it’s too cute for its own good.  This is especially true of the “helpful” way it converts :) and ;) into and respectively. Helpful in the same way that Clippy was helpful.

This behaviour gets very annoying when one is trying to look at code.  The above code example becomes .  You can image how annoying this is when every third line of chat is code.  So I went hunting through the iChat preferences to find a little box I could uncheck and turn off smileys, only there was no box to be found.

A quick trip through google didn’t turn up too much either, but I was able to figure out where iChat kept its preferences for that.  A minute later, I had figured out a way to turn them off.  Here’s how:

Browse to /Applications/iChat.app, and “Show Package Contents”.

Next up, browse into Contents/Resources/English.lproj and look for a file called SmileyTable.plist.  This is where all the smiley definitions are stored.  Without it, iChat can’t translate smiles, so rename it to “SmileyTable.plist.banished”.  If you ever want smileys back, just reverse the process!

There, that feels better

So, I just spent the last hour getting a screencast built to show how you can start using ExpressionEngine on your site now, even if you don’t “know” ExpressinEngine yet.  Good times.  Used Screenflow, had a sexy little video thing going… and then realized that I recorded the blasted thing nearly fullscreen on my computer (it’s a 24inch iMac).  I tried to scale it down so that it would fit onto 1 screen for most people, but then so much detail got lost that it looked like crap.

How frustrating.

So I’ll re-build it at some point in the near future, and for now, you can admire all my hard work in static, useless, image form ;)

Note: the specific subversion information in this post is now out of date. Please refer to the CodeIgniter Downloads page for the latest information.

If you’ve been following the CodeIgniter community, then you’ll know that some time ago, we made an subversion (SVN) repository available. Subversion is a version control system that we use internally to be sure we’re all working from the same page. The SVN is publicly available, and is committed to by 4 of the fine folks at EllisLab.  I’ve referred to it before, but I’ve never really talked about how to use it. Recently, there’s been some people interested in getting the latest and greatest CodeIgniter changes pre-release - and heck, why not, as there’s some fine work in there.  This post will talk about how you can use the SVN to keep up with the latest CodeIgniter changes.

First of all, the standard disclaimer: we make great efforts to be sure that the code in the repository is bug free and functioning, but as is the case with all “bleeding edge” releases, from time to time things may slip in there, so I don’t recommend you use it in a “mission critical” environment.

So, how to use it?  If you are a Mac user, there are 2 pretty nice graphical interfaces.  SCPlugin gets the most attention, but I really like SVNX. 

In windows?  Go for Tortoise SVN.  Integrates with Windows Explorer and has probably the most intuitive interface I’ve ever worked with.  In any event, pick a client ;)

Now create a folder on your computer somewhere, and rightclick to set up a new repository.  As your destination, choose “http://dev.ellislab.com/svn/CodeIgniter/trunk” which is where we keep our stuff.  Now your goto command is “update” and “show log”.  Update gets you the latest files, and “log” let’s you see what changed.  Here’s an example of the log file from today.

Notice that most times when we check something in we make a comment? Sometimes a change is so minor that we don’t bother, but in general it’ll help you stay on top of what is new in the repository.

Changes tend to come in fits and spurts.  You might see nothing for two weeks, and then a dozen changes in two days.  In general, anything particularly noteworthy will be discussed here (on this blog), so you don’t need to check it every day, but you might want to keep an eye on future changes yourself.

Welcome to the cutting edge! ;)

A few days ago, I wrote about the release of ExpressionEngine 1.6.1.  In it, I highlighted the “live look” feature, as a great new addition.  Live look allows you to preview a post within a template, rather than previewing only isolated content.  So you can see what your content will look like inside your template.  This is great if you have a future entry, or a post that you are leaving “closed” until you have a chance to finish it up.

But there has been a bit of confusion about how live look should work.  Essentially, all it does is load your entry into a template, so if you have a future dated entry, or a closed entry, it won’t be visible by default.  The solution?  Create a “preview” template, and take advantage of the status and show_future_entries parameters.  Essentially, make it look like this

I’d further recommend that you take advantage of Template Access Restriction in your preview template.  Without it, anyone who guesses your preview template will be able to see upcoming or closed content.  Probably a good idea to restrict it to the same member groups as your authors.

Happy ExpressionEngineering!