Tag: web development

Placeholder Images For Your Site

Posted on by John Rockefeller

kitten

Sean Yo from last night’s Guelph Web Maker Meetup shared a few awesome web tools I’d never heard of and I thought they were so neat I resolved to share them (and a few extras) today with everyone here.

Every web designer and developer under the sun has used (or at least heard of) the default ‘lorem ispum‘ text that is used as a filler for unfinished text copy on websites that are a work in progress. Well, now us web developers and designers have an option to use something similar for our images as well.

The image on the right should give you some sort of indication where is going… check it:

 

How To Setup A Local ColdFusion Development Environment in Windows

Posted on by John Rockefeller

Interested in programming in the ColdFusion language?

Setting up a ColdFusion development environment on your local computer is easy! Just follow these simple steps. This small walkthrough will enable you to develop and execute ColdFusion web applications on your Windows PC. This software is not intended for commercial use — for that, you’ll need a licensed copy.

1. Download ColdFusion Developer Edition (for free!)

You may need to sign into your Adobe.com account (or create one if you haven’t got one yet) in order to download the Developer Edition of the ColdFusion server.

Download ColdFusion Developer Edition from Adobe.com.

2. Installation Options

After downloading the software, begin installation. For all installation screens you should select all default options except in the screens shown in the images below. These settings will allow you to have the ColdFusion app server run on your computer locally.

Screen 1: Skip Product Key by selecting “Developer Edition”

Screen 2: Select “Server configuration”

Step 3:Select “Built-in web server” (This one is really important!)

3. Finish Installation

Once ColdFusion is finished, it will launch the completion script in your web browser and finish the installation. After that is complete, you will be taken to the ColdFusion Administrator screen, which will allow you to change all of your ColdFusion server settings and looks like this:

In the future you may need to change ColdFusion settings on your computer. This is the panel you will use to make those changes.

If you installed ColdFusion correctly, clicking here will take you to your ColdFusion Administrator.

Happy programming!

DemoCampGuelph6 was a lot of fun!

Posted on by John Rockefeller

I got back from the 6th Guelph DemoCamp around 9:00pm last night. Free beer, free food, a group of 50 or more programmers, and one block away from my apartment. Guelph rules :)

If you live in the Guelph area and you’re interested in going to the next one, there will be another DemoCamp on the 17th of September 2008. You should be there. Presenting stuff is easy: You get 5 minutes to set up, 5 minutes to talk, and 5 minutes to answer questions from the crowd. If you just want to come listen and mingle that’s cool, too.

I presented Jack of All Links to the crowd and it went really well. There were a couple of guys from WeGoWeGo, which is a startup that’s gearing up in Toronto as well as a few other people presenting technology or software they wrote. I really enjoyed it.

I was really surprised at the size of the crowd! I figured there might be at maximum 10 people (I mean, how many programmers *are* there around here anyway) but there were over 50. Exciting!

Firefox 3 First Impressions

Posted on by John Rockefeller

I downloaded Firefox 3 today. Just like a gazillion other people. It’s launch day and Mozilla wants to enter the record-books for number of downloads for a software product in one day. Supposedly there is no previous record so basically once the first download finished they were the winners :) Anyway, it was good to drum up some interest in alternative browsers!

The first thing I noticed was how responsive everything was. I’m a web developer — I get used to how long it takes for menus to load and things to happen after I click. I started using Firefox 3 and I have to say they have really raised the bar for browser speed. It used to be that only Opera was this fast. Great work!

Secondly, the “Awesome Bar“: I love it. Looks great, works great. It’s similar to Google Desktop’s search field in that you just type a few keywords of what you’re looking for and it’ll show you any sites that you’ve been to that match those keywords. Handy. We are definitely moving away from people actually knowing the domain your business is at. We know we’ve reached the turning point when browsers stop including an address bar entirely or when businesses owners don’t even know their own domain names :)

Finally, a new feature has been added on my Bookmark Toolbar that contains the top 10 most visited websites. This could be good or bad depending on your browsing habits ;). For me it’s really handy. Gmail is in there, Dzone, Digg, Synnema. Awesome.

I have to say I’m really impressed. The difference between Firefox 1 and 2 really didn’t hit me much but the difference between 2 and 3 is monumental. You really have to use it yourself to feel the difference in speed.

If you’re reading this post on June 17th, 2008, then head over to Firefox.com and help raise the number of downloads today by 1!

PHP Tricks: How To Handle Multiple Domains

Posted on by John Rockefeller

This is really handy for those of us who have the same code handling multiple sites or multiple sub-domains.

A case in point: When I coded NetBoardz (my free forum hosting service now defunct), I had one codebase handling all 250 forums. How? Simple. When the code runs, it determines which site the user is loading and does different things (like using different databases) dynamically.

How to determine the domain the user is using to view your site:

$domain = $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'];
if ($domain == "xyz") {
    ...
} else if ($domain == "uvw") {
    ...
}

In the example above you can see that we have put the domain that the user has used to view your site into the $domain variable, loading the value from the PHP global variable, $_SERVER. The $_SERVER variable is global, which means you can access it anytime and anywhere in your code.

More information on PHP’s predefined global variables.

How to determine the sub-domain the user is using to view your site:

Sample code is from NetBoardz, which is based off of phpBB 2:

$subdomain = strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'], ".");
$subdomain = substr($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'], 0, $subdomain);
$dbname = "nb_".$subdomain;
mysql_select_db($dbname, $sql_link);

Here you can see that we retreived the whole hostname, including the top-level domain and subdomain, then used the PHP functions strpos and substr to take anything before the first dot. For example, the whole hostname “testforum.netboardz.com” passed through this code would end up as “testforum”.

After, we use that subdomain name to calculate which forum database to load. Of course, once you have the domain or subdomain in a variable, you are able to handle your code as you wish!

Render Your Sites In IE6 With Free Software

Posted on by John Rockefeller

If you’re a web developer like me or even a web designer, there comes a time in the development of your site when you need to verify that everything works with Internet Explorer. For small sites or minor tweaks this can wait until the end of the day without much worry. On larger sites, it’s likely you’ll be checking for IE 6 or IE 7 compatibility several times throughout the project.

For those of us who have moved to greener pastures by switching to Linux or for others who have updated their system to Internet Explorer 7, several options exist to view your website in everyone’s favorite web browser: Internet Explorer 6.

In order of success I’ve had with this software, some of the options for Mandriva Linux users are listed below:

#1 – Wine, Wine-Doors, and Internet Explorer 6.

Wine-Doors is a graphical, easy-to-use point and click program that uses Wine. For those unfamiliar with Wine, it is a Windows “compatibility layer” that, in layman’s terms, allows you to run Windows programs like Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office in Linux.

Installing Wine and Wine-Doors in Mandriva Linux is a breeze. Simply open up the software installer in type Wine in the search box. Install both Wine and Wine-Doors.

Once they are installed, open Wine-Doors and click on Internet Explorer 6 to install it. Wine-Doors will take care of everything, including downloading Windows fonts and the Internet Explorer program itself.

Internet Explorer 6 works great for me this way. IE loads quick and displays websites just as it would if it were running on a Windows computer. With some of the other options listed below, the fonts and performance were not as smooth.

#2 – IE NetRenderer – Web-Based Browser Screenshot

This is a unique solution that is truly cross-platform. It’s not perfect – sometimes divs, table widths, or images are off by a few pixels, but for the most part this is a really reliable and quick solution.  The process is simple: You go to their website, paste your website’s address in a form and it will refresh with a screenshot of what your website looks like in IE5.5, IE6, IE7, and IE8 beta (still in beta as of this article’s creation).

Similar, but not free service: Browsershots. Well… It’s free, but you get put into a queue and it could take hours to get your screenshot. Unless you pay. :)

#3 – IEs4Linux

This is another project that is based off of Wine and installs easily on Mandriva Linux as well. You are able to download and extract the installer program from their homepage, but some of the fonts were off for me and it only loaded once. Once I closed the browser it never re-opened.

Also, the program is able to install IE5, IE5.5, and IE6 though I personally was only able to get IE6 installed. All other options resulted in an error. Your mileage may vary.