Have you ever wanted to redirect your index.php page to yourroot domain? So this:
http://www.mysite.co.uk/index.php
Automatically redirects to this:
http://www.mysite.co.uk/
You have… excellent! Well with the following code snippet for the .htaccess file you can now achieve this:
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*/index.php
RewriteRule ^(.*)index.php$ http://www.mysite.co.uk/ [R=301,L]
I’ve just spent some time swapping out our security Captcha code to use reCAPTCHA on both our Website Healthcheck form and our SEO Enquiry Form form. The process is extremely straightforward, no hassle and the site contains all the instructions you need, i would definitely recommend it.
Not only does this particular security image produce W3C compliant HTML it is also helping to digitise books as the words that you are asked to re-type are ones that computers have trouble reading using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software.
There is more information about the service here: http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html it is worth a read.
If you’ve ever wondered wanted to know how PayPal returns data to you from a transaction (and we have) then look no further than this blog courtesy of the PayPal X Developer Network.
This explains the POST, PDT and IPN return types. Ok, so not the most interesting night time reading but someone needs to know this kind of stuff.
In other news Google has bought BumpTop; the software that turns your flat desktop into a 3D interactive space. I’ve tried the software and whilst it did impress visually it did not make sense, to me at least, on a desktop machine where you have a keyboard and mouse. However I can completely see the benefits on a touch based piece of hardware, like the iPad. Are Google about to impress with some new mobile device that makes use of this technology? or maybe their own large iPad style device? Only time will tell.
After many attempts at trying to, unsuccesfully, merge branch changes into my trunk using SVN I came across a working solution, courtesy of http://crunchlife.com/. Here it is:
Step 1: checkout the trunk to a working folder
svn checkout file:///repository/project/trunk /home/project-trunk
Step 2: Perform a merge bewteen the SVN repos trunk and branch with onto the checked out trunk folder
svn merge file:///repository/project/trunk file:///repository/project/branches/my-branch /home/project-trunk
Step 3: Commit the changes on the trunk folder back to the repos
svn commit /home/project-trunk -m"merging my-branch into trunk"
Step 4: Sit back, relax and be happy
In this era of cloud computing and moving hardware to some unseen location, floating in the ether, it is interestingto learn about IDEs (Integrated Development Environment) that are now also available ‘in the cloud’. Not having to install software on your machine and deal with all the hassle that comes with it is definitely something that has legs.
Here are some of the available solutions:
Each has their own features and benefits but they all provide interesting UI and easy on the eye layout and styling. More investigation is needed into these and other solutions before actually making a switch from on machine coding to in the cloud coding but it is an exciting development for development.
Everyone wants to have the fancy stuff on their site, don’t they? Nice images, gradients, that fancy serif font the MD saw on the London based digital media agency with the cool anti-aliasing. It all looks nice on the design but when it comes down actual putting together the nuts and bolts PHP, XHTML, CSS etc it may not always be possible. Someone, somewhere is going to be disappointed.
The question of typography and web safe fonts is one that has a number of different solutions to help achieve that look the designer had in his mind’s eye, each with pros and cons. MightyMeta has taken much of the pain out of deciding which is best with this guide to getting a web safe font and related cheat sheet: http://www.mightymeta.co.uk/introducing-the-web-safe-font-cheat-sheet/
Another week comes to an end and we get ever closer to Christmas, which in my book isn’t a bad thing. The build up to Xmas is always the best bit; buying in the food, putting the tree up, eating nuts, chocolates and sweet meats, watching the festive films and yuletide offerings on the goggle box.
So, during this past week I have stored some interesting posts and blogs articles which I’d like to offer to you now, a (very) early present:
Only a few I know but with presents it’s not only about the size is it…?
Here are a couple of useful links that we’ve come across whilst building our latest Magento installation:
Removing Product Comparison - Some pointers for PHP developers to remove the product comparison block from a Magento installation.
Magento SEO - This one is very interesting giving useful advice for maximising the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) performance for a Magento site.
I am now able to create this new blog after a number of hours trying to work out why Wordpress wasn’t outputting the trailing slash on the post page URLs and so not allowing me to access the admin pages for the blog.
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It’s not often that the works of Friedrich Nietzsche and Kierkegaard spring to mind in the non-philsophical PHP coding world. However whilst working on the latest set of feature updates for our content management system, Miromanager2.0, I found the need to be looking to see if smoothing exists before attempting to use it.
Part of Miromedia’s next release version of the new CMS will be the ability to easily (for the developers at least) create client-specific customisations that sit outside the core code. Such things include modules and HTML output relating to a certain industry sector that would not necessarily apply to other customers.
In order for use to achieve this we needed a customisation model that would site alongide the base code but would not be affected by future release of the base code. So, a new directory strucutre and mirroring of customised objects has been adopted making use of: is_dir(), is_file() and function_exists(). These being used to determine if customisations exist for a particular PHP object and if function overrides exist. In this way the base code will only execute customisations where they have been created.
…the question now remains if I can call a similar function call passing myself to find out if I truly exist. As yet I have been unable to find such a method either in the existing PHP manual or future upgrades however if I do find one and call it and the call comes back false will I explode in a puff of existential logic?
