Shorter Link: A rev=canonical WordPress plugin

Hot on the heels of my No DiggBar, I've created another extension for WordPress! Shorter Links provides a <link> tag in the <head> section of your page with a shorter url and appropriate tags for use with the new revCanonical system. Further details can be found at laughingmeme.org, shiflett.org or benramsey.com. The link created looks like this: By default, the shorter url is simply {your domain}/{post id}, but the plugin also creates a custom field… continue reading.

Posted on 11 April 2009 in WordPress

Digg bar blocker for WordPress

The DiggBar is a URL shortening service that puts your website within a frame on digg.com. As a result, the user sees Digg's URL, rather than your URL in their address bar, no matter which page they navigate to on your site. I don't particularly like this, so I've written a small plugin for WordPress that removes it. Go to the No DiggBar page to download it. Tip of the hat to John Gruber for… continue reading.

Posted on 10 April 2009 in WordPress

Caching talk at DPC 2009

The Dutch PHP Conference is being held in mid-June in Amsterdam and I'm speaking at it! My talk is called Caching for performance and in it I'll be looking at how to use caching to improve the performance of a website. I decided to talk about this topic is that it's something that our customers have started asking about. I've started getting questions from clients asking how we can increase the speed of the their… continue reading.

Posted on 9 April 2009 in Conferences

Initial notes on Zend_Application

Zend_Application is now in the incubator and being actively developed for version 1.8 of Zend Framework. I've had a little play using it with a standard ZF application with no modules and this is what I've worked out so far. As a result this post rambles a bit; sorry about that. Zend_Application is intended to make bootstrapping your application easier, presumably with less code. It also has a new autoloader, Zend_Loader_Autoloader, but I haven't worked… continue reading.

Posted on 25 March 2009 in Zend Framework 1

In honour of Ada Lovelace

As today is Ada Lovelace Day, I get to write about a women who has inspired me and isn't my wife! I first met Alison on the Electronic and Electrical Engineering course at University back in 1991. Of course, that dates me; Freddie Mercury was still alive and died towards the end of '91. I remember her from our Uni days as conscientious and determined to do well, though I did not know her very… continue reading.

Posted on 24 March 2009 in Ada Lovelace Day

Fixing — in WordPress

One thing that I've noticed is that whenever I used — in a post, such as this one, WordPress converted the — to &emdash; which whilst very pretty doesn't work so well for people trying to understand command line switches to ./configure! Today, I finally got around to poking into the WP source code to work out what was happening and I tracked it down to the wptexturize function in the wp-includes/functions-formatting.php file. Once I… continue reading.

Posted on 21 March 2009 in WordPress

Manning is on Twitter

I use Twitter's search feature to create RSS feeds for useful terms, like "Zend Framework". Today I noticed a tweet from ManningBooks, my publisher for Zend Framework in Action! It turns out that they've put up a sample of the book on Scribed! Check out the book, then order it, remembering to use the coupon code scribd25…

Posted on 19 March 2009 in Around the web, ZFiA

UTF-8, PHP and MySQL

Everyone else probably already knows this stuff, but I hit an issue today to that took a while to sort out. Fortunately, some kind folks on IRC helped me, but as it's embarrassing to ask for help on the same issue twice, I'm writing down what I've learned! The problem Get a £ character stored to MySQL, retrieved and then displayed without any weird characters in front of it using UTF-8. The solution Make sure… continue reading.

Posted on 18 March 2009 in PHP

Setting up PHP on OS X Leopard

In the vein of some of Lorna's articles, this is more a note for myself than anything else. Not everything is explained in detail as it assumes you know how to use a command line… These are the steps I take to get the Apple supplied PHP working with GD, PDO_MySQL and Xdebug working on OS X 10.5. /usr/local Ensure that the following directories exist: sudo mkdir /usr/local/include sudo mkdir /usr/local/bin sudo mkdir /usr/local/lib sudo… continue reading.

Posted on 5 March 2009 in PHP

PHPUK 2009

Another PHPUK conference is over and again it was a good'un! There were a lot of good talks, though not all were targeted at me and I also got to meet old friends and make new ones. The day started well with probably the most inventive safety announcement ever by Marcus, though he should use a microphone next time! Aral Balkan's keynote provided food for thought and he's a very enthusiastic speaker. This was an… continue reading.

Posted on 2 March 2009 in Conferences

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