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My Three Favourite Opera Features
05 October 2010
Read moreI'm an Opera user, and one of the reasons I am is that I can control my browser entirely from the keyboard. I think everyone uses browser keyboard shortcuts, and in a lot of ways Opera has similar functionality to other browsers, but it also has keyboard spatial navigation, meaning I can jump to the next element in whichever direction I choose. Opera also has per-site preferences, which actually make the web usable for me.
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Missing pcre.h when installing pecl_oauth
27 September 2010
Read moreI was playing with pecl_oauth last week (more about that in a later post) and when I tried to install from PECL, it grabbed the files, ran the configure step but stopped with an error status during make. This is bad news for those of us who are ubuntu users …
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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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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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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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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 …
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Migrating Github Contributors to an Organization
02 August 2010
Read moreRecently, a github project that I contribute to, joind.in, moved from an ordinary github user account over to an organization. Getting contributors moved over is pretty straight forward, I have a fork of the main repo on github at http://github.com/lornajane/joind.in and that updated to …
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WordCamp
22 July 2010
Read moreLast weekend I was at WorkCampUK in Manchester - it's taken me this long to writ the blog post because I needed time to download my photos, however I've now done that and I didn't get anything at all worth publishing, d'oh!
I am a wordpress user and even wrote a …
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Working with Branches in Git
28 June 2010
Read moreRecently I've been doing more git than I ever intended to, working with the Joind.in codebase, contributing and managing contributions to that. I quickly realised that I needed to make changes on branches, and since I'm new to git, it took a while to figure some of this out …