Archive for January, 2007

Getting advanced with objects

Thursday, January 25th, 2007

Just a quick note - if you’re into strict systems specification and architecture, you’re no doubt no stranger to object-oriented patterns and interfaces. In case you were ever tempted to use interfaces in your application, Symfony has a simple way of declaring an instance and having it autoload into the program stack: just declare your […]

Poll results are in

Thursday, January 25th, 2007

Well, not a very good turnout, but still, here are the results: Proof of concept - 50% Work in progress - 25% Advanced topics - 25% And yes, sadly, those numbers are accurate. And yes, they do add up exactly. And yes, 4 of you voted. But it does give me a slight hint about what to write […]

Fixing the column problem in IE6

Wednesday, January 24th, 2007

I’ve just stumbled upon a bug in IE6 that doesn’t manifest itself in IE7, and it has to do with floated elements. I’ve used 4 floated columns to display 4 independent DIVs and floated them all left within a container DIV element. During development, I’ve been changing widths of the columns to get them aligned just […]

Fuzziness helps keep focus

Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007

Now, this may sound as an oxymoron in itself - how exactly does vagueness help keep the overall picture in focus? It’s been proven that the human brain can perceive information and filter it to effectively perceive the environment - just imagine each eye capturing something like 8-megapixels’ worth of data every 1/30th of a […]

Switching Wordpress themes

Monday, January 22nd, 2007

Sorry for the constant back-and-forth switching between Wordpress themes, but it seems that whenever I find a suitable theme that has a variable width for displaying long lines of code, it invariantly breaks one of the plugins or Google Analytics acts up. In any case, don’t worry, all the content’s still there.

Generating permalinks

Saturday, January 20th, 2007

We’ve all been there - SEO can be quite a pain in the ass when you’re competing against others for exposure. Turns out, much of the tedious content optimization can be resolved in the development phase, using nice and descriptive URLs.

A quick update

Friday, January 19th, 2007

Well, until I’ve resolved some issues regarding the code highlighting plugin, I’ve decided to present you with a quick poll on just what topics I should tackle on this blog. Whether it be Symfony specifics, like manipulating requests and responses, internals and other whatnots or just writing about cool new ways on how to use Symfony, […]

Markdown-compatible code highlight

Friday, January 12th, 2007

Finally found a plugin that’s made to work with Markdown in WordPress - link. Just have to wait for the admins to install the thing. UPDATE: Seems there’s a problem with the included PEAR class package - Text/Highlighter, which is used for code highlighting, is an old version and written for PHP4, and if you […]

Working on code listings

Thursday, January 11th, 2007

Well, it’s seems there’s no way around the double html entity escaping in WordPress MU with Markdown Extra, which makes posting any kind of code containing HTML entities a nightmare. I’m looking for a solution to get around this weird behaviour, but I’m stumped as to just what to do. In the meantime, I’ll be posting […]

Back to basics: templating with helpers

Wednesday, January 10th, 2007

If you’re like me (eg. lazy), you’ll have probably tried to make your code as efficient as possible, when it comes to generating output code. And in some cases, you can’t get around declaring your own functions to do your bidding. That’s where helpers come in.