Archive for the 'Web Development' Category

My 2 Cents On Web Hosting

July 18th, 2008

People regularly ask me where to host their websites. This is pretty much what I tell everybody.
RackSpace Is The Best

Unless You Don’t Want To Pay For Managed Hosting Or You Want Ruby on Rails Support
An entry level server at RackSpace will cost you about $500/month. If you can afford a managed, dedicated server, and your […]

IDs With Square Brackets And jQuery

July 8th, 2008

I have recently become quite fond of using jQuery as my javascript library in conjunction with my CodeIgniter PHP projects. In PHP, I often name my form fields in the format of…

model_name[attribute_name]
For Example…
contact[first_name]
contact[last_name]
etc.

I do this so that I can easily retrieve all the attributes for each model and then quickly store them to the database […]

Ecommerce with CodeIgniter

May 15th, 2008

Ironically the Zend Framework is marketed with the phrase “Extreme Simplicity & Productivity”. I have developed a few sites with it now and I find it to be anything but simple and productive. It’s complicated, has a steep learning curve, and (in my opinion) needs a lot more work. I realize that I’m coming from […]

How To Sort A Zend_Db_Table_Rowset

February 14th, 2008

So you figured out how to define the relationships between your Zend_Db_Tables and you have issued a call to findDependentRowset(). You get your Rowset back but you need to sort the results by one of the columns in the dependent table. How do you do that?
The short answer is, you can’t! Unfortunately, this functionality won’t […]

How To Implement Partials In Zend Framework 1.0.3

February 11th, 2008

The pre release of Zend Framework 1.5 has been out for a few days and includes an implementation for partials – among other things. But the GA release is still at least a few weeks off and I’ve got a project that needs to go live very soon. So, I’m using version 1.0.3 of the […]

QuietHeadphones.com Goes To Zend Framework

January 24th, 2008

A while back I wrote about using Ruby on Rails to develop QuietHeadphones.com, a website that sells high quality noise reduction headphones. Tonight, we made the move to the Zend Framework. We did this for a variety of reasons including the fact that we are now hosting our site on a dedicated server with RackSpace. […]

Add View Helper Paths For Entire Zend Framework Application

January 17th, 2008

I have been writing several Zend_View_Helpers to aid in the development of my Zend Framework Application. The helpers are very generic and are used in many of my Views throught my applications. So, naturally, I want an easy way to configure my Views to have access to my custom View Helpers. You don’t want to […]

How To Remove External Repositories From Subversion

January 8th, 2008

I was trying out a plugin in my Ruby on Rails application and decided not to use it. Apparently, when I installed the plugin, a reference to it was added to my subversion repository. Since the reference was not to a working directory, my capistrano deployments got debackled and died. Here is how you can […]

Setting Up Subversion And Apache for Ruby on Rails Development

July 20th, 2007

I’ve been asked several times how I have my Ruby on Rails development environment set up. The most frequently misunderstood aspect of a Rails development environment is that you do not have to have your Subversion repository physically located on the same server as your deployed application. The only requirement is that all the pieces […]

How To Delete Saved Form Data In Firefox - One Value At A Time

June 1st, 2007

As we all know, Firefox will save the values you type in a form. Then, Firefox will provide a drop down list of previously entered values for form fields that you have completed and submitted in the past. Today, I mistyped my username in a form causing Firefox to store an incorrect value in my […]