zedzdead

I have a headache

Andy — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 15:31:31 +0000

I’m at dev8d. Its a conference for developers, so its all beards, laptops and geeky games. Yesterday afternoon I was treated to a full demonstration of Yahoo Pipes. I can see what can be created but all too often the data that pipes scrapes or tries to scrape, is a little flakey. The demonstration used a wikipedia page to scrape a html table of content for the medal tables at the 2010 Winter Olympic games. Little hacks had to be applied to get the thing to work, because the structure of the data table had changed. Of course, you want the data to be updated regularly, otherwise what’s the point. I was impressed enough though to consider building some of my own in the next few days. Watch this space.

This morning I attended an arduino workshop. I felt like a kid with his first set of lego. Because of last night’s beer mixing, I still have a headache, but it didn’t stop me and my arduino buddy from making a traffic light, fading lights in sequence ad a whole bunch of other stuff. I never really understood electronics, but now I want to go and buy and arduino kit and get Boba to give it a try.

Installing Symfony and the jobeet tutorial

Andy — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 22:14:54 +0000

For what seems like forever now, I’ve been planning on getting an installation of symfony up and running. A couple of weeks ago I followed the rather excellent tutorial from eingko on how to set up symfony on media temple’s grid server. Many people have commented on how good this is, but I’d go as far as saying its the media temple gridserver, symfony installation 101.

The tutorial is much more than just an installation, and after completing it, I can say that its not the installation that’s complicated, its setting up the platform that allows it to run flawlessly. I’ve been developing on a LAMP platform in my day to day for almost two years, but I’m no expert. This tutorial takes you through the set-up of the shared hosting package and the installation of pear (something I’d never done before) and once all those things are in place, there are only about two steps to a successful installation of symfony. I suspect that the tutorial was written for 1.0, but 1.2 just went in like a dream.

I was thinking about developing my own site, but since I use symfony 1.0 everyday, I decided to give 1.2 a try, by working through the jobeet tutorial, and report back the new features to the office. It was at this point I realised that my installation was not the now recommended way, but I decided to press on regardless as the pear installation (I think) saves me space.

That just about brought me upto the end of Day 1. Day2 is the project brief, but if you ever wondered how wire framing might look if you stuck with balsamiq for long enough, this will give you a good idea.

That brings me to this evening and Day 3. I tied myself up in knots by not reading the instructions carefully enough, but it seems that I’m not the only one. You only need to run the following command if your dB already exists!..

$ php symfony propel:build-schema

Also, don’t get caught out by the screen grab of the form (you will only get that page once you’ve implimented the change outlined below the image).

Getting the dB hooked up is a big step, and if you’re past that, the rest should be easy!

What I did next

Andy — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 20:52:49 +0000

Anybody who has set up wordpress more than once starts to add to a list of things to do after install. Here’s just 5 things I did straight away even though it took me 10 times as long to finish off the blog post about it.

I changed the theme and I don’t need to tell you how to do that because there’s a whole raft of stuff about it out there.
I activated Akismet (spam killer). You’ll need a WordPress API key for this, which you can get by creating an account at WordPress. Once you have your api key, navigate to Plugins on your WordPress dashboard and if it isn’t already installed, install it and activate it with your key. At the time of writing I have 4 spam posts, which have already been blocked by Akismet, and countless others, no doubt, already deleted. Install it now.
Install Google Analytics Plugin. If you install this prior to your first post, you’ll have visitor statistics from day one.
Added a favicon. I don’t know in what version a default favicon began shipping with WP, but all you need to do is find it and replace it with one of your own. I have the .ico plugin for PhotoShop but you can get free favicon generators all over the web.
Microformats. I’m a big fan of microformats, and browser support is growing. I have an hCard on every page of the site, (hidden for now, until I find a theme I really like or until I design my own). If you want to find out more about microformats, the wiki is a great starting place and if you’re using FF, download the Operator toolbar now, its the best microformats tool around.

That’s it. I did all that about 6 weeks ago! C’mon Andy get your arse into gear and write some more posts.

Welcome (back)

Andy — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 18:09:23 +0000

Welcome to the third incarnation of this blog. I’ve been blogging, mostly very badly, for about 7 years. I started on a domino platform but following a move into PHP development in 2003 I moved towards the LAMP platform. I have backups, but I read them and they’re rubbish, so I’m starting over with a clean slate.

Until a couple of months ago I was turning out weak, limp wristed posts about once a month but when my hosting company went West with no warning whatsoever, there I was blogless. Thanks to twitter, flickr, friend feed, linkedIn, and Facebook losing the power to blog is nowhere near as debilitating as it might have been two or three years ago.

So a new host and a new wave of optimisim, plus a scheduled reminder on rtm heralds a new era of blogging from me. So expect the usual load of everyday life crap mixed in with a bit of Wordpress, symfony, social networking and the latest from the web.

Now, lets get this blog set up the way I want it…….