Development Archives

  1. Google Apps Dropping IE 6

    As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 ​as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers. I’ve never been so glad to receive the same email 5 times (for each Google Apps domain).

  2. Show all svn:externals

    If you need to see all svn:externals in a directory structure, this is your huckleberry: svn propget -R svn:externals . Logging this here for my own future reference. This post is part of the thread: Version Control – an ongoing story on this site. View the thread timeline for more context on this post.

  3. WordPress 2.9 and PHP Libraries

    I recently put new releases of my Twitter Tools plugin – basically patches so that it would work in WordPress 2.9 on versions of PHP prior to 5.2. This is an interesting situation, where I hadn’t really done anything wrong in the plugin and the WP core team hadn’t really done anything wrong in the…

  4. Coding Backwards

    I’d been putting off building an abstracted search query library for a while because I knew it was a big concept with a lot of options and was going to be hard to get it organized right. When I finally built it, I ended up taking an approach I hadn’t used before, and I’m really…

  5. API Versioning Tip

    You create APIs because you want people to build to them. When people build to your APIs, they need to continue working – even if/when the APIs need to evolve over time. The best way to do this is to build API versioning right into the API URLs themselves. Yes: api.example.com/1.0/command No: api.example.com/command Assuming your…

  6. Canonical “Focus on First Field” jQuery

    I want a “set focus to first field” script that is simple, generic and smart enough to work 95+% of the time. Here is what I came up with: var pageBody = ‘#page-body’; // set this to be your main content area (avoid always setting focus to a search or login form in the header)…

  7. Mac Text Editor WordPress Tools

    Shawn (one of our talented developers at Crowd Favorite) has created some great tools for WordPress developers that use BBEdit and TextMate. The TextMate bundle has been out for a little while, but he now has a functional port of it to a BBEdit clipping set as well.1 The TextMate Bundle provides nice, handy auto-complete…

  8. Do Little Things First

    When working on a web project that has multiple features/components, there is a tendency to want to get all the big stuff done first and then focus on the little stuff. For example, when building a site with a blog, forums and an online store I will typically see developers working on getting the basics…

  9. Open Source Contract Considerations

    BIG FAT DISCLAIMER: I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV. I have, however, been working in the Open Source consulting and development space for a number of years and think this is an important issue for all Open Source consultants to consider. Please consult your own lawyer, don’t blame me,…

  10. WordPress Theme Admin Page Tip

    In WordPress 2.7.1 (and probably previous versions), the admin page that allows for theme activation has some behavior that you might find sub-optimal in certain conditions. Today I was setting up a site and wholesale replaced the default ‘wp-content/themes’ directory with a ‘wp-content/themes’ directory checked out of our SVN. This removed the default theme (Kubrick)…

  11. Abbreviate – Anti-Social URL Shortening

    This weekend I took a day and a half and built Abbreviate, an URL shortening service1 on the CodeIgniter (PHP) framework I’ve been building for the next generation of Crowd Favorite web applications. Why build yet another URL shortening service? A couple of reasons: Exercise the application framework and see how well it works for…

  12. Debugging an XSS attack

    Today I ran across a Cross Site Scripting (XSS) attack in the wild. Since the victimized site is run by a friend, I did a little digging to see how the attack was done so I could tell him about the issue and how to fix it. Here is a little background on XSS attacks…

  13. 404s and WordPress Server Load

    A few months back we launched a site redesign/redevelopment project for a client, and made a simple mistake that had some interesting ramifications. It’s worth posting here so others don’t make the same mistake. What Happened When redeveloping the site, we moved the WordPress instance from the web root: /public_html/wp-config.php /public_html/wp-includes/ /public_html/… to a subdirectory…