Archive for the ‘Web’ Category

OpenID support

Wednesday, February 13th, 2008

The observant visitor to this site may already have noticed the addition of OpenID support for logon and commenting on this site. This is easy to achieve with the WP-OpenID plugin. For now I have enabled the option to auto-approve comments submitted with an OpenID. I know having an OpenID doesn’t necessarily make you a good person but, at least for now, its more effort than your average spammer is prepared to go to.
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Immersive slideshows

Thursday, February 7th, 2008

If you spend a lot of time looking at large numbers of photos on the web then take a look at the PicLens browser plugins. It builds a 3D wall of photos from a page and allows you to zoom around them and view each one full screen. In my case, particularly useful for browsing photos on Flickr.

Upgrade weekend

Sunday, January 13th, 2008

Finally had a chance to put in place a whole upgrades on this site. First up was WordPress 2.3.2. I then needed to upgrade Gallery2 for the latest version of the WPG2 so that’s now at 2.2.3. The WPG2 plugin now acts a lot more like I’d expect a plugin should. Two minor niggles. Firstly, it adds its own page which appears with all the others on the right. You can rename it but I’d rather like to get rid of it completely! Secondly, it doesn’t work with Gallery URL rewrites. Need to investigate that further but it is mitigated to a certain extent by enabling Lightbox support so you won’t usually get to the image page from a blog post anyway.
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Ruby and Zero

Sunday, October 7th, 2007

Out of the box, Project Zero supports PHP and Groovy as scripting languages but, as this developerWorks article demonstrates, extending Zero to support other languages is pretty trivial. In this instance, they show how adding support for Ruby (specifically JRuby) can be achieved with one simple class. Now Rails developers have no excuse not to take a look at Zero!

Rails Overview: View

Friday, July 20th, 2007

Having covered the Model and Controller aspects of Rails in previous posts, that really means it has to be View next. I’ve already touched on the basics: the controller method renders a template, either explicitly or simply by exiting and allowing the default template for the action to rendered, and the attributes of the controller class setup by the action method are then available to the template.
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Gallery rewrites are back

Monday, July 16th, 2007

Many thanks to Ilya Azarov who answered my plea for assistance and supplied his nginx rewrite rules for Gallery2. I won’t claim to understand why his work and mine didn’t (although previously I wasn’t aware that you could nest location directives so that was something I hadn’t tried). They still can’t cope with spaces in file names but I can live with that.

Changing servers

Friday, July 13th, 2007

So, it’s been a little bit quiet on this blog for the past few days. The main reason is that it’s been on the move from the hosting provided by our ISP (PlusNet) to my SliceHost slice. Things would have been much quicker had I not decided to switch Apache for the increasingly popular (due to its low memory usage) nginx.
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Rails Overview: Controller

Wednesday, July 4th, 2007

In the previous entry of this series I covered the model part of the MVC support in Rails. The view and controller support is very tightly linked (more so than in, say, Struts) but I’ll start with the controller just to be contrary.
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