AirHogs.com is Live!

Air Hogs01 home page

I was lucky enough to be selected to work on the build of the Air Hogs website redesign at Proximity Canada. We had a terrific team, and the build went fairly smoothly; especially considering it was my first time using the ExpressionEngine CMS. I’m enormously proud of this project, so with your kind indulgence I’m going to bore you with a tour of a few of the highlights of the project. The one saving grace of this post, is it will have lots of very pretty pictures. Continue reading

IE Refusing Session Cookies

Photo Credit: Bree Hester, Baked Bree.

So here’s another good reason to loathe Microsoft and yearn for an opportunity to kick them in the ‘nads. (But I’m not bitter.)

I’m working on two web applications: one is the public facing site, and the other is the administration site. So, natch, for the latter I created a local domain called oursite_admin.local. I’m usually partial to .dev, but the team had already started with .local, and I had no serious philosophical issues with that. Contrary to scurrilous rumours, I’m actually a very easy going fellow. Continue reading

Downloading Files in PHP for Fun and Profit

I recently had to setup a page where users could download files. You’d think such a task would hold few secrets for someone who architected a download site. Well, that’s how much you know.

Like many programming tasks, you meet it head-on, on the field of battle; you grab it by the horns and wrestle it to the ground. Victorious, you move on, and quickly forget the finer nuances which thrilled your sense of challenge and elegance. Luckily for you, I’ve started documenting these little trysts in this blog. Continue reading

Migrating Contacts From Palm Pilot to Gmail

Once he finds someting that works for him, my father sticks with it. Which is why, until very recently, he was still using his Palm Pilot Vx. But all things come to an end, and now that he and Mom got His and Her’s Samsung Galaxy S‘s, it was time to get his contacts migrated from the Pilot to Gmail, so they could get picked up by the Android.

This turned out to be less straight-forward and more challenging than anticipated. So, although I don’t expect many will need to run through this, I’m posting for the few who might. This’ll save you a couple of days of heartache.
Continue reading

Alfred’s Notes: Drupal

I’ve started studying Drupal, the open source content management system (CMS). I’ll use this page to gather interesting links to documentation and articles on the subject. Who knows? I may even sort and organize them some day.

Ajax in Drupal using jQuery

Introduction to AHAH Forms in Drupal (handbook)

Creating Drupal style tables

AHAH in Drupal: may it one day live up to its acronym

Using default views in your module
Where to put your exported Views in code, direct from Earl Miles, aka merlinofchaos, author of Views, among other essential parts of Drupal.

Describing tables to Views
To someone who already knows SQL, and is very comfortable with it, Views is like trying to fiddle with very small dials while wearing large mitts of cotton batting. The main problem is Views doesn’t necessarily know the ins and outs of your data model. Here’s how to tell Views about those ins and outs. And remove at least some of the batting.

Updating WordPress Plugins Locally, Without FTP

It’s been the bane of my WordPress life: every time I get a notification of updates available on my local installation (on my MacBook Pro), either for the WordPress core, or one of my installed plugins, I get a request for FTP parameters. This, I’ve learned, is due to WordPress trying to write a small test file to the wp-content directory. When it fails, it reverts to trying to get the files via FTP. But, sadly, I don’t have FTP setup on my local install. Besides, from what I hear, this method seldom works.

Don’t despair, though: there is a solution. And it’s fairly simple. (Don’t be put off if you’re not familiar with the OSX Terminal: it’s not that complicated. Really.) Continue reading