Archive for posts dated '2008'
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January 2008
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Hello world!
Hello and welcome to my new weblog (generously hosted here on WordPress.com). I’ve spent the last year (or so) trying to figure out how to best present myself online. My last attempt was over on at leekelleher.com. I had some information about myself, a linklog and details of a WordPress plugin that I developed. I found that the linklog became redundant, as it’s easier for me to use del.icio.us for my links/bookmarks. The Category Cloud…
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February 2008
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Mozilla Prism – Bringing Web Apps to the Desktop
I feel like I’ve been living under a rock for the last couple of months. I’ve only just heard about Mozilla’s Prism – and it’s already changing the way I use web-apps. Prism, (previously called WebRunner), is essentially a Site Specific Browser (SSB) – meaning that it’s a desktop application designed to host a single web-application. This is good for many reasons, foremost it causes less distractions. So far, I have prisms set-up for most…
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WordPress: “post.php” is blank after publishing
Whilst I was helping out Bookninja earlier this week, I came across a strange problem in WordPress. Every time we tried to publish a new blog post (or page), there would be a pause, then the page would go blank. (This was on the “post.php” page) I spent a long time trying to figure out what the issue was… even longer googling it! Several pages into the Google results, I found the answer! Thank you…
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All hail “The Bookninja Messiah”!
Earlier this week I’d heard that Bookninja had been hijacked, they needed some help to get their WordPress back in working order. Mark suggested that I offered my services, so I did. George explained what the problems since the hijack: Unable to publish blog posts and pages; (a blank page appeared when he tried to publish) All the pages had been delete, or disappeared. Akismet was turned off… opening the floodgates to lots of unwanted…
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Personal Zeitgeist
I’ve finally started work on my zeitgeist page. My personal projects have been on the back-burner, as I’ve (obviously) had other things to think about! Personal Zeitgeist is very easy to get up and running, although I have been making a lot of tweaks – mostly to satisfy my own coding preferences; for example: renaming the *.inc files to *.inc.php – so that nobody else can view the source-code. (That’s been one of my long-term…
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Social Networks are like Pubs
I received an email from Pownce this morning, letting me know that they’ve opened the doors to all! Yah! (oh, the irony) I signed up for Pownce a couple of months ago… configured my profile, looked for a few friends … didn’t find any … now what? At this point I’m reminded of Rob Manuel’s comment about social networks: Social networks are pubs. There’s little reason to like Facebook if your friends aren’t there. Anyway,…
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Daddy’s Little Girl
The past weekend has been an amazing experience for me (and Lucy). After being 12-days overdue, and a 12-hour labour, Lucy gave birth to our beautiful daughter, Katelyn Mary Kelleher! I’m still trying to recover from the lack of sleep… but I can’t complain too much – as I wasn’t the one giving birth!!! (Lucy did fantastic!) Hopefully they’ll be coming home from the hospital tomorrow… I can’t wait! (apart from doing the house-cleaning! :-(…
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Fatherhood
I’ve survived the first week of fatherhood! Even after all the advice from friends and family, books you’ve read, etc… Nothing prepares you for it! Completely in at the deep-end on the first sleepless night – no idea what was going on; what time it was; night-turns-into-day-into-night; a total blur! Strangely though, I am loving being a father – and absolutely smitten with Katelyn! In other news, there’s another baby (a project) that Ben and…
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March 2008
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Traffic Updates: RSS -> SMS
Since moving down to Bristol, I have been subscribing to the Underscore mailing list – of which I’m guilty of non-participation. One of the threads today made me realise the potential of user empowerment using “Web 2.0” services and technologies. The thread was called “RSS -> SMS“, Andy wrote: After my wife took three hours to get to work this morning due to the M5 being shut, I’ve built a Yahoo pipe that takes the…
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I MADE LOLCAT!
Yes… I MADE LOLCAT! moar funny pictures The photo is from my flickr photostream, [link]; taken whilst we were staying at the farm – couldn’t resist taking a snap of these two “love cats” Who knows why I end up doing this sort of thing… it’s not like I’ve got time to waste these days! Right, back to work!
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Accessing the jQuery DOM in an Ajax callback
Whilst developing the admin pages for Pez, I wanted to add some nice features to the UI. My first choice for a JavaScript framework is jQuery. I’ve used other frameworks before, (like mootools, script.aculo.us and YUI), but I just seem to get on better with jQuery, (although mootools is a very close second). Last night I was playing around with the Ajax/jQuery.get() method – it was the first time I’d used it, and was having…
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Introducing Pez…
In between my many projects (paid and personal) and entering fatherhood… I seem to have found some time to start up an open-source project with Ben Taylor, (my old comrade from the Scream days). I’ve mentioned it a couple of times on my blog recently, but hadn’t yet got around to introducing it… then Ben beat me to it! So without further ado, here is Ben’s introduction to Pez!
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One Less Vista Woe
To follow up to my rant a few weeks ago (More Vista Woes on my old blog), it seems that Microsoft have taken note everyone’s complaints about the forced reboot. After putting off my Windows Vista updates for as long as possible, I finally succumbed… Once all the updates were installed, I’m prompted with the same “Restart your computer to finish installing important updates” message. But now the countdown timer is gone!!! So at least…
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Scrobbling my BBC Radio listening on Last.fm
A couple of months ago I’d heard that the BBC Radio Labs had developed a desktop widget that scrobbled the songs you listen to on BBC Radio (currently only available for Radio 1, Radio 2, 6 Music and 1 Xtra) [via Last.fm] I’m not a big fan of gimmicky desktop widgets – it’s bad enough that Vista comes with them as default – some people love them, some hate them… I just prefer less clutter…
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IE View Lite 1.3.2+ not compatible with Firefox 2.0
I used all sorts of add-ons and extensions for Firefox, (I’ll get around to writing a blog post on that soon too). Since I do a lot of web-development, I switch between Firefox and Internet Explorer frequently during a build. To make this easier, I’ve been using Grayson Mixon’s IE View Lite. But with the latest upgrade (version 1.3.2), it broke in Firefox 2.0! (This made me sad) :-( I’d been holding out for the…
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Vista SP1 Hibernation problems
After a couple of unsuccessfully attempted to install Windows Vista Service Pack 1; it seems that I “forgot” to disable my anti-virus software! Then it installed fine. Vista does seem to perform better/quicker since SP1, but, for me, it introduced a major show-stopper! Hibernation stopped working! I google’d the problem to see if anyone else had the same issue — and knew how to resolve it. It took me a while, probably because Vista SP1…
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Strange goings-on
The first time it happened I thought it was odd. After the second time I seemed very weird. Now that it’s happened a third time – I’m just baffled! What am I rambling on about I hear you ask?! This… This picture on Flickr has been favourited 3 times – which is nice! However the strange thing going-on here is that those Flickr users (who favourited it) have no photos themselves and have only favourited…
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April 2008
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Converting CSV to XML
There’s a bit a functionality on one of the projects that I’m working on where I need to do a lookup. The data I’ve been given is in an Excel spreadsheet – which I needed to convert to XML (as ultimately the data will be stored in a CMS that handles XML better). I’ve done a lot of projects where I need to convert XML to Excel (via CSV), but not many where I need…
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Sneaky Skype installing Firefox Extension
We’ve got an old laptop that we keep under the coffee table, so that we can quickly check IMDb or Wikipedia for mid-conversations things (very geeky I know!) Since Katelyn arrived, we’ve been using it for web-cam too. Yesterday we were having a few problems with voice chat on MSN, so we installed Skype on the laptop. A couple of clicks later, Skype was installed, all was good. Then about 5 mins later I notice…
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New Richard Westbrook Site
Bodenko and Crush Design have just launch the new website for, Porsche Supercup champion, Richard Westbrook. We built the site with WordPress (2.5) to take advantage of it’s blogging framework and also to be totally buzzword-compliant! It’s not often that we get to mention the sites that we’ve built – usually due to the non-disclosure when doing B2B projects.
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Posting source code on WordPress.com
I feel like a complete n00b … I’ve only just found out how to mark-up source-code snippets on WordPress.com It’s in their FAQs: How do I post source code? Essentially you use the short-code: [sourcecode language='css']...[/sourcecode] Here’s an example: // A "Hello World!" program in C# class Hello { static void Main() { System.Console.WriteLine("Hello World!"); } } I knew about WP.org plugins that did this, but I’ve been scratching my head on how do this…
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Upgrade WordPress Shell Script
Now that I’ve found my new best friend (the sourcecode short-code), I want to put it to good use now. Here’s a quick Unix shell script that I use to upgrade my WordPress installations: #!/bin/sh # WordPress Update Script # Written by: Lee Kelleher # Released: 2008-04-23 # Email: lee # at # vertino # dot # net # Released under GPL echo "Downloading current version of WordPress..." wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz echo "Uncompressing WordPress archive..." tar…
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“Powered by Category Cloud”
I’ve just installed Operator – a Firefox extension that highlights microformatted data on web pages. So far I haven’t noticed any performance issues, and it’s been playing nicely with all my other Firefox extensions. As a web developer, Operator makes me want to add more semantic mark-up to my websites, (which I already try to do). This extension will make it easier for testing purposes. I decided to read more about the extension on the…
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Disabling Possibly Related Links on WordPress.com
When WordPress.com introduced Snap Preview on our blogs (or is that their blogs?) at the end of 2006, I wasn’t impressed – it felt intrusive – like a JavaScript pop-up for Web 2.0! (Just given a different name). So I disabled it straight-away. A few days ago, the WP.com team introduced a new feature “Possibly Related Posts“. At first I thought this was a great idea for finding similar content – but then I realised…
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May 2008
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rel-tag-spaces dilemma
Since I started using the Operator Firefox extension a couple of week ago, I’ve found it to be a useful tool – to quickly access microformatted content; such as Contact details and Tagspaces. Whilst I was testing it out on ReadySteadyBook, I noticed that the only tagspace was “Blog.aspx“, which seemed a bit weird. When I found the same problem on other websites, such as Amazon (example here) where the tagspace was “ref=tag_dpp_cust_itdp_t“. I thought…
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How to follow conversations on Twitter
After reading Dave’s post about Twitter being the new Facebook yesterday, I decided to give Digsby a go. (I’d heard of it previously, but I was semi-scared off by all the twittermania – it’s a bit like marmite). Since I was only following a few tweeters there wasn’t of a flow – so I added a couple more higher profile tweeters, like Jeff Atwood’s Coding Horror. This morning Jeff tweeted: I hate #region so much.…
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June 2008
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Making Request.QueryString writable (by clone/copy)
Every now and then I completely forget that the Request.QueryString (and Request.Form) object is read-only. Today I had a bit of functionality where I needed to remove a key/value from the collection - but the Remove() method (of the NameValueCollection object) throws an exception. Unfortunately, the Request.QueryString's CopyTo method assigns the values to an ARRAY, not a NameValueCollection - losing functionality and flexibility. You need to copy the Request.QueryString object to a new NameValueCollection instance,…
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How to convert NameValueCollection to a (Query) String
Most ASP.NET developers know that you can get a key/value pair string from the Request.QueryString object (via the .ToString() method). However that functionality isn't the same for a generic NameValueCollection object (of which Request.QueryString is derived from). So how do you take a NameValueCollection object and get a nicely formatted key/value pair string? (i.e. "key1=value1&key2=value2") ... Here's a method I wrote a while ago: /// <summary> /// Constructs a QueryString (string). /// Consider this method…
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How to best embed a WMV video clip?
I hate to admit it, but I’m stuck… I’m trying to figure out how to best embed a WMV video clip in a web-page, so that it works cross-browser (and cross-platform). Even after all my years of web-development, I’m still confused to which browser supports which tag … nested <embed> tags in <object> tags … it gets messy! I’m as equally confused with the Class ID attribute: “CLSID:6BF52A52-394A-11d3-B153-00C04F79FAA6” – surely that can’t be the same…
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Firefox 3 – Download Day
Today is Firefox 3 Download Day! Mozilla are hoping to set a Guinness World Record for most software downloads in 24 hours. At the time of writing, over 1.2 million people have pledged to download Firefox 3 on the Download Day! This is a first attempt of this record, so there is no number to beat. But Mozilla want to outdo the number of Firefox 2 downloads on its launch day, which was 1.6 million!…
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July 2008
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Last.fm Web Services
Last weekend, the good folk at Last.fm revealed version 2.0 of their public API: The new API introduces a user authentication protocol which for the first time allows applications to create user sessions, bringing both read and write services to web apps, desktop apps and mobile devices. Take our new tagging API’s. Developers can both pull and apply tags to music content from any application on any platform now. The same goes for sharing –…
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.NET Test-Driven Development
Has anyone got any pointers on how I should start doing test-driven development in .NET? It’s something I’ve been meaning to look into for years now. I’ve got all the usual Visual Studio add-ons installed… NUnit, TestDriven.NET, etc. But no idea how to use them! Usually I learn this stuff on the job, yet from most other developers I speak to – it’s all guess-work! Any advice is much appreciated!
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How to prevent hotlinking to FLV files? (Flash Videos)
My friend Shane (from DVD House of Horrors) is having a hard time trying to stop other websites hotlinking to his horror movie clips. The site is running Joomla on a Linux server, so he’s been down the usual .htaccess routes to prevent remote hotlinking. However the problem with FLV files is that they aren’t requested directly by the web-browser, but rather the Flash video player (a .swf file). This causes a problem for the…
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Hindsight… It’s is a wonderful thing!
A couple of hours ago I received an automated email from our Travelblog site, saying that we had a new user registration; which was strange, since we disabled that feature a long time ago! Great! We’ve just been hacked! I put my hands up in the air, I’d been running an old version of WordPress (2.2) … which I’ve been meaning to upgrade for a long time; but hey, I’ve bought a house, had a…
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My WordPress hacked by c99madshell script
After all the excitement of last Friday’s attempted hack on my travelblog, and the subsequent upgrade to WordPress 2.6 – I thought everything was under control. Boy was I wrong! A few hours ago I received a blog comment (from a Mr Andrew Wong) on the travelblog: http://www.lee-and-lucy.com/travelblog/index.php?p=5817 check this out!! I clicked the link, my jaw dropped! It wasn’t an attempted hack, it was a very successful hack… I felt violated -in a digital…
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August 2008
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Setting up Visual Studio to work with Umbraco
Over the last 12 months I have been involved with developing several Umbraco-powered websites. During that time I’ve experienced many development frustrations; specifically with debugging and version control. A while back I read Paul Sterling’s blog post on “Working with Umbraco in Visual Studio” – I used this as my basis. I have added to his orignal suggestions: Have a clean, working copy of Umbraco – using the installer – on your machine. I am…
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November 2008
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Lil’ Bookninja
After helping Bookninja with their blog, George kindly sent me some swag, (or “thanking him by advertising on his chest“, as George put it), including a baby-grow (we were expecting Katelyn at the time). Well, 9 months later, Katelyn fits into the baby-grow (she’s always been quite a small baby). I promised George that I’d sent him a photo when we got chance. It was by pure coincidence that I was wearing a WordPress hoodie!…
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Populating multiple DropDownList controls with generic ListItem array
I’ve just had some fun spending the last half-an-hour trying to figure out why when I used the SelectedValue property of a DropDownList, it also set the value of another DropDownList control. Here’s some background to the problem. On my web-form, I have 2 fieldsets, one for a "Start Date", the other for an "End Date". For each fieldset there are 3 DropDownList; Day, Month and Year. Now rather than populating the values declaratively, using…
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December 2008
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Using jQuery to swap form fields
Due to an technical decision early on in my project, the date-of-birth field on a profile edit page in a single text-input element. My client would now like the date-of-birth to be 3 dropdown lists, (day, month and year). The amount of work involved making changes to both the back and front ends would take at least a day. (It sounds a lot, but you know it would). Here’s where a front-end developer’s best friend…
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