I am very honoured to say that I have been mentioned by John Bristowe as one of the developers in Canada You Should Follow on Twitter. John has already been accused of including only Microsoft centric developers, but I’m certain there must be many other programmers like me that don’t normally use Windows, or Microsoft’s…
BRCline Consulting has been busy working on its first ecommerce site to create Niagara Fall’s Natue Bumz Cloth Diaper Shop. The owner, Crystal Cline, needed to accept paypal, credit cards, and be able to create her own blog along with adding inventory, and all of the traditional sort of business functions. I chose magento to…
Magento is an excellent project that so far hasn’t been too difficult to program for. Initially learning how to use magento has been fairly tough: there are a lot of settings and fields that should be set before the site becomes visible to visitors and of course indexed. I won’t touch on magento seo right…
There’s a lot of sites incorrectly showing how to use site_url in both MODx Evolution and MODx Revolution. Primarily, I use site_url with the html base tag. If you don’t already know the base tag goes inside head and specifies the default address. In MODX Revolution, our code in a template would look like: <head>…
jQuery in Action, First Edition is written by Bear Bibeault and Yehuda Katz and is probably the simplest and easiest to understand programming book available. Target reader is somebody that already is using javascript in projects and is looking to push the limits of their web applications by using jQuery and many of it’s great…
SQL Pocket Guide by Jonathan Gennick is a small pocket sized guide published by O’Reilly. The book isn’t really meant to be a learning guide and more of a quick memory refresher for something not commonly used. There’s very little fluff in the this small tome on the different SQL implementations in DB2, MS SQL,…
Operating System Concepts, 7th Edition is written by Abraham Silberschatz, Peter Baer Galvin, Greg Gagne isn’t a book about how to use a computer or how to use a particular operating system. Operating System Concepts is a book about the basic low level and some high level concepts of how the different operating systems actually…
Code Mirror is a great addition to MODx Revolution that serves as a very useful EditArea replacement.
Installing CCKEditor for Drupal is pretty easy, but does require the two downloads. CCKEditor Module and the actual editor. If you haven’t copied the actual editor you will see an error something like the following: CKEditor was not found at sites/default/modules/ckeditor/ckeditor
Every web developer or computer programmer spends time taking pictures of websites for their portfolio. Taking screenshots of pages that have a scrollbar has always been really difficult for a developer and often requiring sometime stitching images together in Photoshop. I found a plugin for firefox called Screengrab! that actually can take screenshots of the…
jQuery is very well suited for cross browser JavaScript development, but I bet you didn’t know jQuery is also fairly well suited to parsing XML. I often use jQuery to send XMLHttpRequests and then parse the XML returned by a PHP script on the server and then manipulate the return in some way. I won’t…
jQuery is so powerful and very flexible and usually makes so many complex takes so simple. Anything with a scrollbar and can be selected can be programatically scrolled to to the top. $(div).scrollTop(); Scrolling to top of browser window is as simple as: $(window).scrollTop(0);
“Thinking in C++, Section Edition, Volume One” (ISBN:978-0139798092) was written by Bruce Eckel. The book is quite large coming in around 800 pages and focus on making the transition from C to C++, and focusing on practical programming. I believe the book could be much shorter if Bruce had a lot less repetitive, and long…
Niagara Falls, and the Rest of Niagara Region have a large collection of great attractions, museums, art galleries, and more. There are probably dozens that I’m forgetting or maybe never even visited, but if you leave a comment I will be very happy to add it. Former Battlefields (War of 1812) Historic Fort George Old…
Kijiji occasionally will block an advertisement from showing up for twenty four hours to prevent spam. I’m not really sure if an employee actually goes through the queue of waiting ads and checks if it’s spam or not. To find out where your ad is visible, you should use Kijiji’s status checker.
jQuery is a really popular JavaScript library that helps really simplify manipulating HTML with JavaScript whether it be CSS, animations or even doing Ajax. I’ve been using jQuery since at least mid 2008 and have to say that I just love how much easier things are and not having to generally deal with the cross-browser…
Error messages should be clear and include what the error is, why it was caused and how to resolve it.
I’m an Administrator on my installation of Windows 7 and had to edit the hosts file for one of my projects. I wasn’t able to make the changes though because it kept saying file was in use. I realized that I need to run notepad as the administrator and then I could make my changes!…
In MODx, it is always preferable to link to another page using the document id instead of using the friendly alias because sometimes MODx Evolution has a package that is appearantly capable of using the alias instead of the document id to provide a working link to another page. The reason you shouldn’t use the…
Google SiteMap and the other web tools provides a way for the owner or webmaster of a site to easily submit all of the pages to Google and keep track of which ones are crawled and indexed. Wikipedia provides a much more detailed description which goes beyond the scope of this post. I didn’t want…
