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Displaying Syntax Highlighted Code in Wordpress
It is difficult to use both the TinyMCE WYSIWYG and post formatted code. TinyMCE will attempt to cleanup your HTML and it will therefore remove any tags it does not recognise so your XML code will be hacked up. To compound the problem further Wordpress has annoying habit of removing all your carefully laid out indentation and line breaks. There are many solutions to the problem out there including plugins that use BBCode to wrap the posted code up in. Read more ⇒
Wordpress I have now moved my website over to WordPress; it is more widely supported than TextPattern and it has a regular release schedule. Read more ⇒
Windows Cron Jobs using Scheduled Tasks
UPDATED: I have written a new, more indepth, article on this subject here: </post/2009/01/linux-to-windows-server-migrating-and-securing-your-cron.html> Every now and then you end up having to develop on a Windows box. Here are some handy hints for getting your cron jobs up and running. The user interface for the Scheduled Tasks in Windows can be found at Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Scheduled Tasks. For performing cron jobs on webpages I recommend that you get the following binary: WGET for Windows Read more ⇒
Here are some hints for those of you that use a XAMPP install for testing your developments on your local machine. I am using a Windows machine running XP Pro and this is how I setup my VirtualHosts. The conf file you need to amend is located at c:\xampp\apache\conf\extra\httpd-vhosts.conf Open it up in your favourite editor and un-comment the following line near the top of the file: NameVirtualHost *:80 This will enable the creation of VirtualHosts in your XAMMP installation. Read more ⇒
Installing Agavi on XAMPP Windows
Having recently heard of the Agavi project from a web framework showdown at a PHP conference in the UK I have decided to trial it. My setup is a WinXP computer with a default install of the latest XAMPP which has thrown up some issues with installing and building Agavi. Please see my hints below to overcome these issues. Open a command prompt (type cmd in the run console) Navigate to your XAMMP PHP directory. Read more ⇒
A few common PHP mistakes: Using require_once when a simple require would achieve the same result. Using require uses less system resources and therefore executes more quickly. You should engineer your code so you don’t need to use require_once. The same of course applies to include statements. Failing to declare variables before attempting to use them. Don’t use absolute paths and URLs where relative will suffice Not opening code for peer review. Read more ⇒
I have recently been using the web from my mobile quite a bit. My email is hosted by Google for my domain name so I use their freely available mobile java app (with the blue icon) to view my mail. The best web browser on the mobile is of course Opera Mini. I make no secret of my love of Opera on the desktop. After having downloaded and used Opera Mini I am very impressed with the way it renders pages and the browsing experience it offers on such a small screen. Read more ⇒
SQL Server 2005 Dump to SQL statements
Say you have a development environment setup using SQL Server 2005 Express Edition and your customer has a SQL Server 2000 database accessible only via ODBC and you can only run a DB import via a script. How would you do it? Easy you might think just run msdbdump.exe on the command line, well this isn’t MySQL so you are not so fortunate. Backing up your DB is easy with SQL Server using the following commands: Read more ⇒
Say you have a development environment setup using SQL Server 2005 Express Edition and your customer has a SQL Server 2000 database accessible only via ODBC and you can only run a DB import via a script. How would you do it? Easy you might think just run msdbdump.exe on the command line, well this isn’t MySQL so you are not so fortunate. Backing up your DB is easy with SQL Server using the following commands: Read more ⇒
Recently I produced a website for hosting on a Linux box running with PHP5 and MySQL5. Well it now needs to move over to a Windows 2003 server with MS SQL as the DB and IIS as opposed to Apache. Install MyODBC Install SQL Server 2005 Express Using MS SQL Server Management create a new database. (right click on databases in the Object Explorer) Use the following SQL Server SQL to create a link to your MySQL DB: Read more ⇒