Archive

Author Archive

Twitter: What did I learn from it.

August 12th, 2010
No comments

Twitter…. Tweets ….. funny how this has just blended into our life style these days, anyone with a computer, a laptop, an Ipad, a netbook, a phone is tweeting. Heck, they make phones that are sold based on the fact that “Hey this phone can tweet”, amazing isn’t it? That in my head is only second to cars being sold based on the fact that they can integrate with an Apple MP3 player. (Oh! I am sorry, did I say MP3 player? I meant Ipod, yes that fancy music player that can play.. well mp3 music.)

I was one of those people who found it pretty funny that there were people out there that wanted to know what others were doing… eating…. playing…. anything. I was one of those people that enjoyed watching Conan O’brien’s Twitter tracker bit (A mockery of twitter.com which displayed senseless funny celebrity tweets) just because I used to love making fun of twitter.com until recently when I used it myself and started following it, seeing it only trend upwards. Its amazing how tightly integrated this in essence pretty basic website is these days. Businesses rely on it to get the word out, be it events or a new product launch, friends rely on it keep their friends up to date, it has single handledly changed the face of marketing, its a one stop shop to find out whats going on almost anything, anywhere in the world.

So I spent some time thinking about it, that how a simple website idea like twitter.com got to where it is today, what we can learn from it and apply it to our next website idea.

This is what I came up with.

A website these days

  1. must have a social element to it.
  2. should be very focused and shouldn’t perform more than a function or two. (Another example of this is the recent popularity of the shopping site woot.com that sells a product a day)
  3. should be easy on the eyes and easy on the mind. Seems like people have lost the thirst to learn and use, they just want to use, one may be two buttons and done!
  4. Should let users share their views (wherever applicable) with others, since apparently people don’t mind standing on this new virtual soap box.
  5. and finally should be available on multiple platforms, specially mobile, iphone and andriod style products.

Your thoughts?

admin Social media, Technologies, general , ,

< html5 > Rocks! < /html5 >

August 12th, 2010
No comments

HTML5 will be the new standard for this new and hyper active world wide web. This new standard will incorporate features like video playback, drag-and-drop that have been previously dependent on third-party browser plug-ins such as Flash (Adobe and Microsoft) and Google Gears.

HTML5 introduces a number of new elements and attributes that are almost trivial on modern web 20. websites. Some of them are being semantic replacements for common uses of generic block (<div>) and inline (<span>) elements, for example <nav> (website navigation block) and <footer> (usually referring to bottom of web page or to last lines of html code). Other elements provide new functionality through a standardized interface, such as the multimedia elements <audio> and <video>.

The HTML5 syntax is no longer based on SGML despite the similarity of its markup. It has, however, been designed to be backward compatible with common parsing of older versions of HTML. It comes with a new introductory line that looks like an SGML document type declaration, <!DOCTYPE html>, which enables standards-compliant rendering in all browsers that use “DOCTYPE sniffing”.
HTML5 also incorporates Web Forms 2.0, another WHATWG specification.

Read more:http://diveintohtml5.org

admin HTML, Programming , ,

The Steven Slater guy …. like George Costanza?

August 11th, 2010
No comments

So yes I am a “Seinfeld” fan (Not seinfeld the comedian, but seinfeld the show), a pretty hard core one I would say. I have probably watched so much seinfeld in my life that most of the episodes and punch lines are actually embedded into my head. I hardly go past a day where I am unable to link something that happens to me during the course of a day to a Seinfeld bit or I should say I am always trying to link everything that happens around me to a Seinfeld episode, ROFL.

So it is only natural that I do the same for popular news as well. So here I am sitting on my bed watching CNN while the news of Steven Slater the “flight attendant gone wild” was playing over and over again, and they kept saying the blahblahblah… who made a fantastic exit and it suddenly clicked again, George would fit right into this. Remember the episode “The Susie” when George wanted to go to this party and make a fantastic Entry with this girl he was dating and says “My whole life I have never made a great entrance.” and Seinfeld replies: “You’ve made some fine exits.”, haha, I am sure we can say that about Steven Slater now.

Is Steven Slater trying to be like George?

Steven Slater   George Costanza

For all the omg tweets coming out for slater check out: OMG - Steven Slater

admin Fun, general , , ,

Magento multi-site install: Run a specific store view via the domain.

August 9th, 2010
No comments

Now ofcourse magento comes with a website or a language switcher built in, so if you have multiple store views for a single website/store, you have a nifty drop-down list on the front-end to let the user switch to a preferred language and locale. But what it doesn’t come out of the box with is the ability to direct the user to a store view based on the domain (Most big companies own most domain extensions on their main domain.). So in-case you are trying to accomplish the above you can use this technique that I came up.

In this example I assume that you own domains for the different countries for the same website. So say www.domain.com is primary domain in English and you also own www.domain.de for German, www.domain.nl for Dutch and www.domain.fr for French and so on.

So here’s how to do it.

Pre-requisite:
All the domains mentioned above are directed to the same magento instance via apache site setup. Usually virtual hosts.

Step 1: Setup Store codes in the Magento Admin.
This can be done in the admin under System -> Manage Stores.

For this example my stores are setup using the magento admin where the store view code is the domain extension, meaning for the German store the code = “de”, for the french store => “fr”, for the dutch store => “nl” and so on.

Step 2: Changes to the main index.php file.
Add the following code at the end of the main index.php file (Just paste over the Mage::run() statement, make sure you remove this statement.).


/**
* find the domain tld.
*/
function find_tld($url)
{
$purl = parse_url($url);
$host = $purl['host'];
preg_match_all(”/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+).([a-zA-Z0-9.-]{2,8})$/”, $host,$matches);
return $matches[0][0];
}

//Store Switcher based on URL
$host = find_tld(”http://”.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']);
switch ($host)
{
case ‘domain.nl’:
$store = ‘nl’;
break;
case ‘domain.fr’:
$store = ‘fr’;
break;
case ‘domain.de’:
$store = ‘de’;
break;
default: $store = ”;
}

//Set the store
Mage::run($store);

That should do it.

You can also use this technique where you don’t want to present the user with the options to switch stores for any number of reasons e.g. you have different pricing on different store views.

You may also use this technique for sub-domains, you will just have to tweak the find TLD function to find subdomain.

admin Magento, PHP, Programming, Technologies , , ,

Display Fail

August 7th, 2010
No comments
Dispaly Fail

Dispaly Fail

admin Technologies, general , ,

Open vs Closed source (Java vs .NET)

August 5th, 2010
No comments

admin Programming, Technologies

How to retrieve Magento base URL paths from views inside template.

August 5th, 2010
No comments

Magento front controller comes with built in methods to retrieve all base URL paths that are configured via the Magento admin.

All of these methods are inside the Mage class but just like many other things aren’t mentioned openly in their forums or documentation.

So I thought I would share this with everyone.


Javascript Base URL: http://[yourswebsite]/js/
<?php echo Mage::getBaseUrl(Mage_Core_Model_Store::URL_TYPE_JS); ?>


Base URL i.e. http://[yourswebsite]/index.php/
<?php echo Mage::getBaseUrl(Mage_Core_Model_Store::URL_TYPE_LINK); ?>
or
<?php echo Mage::getBaseUrl(); ?>


Media URL: http://[yourwebsite]/media/
<?php echo Mage::getBaseUrl(Mage_Core_Model_Store::URL_TYPE_MEDIA); ?>


Skin URL: http://[yourwebsite]/skin/frontend/[yourtheme]/[yourtemplate]
<?php echo Mage::getBaseUrl(Mage_Core_Model_Store::URL_TYPE_SKIN); ?>


Base URL: http://[yourwebsite]/
<?php echo Mage::getBaseUrl(Mage_Core_Model_Store::URL_TYPE_WEB); ?>

All these are store specific, in case you are running multiple stores in your single instance of magento i.e. Mage::Run([store_code]) in your base index.php file.

admin Magento, PHP, Programming , , ,

How to search your whole database for a term/phrase?

August 5th, 2010
No comments

So I came across a situation today where I had some text popup on one of my CMS driven websites (Joomla), which I knew wasn’t coming from the code but was coming from somewhere inside the database. Now if you have used a CMS like me, you probably know that content usually comes from not just one but a lot of tables, so where would I start looking, this would take forever so many tables and even more fields inside those tables!!@#?

Just when I thought it was going to be hopeless I came up with a clever trick to solve the problem, and here’s what I did:

Dump the Mysql database to a [filename].sql
mysqldump -h host -uroot -ppassword [database_name] > [filename].sql

Next you can simply grep this file for the term you are looking for.
grep -i "search word / phrase” [filename].sql

The result would show you the statement where the term exists, which in turn would tell you the exact table, field and row its coming from.

INSERT INTO `tablename` VALUES ('search word/phase‘,0,0),(’khepri’,0,1);

Tip: if you dont know the database, you can obviously dump all the databases into one file, mysql

admin Programming, SQL , , ,

Difference between php echo and print

June 25th, 2010
No comments

So I have been asked this question < ? php echo "a" , " million" , " times" , " over" ? > so I thought I would answer it on my wiki.

Although both these functions or more accurate known as language constructs (which is why you can use these without parenthesis() ) are pretty much the same, they have 2 key differences.

1. echo() can take multiple arguments (as mentioned above) so you don’t have to perform string concatenation on the variable(s) before passing in the value(s). Which is also a reason why echo is a little faster than print().

2. The other difference is that echo returns a void value or doesn’t return a value as apposed to print() returning a int value. This can be considered as a performance benefit. This feature also allows you to pass print() as a parameter to a echo command.

Although I thing to note, which can help you decide which one to use is that php by default uses echo when you use < ? = $var ? > syntax. Which probably means that echo is a better choice

admin PHP, Programming , , ,

PHP doesn’t scale, myth? Aboslutely!

June 16th, 2009
No comments

When you are a PHP Programmer sooner or later you would come across the following statement, “Oh PHP?! PHP is awesome, but you know what, it doesn’t scale well!”. So I thought why not go research a little and find some good material to prove otherwise. FoSho! I found alot but I picked a few to share.

http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2003/10/15/php_scalability.html

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/04/digg_phps_scalability_and_perf.html

http://blog.thinkphp.de/archives/170-Keynote-of-Tim-Bray-some-interesting-comparison-between-PHP,-Rails-and-Java.html

http://shiflett.org/blog/2004/jul/php-scales

Apart from these articles, here are a few big websites are living proof that PHP rocks and is ofcourse SCALABLE!

  • Yahoo.com
  • Facebook.com
  • Youtube.com
  • Flickr.com
  • wikipedia.com
  • photobucket.com
  • digg.com

I am sure the aforementioned companies can afford to hire java programmers!

One of the very clear and interesting excerpt from O’reilly.

The PHP Scalability Myth

by Jack Herrington
10/15/2003

PHP scales. There, I said it. The word on the street is that “Java scales and PHP doesn’t.” The word on the street is wrong! and PHP needs someone to stand up and tell the truth: that it does scale.

So there, for all of you who go around telling that PHP doesn’t SCALE start reading a little and STFU!

admin Programming, Uncategorized