Comparing the Languages

The Good

I recently stumbled across Alfred which looks pretty cool but what really caught my eye was an additional Alfred workflow called Alfred Dev Doctor which gives you the ability to search a wide range of programming languages and frameworks documentation including, Rails, jQuery, PHP, Python and more.

Watch the video on the Alfred Dev Doctor website and you're probably itching to give it a go. It certainly seems like something I would use regularly as a developer.

I recently had to use the Date module in a custom booking form that was constructed using Drupal's awesome Form API. Now I'm sure someone is going to come along and prove me wrong but I couldn't find any documentation on the available widget types, form properties or much of anything to be honest. I did find a few wrong examples that were doing some weird hacks like overwriting #process.

Disclaimer: I've been thinking about this concept for a while and I personally think it's great (although riddled with flaws) so I wanted to share it. This is nothing like anything I've every written before and you probably need a bit of an imagination to enjoy it.

The concept is surely flawed in many ways but I want to discuss only the positives for now to stop this article dragging on. Maybe ill go into why it's a bad idea in another post.

I've been working on a pretty big site restructure this week and as part of the restructure I needed to migrate data from some custom database tables into Field Collections to offer a bit more flexibility. Most of the code documented was available on drupal.org but there was definitely a lot of different ways mentioned and no clean cut function for you to reuse. If you're just looking for a cut a paste, here's the code. I will explain it further below but it's pretty well commented anyway.

We've discussed at work about how great it would be to have a convenient way to share aliases with each other, synchronise them between machines and overall just have a nice way to manage them. I've been meaning to post my .bash_aliases file on my blog for a while as a way for me to manage them but now I've found the ultimate online service for managing your aliases.

Funny little problem this one. Magento Enterprise 1.11 does not use the theme name as part of the FPC uri. Therefore when switching themes within a package using the design exceptions you still see the cached version of the site. This is obviously a major issue when you're using the design exceptions to load a mobile theme.

Solution

Pretty straightforward, add the theme name to the FPC uri. It doesn't need much explaining so grab the source on Github.

Bit of an nuisance this one and it only crept up in the last few weeks. Turned out to be FileZilla which was the culprit.

SortTv is a great little perl script for sorting, renaming and organising your media. It's easy to set-up but I did run into a few minor issues. Here are the steps to install on Ubuntu Server.

This blog has needed a few style tweaks for a while but I have about as much design sense as the guy who rolled out the hotdog theme. However the guy next to me is far more creative and he gave me a few pointers so I thought I'd give it a go. It's not perfect but I like it, if you don't, find a new blog to read.

Before the redesign I was simply using the WordPress Twenty Eleven Theme

After the Spruce Up