How to set the number of pages per post in wordpress

Posted on April 22nd, 2011 by thiswayup.
Categories: dev.

Took me a lot longer then it should have done to find this setting! Putting it down here for future reference to myself!

Settings > Reading > Blog pages show at most

1 comment.

fgetcsv and Mac Excel generated files

Posted on March 21st, 2011 by thiswayup.
Categories: dev.

It seems that Excel on the Mac generates line breaks different to every other software out there and stop the very useful fgetcsv from working! THIS IS BLOODY ANNOYING!!!!!! Took me ages before I realised the difference between two files, thankfully Winmerge helped with that!

There's a fix for it and you need to enable auto_detect_line_endings (more info here).

For future reference any poor soul stuck with this then you can do this in your php code :

ini_set('auto_detect_line_endings',TRUE);

0 comments.

Inside look into facebook’s dev culture

Posted on January 22nd, 2011 by thiswayup.
Categories: dev.

I just read a very interesting blog entry about the dev operations are in facebook here .

There was some really interesting points highlighted which I would not have guessed, stuck out and a few things that just surprised me! Some of these include :

• No unit tests - I'm guessing the code of facebook must be fairly complex given it has to a) keep all the features integrated with each other and b) run across so many servers! To that end, the devs must be incredibly talented to not need unit tests or break it so often they know the code inside out!
   
• Release schedule is weekly
   
• Any engineer can modify any code - I was expecting their to be sectioned off codes and permissions so that only certain groups of coders can modify "their" section of the code else someone who may not know the code as well could cause an unexpected problem.
   
• SVN - Conflicts and locks must be fun! For such a large codebase and so many devs, I would have something like Git would be suitable.
   
• Product development is more engineer orientated - It appears that Product Manager have less of a role of forcing the engineers to build what they want but more the engineers themselves are alot more proactive in owning the product and pushing forward whats of interest to them. The pain must  be almost political with all the lobbying and trying to convince the engineers to build something.
   
• Changes can be pushed out on the same day!
   
• The engineers are very tight - its quite often you see a clear separation of the different engineers who work on different areas. With Facebook, since there is a strong emphasis on the engineers taking more product ownership (and competition ?), the people who push the code out are the ones which hang around to check the code is out ok. Definitely not a 9-5pm culture. A culture of passionate devs looking to constantly push the product forward, very google culture

Definitely a very interesting read.

1 comment.

Building in JS using MVC (especially those big apps)

Posted on December 27th, 2010 by thiswayup.
Categories: dev.

This year has been for me learning not only how to improve my site build technical skills but more importantly understanding the best approach to building sites. As part of this I enjoy learning about things such as design patterns and I have a better appreciation of things such as MVC after being on a few projects using different PHP frameworks. What makes it more fun for myself is when I get to see something I have familiar with in a different light, in this case MVC in JS!

I think its definitely important to approach bigger site builds with a bit more structure and I agree with other people who know alot more than me that site builds are becoming such big buggers, they're becoming apps themselves. This requires the discipline of building in a way that not only do they work and meet the brief (blah blah), but they are also readily maintainable/scalable. This in contrast to the dark past of copying bits of code and hacking it together.

Anyways, I digress a little. I've heard of MVC in JS but I haven't really put too much time into it and just read a great article on it.

Some of the things that grabbed my attention reading it :

• Number of MVC JS frameworks - I thought there was only one JS MVC framework but it turns out there are loads are there. Ofcourse each build requires its own considerations and there isn't a one size fits all which explains why there are so many.
   
• Templating - I have moved away from the days of concating all my variables into a string and tend to favor templates. It's good to see there are a good number of choices are there and I hope to use the jquery tmpl to do more!
   
• Build and minify - With any app, the build process can be a painful one of manually done and quite error prone. The article points out some great resources on how to go about using freely available tools such as Ant to help script out the build process such as concatentating, minifying and testing. Reminds me of the days when we used Nant to do our .net apps

So do check out the article, it's very well written and no doubt I'll be using it as a reference if I get the chance to build any bigger apps!

Building Large-Scale jQuery Applications

0 comments.

head.js = wicked! A quick way to speed up your js and other cool stuff

Posted on December 21st, 2010 by thiswayup.
Categories: dev.

I attended a js mini conference where someone introduced his small library/technique that essentially had the effect of loading js files in parallel *without* blocking, leading to the effect of faster loading page. I then decided to look around for other examples he mentioned and I discovered head.js. 

Head.js does many things, one of the really cool things is the ability to load a bunch of js files in a parallel non-blocking manner which leads to incredibly faster performance gains on load up and rendering. To see this in action, check out the head.js testing page of without head.js versus with head.js AMAZING! On google chrome, my results running it 3 times in a row and emptying the cache each time was :

Without head.js :

1. 1151ms
2. 1123ms
3. 1300ms

WIth head.js

1. 109ms
2. 137ms
3. 111ms

Can we say "hell yes!" ?

Along with that it also has some handy features :

• smart js organise - write some code which uses a library above when you load it. eg write code in header then load it at the bottom of the page without hitting that unknown object/function
• Use semantic HTML 5 tags - use the HTML 5 semantic tags and still have them recognised in IE!
• screen size detector - detects screen width and then the css applicable will be used eg small mobile screen will get a small pic vs desktop. That way you can target large screen dektop, small laptops and then mobiles.
• CSS3 detection - By using CSS3 feature detection, you can style for those with and without in the same css file.

0 comments.

Top 10 MySQL Mistakes Made By PHP Developers

Posted on December 5th, 2010 by thiswayup.
Categories: dev.

I read this recently and thought I'll share the love!

To add to this I think everyone should use easy to recognise naming conventions for the primary key and foreign key fields.

So rather then :

phoneModel.id //primary key

Use :

phoneModel.PK_phoneModel

phoneModel.FK_manufacturer

The reason as you can see is to make the code self documenting! Plus when you go to do mega complex sql queries, it's a lot more easier to see what types of fields you are joining!

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reading about eval in js – why not to use

Posted on November 21st, 2010 by thiswayup.
Categories: Development.

I've been reading through and slowly digesting some of the points on tutsplus.com post on "The Essentials of Writing High Quality JavaScript". One of the many interesting parts is the point about Eval and some common anti-patterns. This can be sumarised as :

• Potentially unsafe security wise - can you trust the string you are eval() on, especially if it comes from an outside source
• passing to setInterval(), setTimeout() and new Function() is essentially an eval
• You limit the potentially var declaration scope using new Function() and putting the eval into an enclosure

I encourage people to read it!

0 comments.

Quick speed up on javascript loops

Posted on November 16th, 2010 by thiswayup.
Categories: Development.

I have heard that one of the ways to speed up js is how you define your criteria on the number of iterations in a loop. Reading an article on Javascript best practices, you should cache the look up of an array length into a separate variable then use that rather then consistently look up the length. So rather then do :

for (var i = 0, i < myarray.length; i++) {
   // do something with myarray[i]
}

The above example  of i < myarray.length does a look up on every iteration. Instead you should do something like :

var max = myarray.length;
for (var i = 0, i < max; i++) {
   // do something with myarray[i]
}

Do the above apparently increases the speed by twice in Safari 3 and 190 times in IE7! Definitely worth knowing!

0 comments.

Learn Visual basic instead of Objective-C

Posted on November 13th, 2010 by thiswayup.
Categories: Mobile Dev.

I thought this was both hilarious and interesting, I just discovered Objective-basic! I've been playing around with Objective-C on and off for the past year ("I have that great app idea!") but I've also been thinking about whether its a bit pointless and we should just learn to use Phone Gap, Titanium or Grapple Mobile if you want to build Iphone apps (and not games). Objective-basic seems to be quite a good alternative, if you just want to build an Iphone App. Visual Basic is so straight forward, I think anyone can learn it. Plus I use to do a bit of visual basic "back in the day", this would be a great way to knock up an app quickly for most people!

PS A great post on the comparison on some of the ways to build mobile apps on stackoverflow

0 comments.

Great javascript video from google tech talks

Posted on September 26th, 2010 by thiswayup.
Categories: dev.

I've recently discovered a great video from the Google Tech Talk channel on youtube called "Introduction to JavaScript and Browser DOM" presented by Misko Hevery. I love the fact it covers some of the real interesting and quirky parts of Javascript, highlighting some of the elements which make Js so unique as well as some of the damn annoying parts!

I'm not sure when the video was made, but I'm guessing it was before IE8 came out. IMHO IE8 is great for Js debugging over Firebug. The reason I say is purely due to the fact that Firebug has become so unstable and sometimes you aren't sure if your JS is broken...or if Firebug is playing up again! That reminds me, I should really do another post on js debugging.

The coverage of the DOM is a bit thin but you can always check out other videos such as this for a good top of your DOM knowledge.

Enjoy!

Ps another great video is the "JavaScript: The Good Parts" from Doug Crockford

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