Development Archives

  1. Hard Drive Update

    As I noted previously, I took my hard drives to a place to try to have the data recovered. I was not impressed by Eboxlab DHE Computers Company (see comments), the guys who I took the drives to. They called me yesterday and told me that they tried to mount the RAID slices on a…

  2. %27 = ‘ in JavaScript Strings?

    Patrick kindly took the time to let me know about an issue with my Share This plugin for WordPress: apostrophes/single-quotes in post titles break things. The thing is, the string looks fine in the source. The title: This title’s got an apostrophe is turned into: This+title%27s+got+an+apostrophe just as I’d intended. What I didn’t realize was…

  3. Monkeywrench

    So yeah, the whole “pull the hard drives out of the machine and drive them somewhere to have folks try to salvage the data from them” thing has definitely put a monkeywrench in my plans for this week. It’s now unlikely I’ll get my new releases of Tasks Pro™ and Tasks out this week, among…

  4. Keyboard and Mouse

    I’ve been using my current keyboard and mouse for a couple of years now and they are due for an upgrade. The keyboard has some keys that have become unreliable and the mouse is getting a bit grimy. Plus with the mouse attached, my desktop machine won’t sleep – I have to unplug it every…

  5. Building alexking.org 2.0, part 5: URLs

    Note: This is the fifth in a series of articles about the building of alexking.org 2.0. The obvious change made with URLs on alexking.org was the conversion from the old template system: /index.php?content=software/wordpress/content.php to nice clean page URLs: /projects/wordpress Since I only had 25 or so pages that used these old URLs, I’ve got the…

  6. Prototype Size Concerns

    Thomas Herold asks about my Share This Plugin: The prototype.js is about 56k in size. My concern is that this slows down the loading time of my site. Any comments about this? Yep, comments I’ve got because this was a carefully considered decision. First, let’s look at the ways this isn’t as big a deal…

  7. Safari Search Boxes

    I ran across a surprising little feature in Safari. If you change a standard: <input type=”text” /> field to a “search” box like so: <input type=”search” /> In Safari, it is magically transformed from a standard input field to a “search box”. It can also have added functionality like remembering previous searches with an extra…

  8. Building alexking.org 2.0, Part 3: Navigation

    Note: This is the third in a series of articles about the building of alexking.org 2.0. The old site navigation was basically in several parts: The main tree menu along the left Breadcrumbs and landing pages Blog archives, categories and search in the blog sidebar Not too much has changed fundamentally in the new design,…

  9. Calling mod_rewrite Gurus…

    One of the trade-offs to going with a fully WordPress driven site for content is a little URL awkwardness for image and archive files you want to show/link to on a page. For example, in a “standard” site it is pretty easy to have a page at this location: http://example.com/foo/ and a related file download…

  10. alexking.org v2 Status

    I’ve gotten a few questions about the new version of this site I’ve mentioned I’m working on, so I figured I’d just blog a response. I’ve been making good progress on it, but it’s been a bit more work than I’d expected. Partly due to my own scope creep. 🙂 The little template system I…

  11. Staging a Database Driven Site

    One of the challenges I’m facing in working on v2 of the alexking.org site is the best way to “stage” the new site. Normally it’s pretty easy. Just build the new site locally and export the database when it’s time to launch the new site. However, since the live site is getting new posts, comments,…

  12. Providing Support

    In discussing the support I provide for my products (and changes I can make to do it better) with Geof, he pointed out that developers can be simultaneously the best and worst people to support their products. One issue is communication – not everyone does it well. I think I do better than some, but…