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Serendipity Template Update
14 September 2010
Read moreIf you read this site purely on a feed reader, this is probably irrelevant to you, but I recently made some changes to this blog and thought I'd post about how I worked with Serendipity to achieve them, mostly involving some template hacking and using a plugin to make a particular area of the site editable through the admin interface.
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Book Review: The Art of Community
13 September 2010
Read moreThis review has been in my drafts folder for 9 months, because I didn't feel I was doing the book justice. It seems like I never will, so here it is - as it was written then, but hopefully still useful and relevant to someone
I bought this book last year when I was still working at Ibuildings, and my role changed a lot to include events and community representation. Before that I was doing entirely PHP development and it was around this time that I noticed myself saying "has everyone forgotten I'm actually a developer?" a lot! So I quickly decided that I needed a copy of The Art of Community, a book by Jono Bacon published by O'Reilly. Actually, I should thank O'Reilly at this point for publishing the book and even more so for sending Josette and her book stand to conferences - I was able to buy the book and it came with a pep talk :)
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Indexes on Tables
06 September 2010
Read moreIncreasingly I find a very binary split between the professionals I come into contact with. One group of people are very database-aware and take the design of their storage quite seriously - with good results. The other group are more concerned with the functionality of their application, and have little regard for how it is stored other than considering it a keeping-place and making useful table and column names.
Too often though, they don't think about how that data will be retrieved or what the implications are when it gets beyond the thousand records that were used for testing. This is where having an idea of how the data will be retrieved can really help application performance. (note: this article is aimed at users of traditional relational databases, and ignores all other possibilities). This post takes a look at the various index types and when to use them.
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Tips for Event Hosting: On The Day
02 September 2010
Read moreThis post is the second in a series of three about organising and hosting events. If you're interested, you could also read the first post about event preparation.
As an organiser you should know exactly where you are going on the day and what you need. Namebadges (sticky labels and pen if nothing else) will be needed at registration, if you have tickets and need to tick people off then rope in lots of volunteers (it sounds like a lot but 3-5% of your total attendee count is ideal) and brief them, and spread out across as much space as you have so you can parallelise as much as possible - registration is always chaos because of course everyone shows up at once and causes a backlog!
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Printable PDF Handouts from OpenOffice Impress
30 August 2010
Read moreLast week I was preparing a training course for a client, and I wanted to print the slides nicely for the attendees to refer to and make notes on etc. The slides were done, I'd talked to my friendly printers (Mailboxes etc in Leeds) and all I needed to do …
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Tips for Event Hosting: Preparation
25 August 2010
Read moreI've been to a lot of events, mostly technical, software-related ones, and I've also helped organise a few as well. For people organising events for the first time there are definitely some pitfalls that might not be obvious until you actually, well, until you fall into them! I thought I'd capture my experiences into a series of blog posts, in case they can help any future organisers to avoid some of the traps. First up: what to do before your event starts.
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Working with Web Services - Froscon 2010
22 August 2010
Read moreThis weekend I'm at froscon in Germany, giving two talks. One had no slides (but may have video, if I see it then I will post the link here) and the other was "Working with Web Services" which I gave this morning in the PHP room. My slides are here …
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One-Step Symlink Switch
19 August 2010
Read moreThis is a trick I use when deploying websites so I thought I'd post it here for posterity. Actually, technically I stole it from someone else but for now let's pretend it's mine (thanks @__kb!)
When I deploy an application, which is almost invariably a PHP application, I like to …
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Geeks Can Write
17 August 2010
Read moreA couple of weeks ago I gave a lightning talk at the PHPNW user group entitled "Geeks Can Write" or "Can Geeks Write?" - basically shooting down the worst of the excuses for not writing that I've heard and asking everyone to give it a shot! If you are interested, then …
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CodeigniterCon 2010
16 August 2010
Read moreI spent the weekend in Bristol so I could attend cicon2010 - a volunteer-organised first-edition conference around the CodeIgniter PHP Framework. It started on Saturday morning with registration at 8:30am and the first talk at 9am. When I arrived (at about ten to nine) there were no organisers there. I …
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Leeds PHP User Group
12 August 2010
Read moreThere's a new PHP user group which has sprung up in my home town of Leeds - Leeds PHP. So far it has met twice and its been a good crowd both times. Our meetings at the moment are at Brewery Tap, which is not only the closest pub to the …
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3 Top Tips for Database Naming
10 August 2010
Read morePerhaps this is more of a rant than a post but I do keep running into issues with databases with names that are inconsistent - which makes them really difficult to work with. When designing a database, there are a few points to consider:
Singular and Plural
This goes for table …