Development Archives

  1. Presenting at Refresh Denver

    I’ll be joining Josh Pigford as a presenter at the next Refresh Denver meeting this coming Wednesday. I’ll be talking about Addictomatic, which we had the opportunity to build earlier this year. Leave a comment and let me know what you’d like to hear in the presentation. The last Refresh Denver meeting was the first…

  2. Posting from ShareThis

    The ShareThis team has rolled out an update with some great new features; most importantly a feature which allows posting to a variety of services: It’s pretty handy – you can post directly to WordPress, Twitter, Blogger, TypePad, etc. You can’t yet customize or add to the message being sent, but if it’s a highly…

  3. Theme Browser “Fixed”

    I got a couple of reports that my WordPress Theme Browser was not working. I checked it out, and sure enough – not working. This was a bit of a surprise as that code hadn’t changed in years. Turns out, it was the browsers that had changed. I had moved the theme browser from my…

  4. Images, onload Events and Browsers

    We’ve been working on a really fun project recently, and I was surprised at some of the browser behavior I was seeing in our testing. I knew from past experience that the window.load event waits to fire until all images have downloaded completely. This is why jQuery and other JS libraries implement $(document).ready() features; so…

  5. Google App Engine

    As you’ve no doubt heard already, Google released Google App Engine at the Google Campfire One event last night. Folks, this is a real game changer. Scalability has been the final frontier for web applications for far too long. For web developers like myself, the “building the app” part of offering a web service is…

  6. jQuery vs. Other Libraries

    Despite having cross-browser incompatibility issues and various things breaking and being re-done with each release, I’m firmly in the jQuery camp and am actively building new things on top of it. This likely includes a port of PHP Tag Engine to jQuery, as well as many of my WordPress plugins. It’s like the old story:…

  7. Fixing a MySQL Character Encoding Mismatch

    We ran into an interesting MySQL character encoding issue at Crowd Favorite today while working to upgrade and launch a new client site. Here is what we were trying to do: copy the production database to the staging database so we could properly configure and test everything before pushing the new site live. Pretty simple…

  8. CodeIgniter TextMate Bundle Additions

    After finding the excellent CodeIgniter TextMate Bundle, I’ve switched to TextMate as my editor of choice for my CodeIgniter development. I’ve tried switching to TextMate in the past and there is a lot I like about it, however I always end up back with BBEdit for find/replace and other text manipulation tools. This time though.…

  9. SVN Scripts and Tools

    At Crowd Favorite we use Subversion for source control and document distribution and management. Last week, we were reminded just how much we rely on it. We made the move from an outdated server to a more properly equipped one, and also used a more suitable domain and set up SSL and all the stuff…

  10. iWork Bundles are Broken

    At Crowd Favorite we use SVN at the core of our team development work. We recently tried to switch from Word and Excel documents to Pages and Numbers documents for estimates and proposals. Unfortunately, we’ve discovered that iWork breaks SVN. The .numbers and .pages files are bundles – plain directories that OS X treats differently.…

  11. dompdf: Easy PDF generation with PHP

    A week and a half ago I started looking into PDF generation with PHP. As my friends pointed out, this can be a somewhat arduous process. Since I was working on a deadline1, I decided the best solution would be to create a nice printable view that I could create PDFs from, then come back…

  12. Apache 2 Only Serves First Virtual Host

    Note: this post is mainly to help people searching for a solution to this issue. Yesterday I upgraded to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard which brought Apache 2 to me along with the many other changes. I develop sites locally using domains like alexking.dev, crowdfavorite.dev, etc. by setting these up HOSTS entries and virtual hosts…

  13. RandomBits Podcast Interview

    Sara Smith interviewed me for a RandomBits Podcast. She asks some good questions, I hope my answers are interesting. The discussion includes a variety of things, including: WordPress Crowd Favorite ShareThis MyFreeBusy

  14. View Local SVN Diff in TextMate

    I created the simplest of little bash functions that I use just about everyday. All it does is: Save the output of the SVN diff command of the current directory in a temp file. Open that temp file in TextMate, which does beautiful color coding of the diff for easy review before I check in.1…

  15. Priorities

    One of the challenges I’ve been facing over the last couple of months since we’ve brought on more staff and started accepting more custom development work at Crowd Favorite is how to avoid having the entire day eaten up by e-mail and phone calls with prospects and clients. I’ve never been a zealot about the…