A colleague of mine pointed me in the direction of a humorous twitter hashtag of the IT variety which, with being a web developer I found quite amusing, especially on a friday afternoon. The hashtag was for #htmlmovies.
If you’ve not already guessed, the basic idea is to convey a film is a clever way using html tags such as
<html><head><style>EM{color:#F00;}</style></head><body>The hunt for <em>October</em></body></html>
I have recently taken on a new web project which is to move an e-commerce website from a custom 3rd party solution over to Magento and before I even got started I hit a road block (you have got to love Magento for that!). I found that I had to import around 200 product attributes (colours, sizes, etc) from the old online shop to the magento installation and obviously I did not want to enter all these by hand, but where to begin?!
Luckily I came across a post on the Magento forums which details a method for bulk importing product attributes into Magento and although it did not allow me to automate the whole process, it was sufficient for my purposes.
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I wrote an article in April 2010 about VPN Issues with O2 Wireless Box II and it has come to my attention that O2 are now putting firmware version 8.2.7.7 on their routers which is supposed to resolve these VPN issues. Apparently this is not always the case and O2 are no longer downgrading the firmware because it is “fixed” in the 8.2.7.7 version. Some people are finding it difficult to get any support, and the O2 CD which you can download no longer has the older 7.4.20.4 firmware.
Fear not though… I did a little digging around and managed to located the 7.4.20.4 firmware (RT-585v7_74K4EJ.exe) and I have upload it for you.
Download the O2 Firmware 7.4.20.4 (RT-585v7_74K4EJ.exe) for the O2 Wireless Box
Just remember and disable O2′s ability to come in an auto-upgrade you otherwise it will not be long till you are be back to square one.
Over the few weeks I have taken to reading (yes, honestly I have, and it appears there is a decent amount of worthwhile reading material out there on the web) a few blog entries from SEOmoz, partly because I started to follow SEOmoz on twitter and have been enticed by twitter teasers.
One of the points of thought on a recent blog entry about the unexpected effects of a tweet on search engine rankings suggested that auto-tweeting using tools like auto-tweet plugins for WordPress or online services such as Twitterfeed were not as effective as promoting the content.
This peaked my attention, especially since I have been using Twitterfeed for several months to feed my blog to twitter and Facebook and I have, on occasion, noticed decent search engine rankings and quick indexing in Google for some of my topics (mainly my Server Backup using Dropbox (A 5 Minute Setup) article).
Thus far I have not been able to determine if there is any more weight given to an tweet that is posted manually rather than a tweet which is posted by an automated service like Twitterfeed but I have come across several recommendation why auto-tweeting services are bad and should not be used.
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Over the last month or so I have been busy migrating my sites from my old shared hosting to a new server in the Rackspace Cloud and it has not been without it troubles. The first site I transferred was my WordPress blog and after following various resources on setting up Nginx and spawning PHP FastCGI processes I managed to get everything up and running happily… or so I thought.
As it turns out I had followed the guide for spawing PHP FastCGI processes to the letter, and that is where the problem lay. After a few weeks WordPress reported there were various plugins that needed upgrading but I could not do the automatic upgrade and I had trouble uploading new files due to the wrong permission being applied. After some investigation this lead me to realise that I needed to spawn my PHP FastCGI processes as the unprivileged user the files belonged to, and not nginx as in the original documentation.
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You have probably come across this already but I have tripped up over this problem a few times.
If you have fields in the db like address_1, address_2, address_3 then the _ is not removed when using getter/setter methods
I am one of those people who, despite knowing the risks, fail to make appropriate backups of my work and important data and rely on hope that nothing will go wrong. Unfortunately I have been caught out on a couple of occasions and I have been after a nice way to backup my data (documents, websites under development, family photos etc) from my home Fedora Core server without me having to really do anything.
I have seen several online backup software solutions, however most have to be configured and managed via GUI applications installed on your computer however as I have been wanting to back up a Fedora Core server which is command line only, this options was not available to me. A few people suggested Dropbox to me for sharing files between home and work computers and when looking into Dropbox I found that it can also be set up with a service on my Fedora Core server and configured to backup the data on my server.
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I was trying to assist someone with the difference between backtics, apostrophes and quotation marks. The three are used in different circumstances and the the basic rules I use with ‘, ` and " are:-
I only use ` in MySQL and only where the field or table name is a reserved word i.e. you have a field called date so the query ends up like
SELECT title, `date` FROM sometable
Today a client was reporting issues with uploading an image via the media section of the diem project administration pages. The error was:-
SQLSTATE[23000]: Integrity constraint violation: 1062 Duplicate entry ‘Logo.JPG’ for key 2
I recall having issues with this whilst developing a previous diem based site and the issue turned out to be something rather simple.
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I have been working on these 2 projects on and off for a couple of weeks and although it has taken me much longer to package up and write the documentation for these 2 projects, I have finally managed to get them finished to a reasonable state and both projects are available for download.
lineTwit - A PHP Twitter Reader – Original developed at my work (Line Digital) and is based on myTwit by Ralph Slooten
wpTwit - A WordPress Plugin build using lineTwit to show how it can be incorporated into proper projects. This site is live example of this plugin in action as I am using wpTwit for the twitter feed in the sidebar.
Many thanks to both Line Digital and Ralph Slooten for allowing me to make these available for everyone to use.
Enjoy!
