End Your If

Boy today was a frustrating day.  Over the past month or so, when I have some free time at work I’ve been learning Objective C to create iPhone applications.

Today, I struggled and struggled to do the most simplistic thing ever and I wanted to share it with everyone so if you get stuck with the same problem, hopefully you will solve it a lot quicker than I did.

What I was trying to do was to change the background color of the “blue” navigation header. More »

Sick days?  What’s a sick day?  I know at my place of work, we don’t take them.  Today is a great example of that.  I couldn’t even get out of bed yesterday, Sunday, but today, with work knocking on the door, I got up nice and early, popped some medication to get me through the day and here we are 9 hours later at home blogging!

Today’s article, won’t contain anything informative, just a message to other web developers out there like me, who feel like crap on the weekend, but still get up to work on Monday.

Sometimes, I’d actually take the day off, but today, like many days, I had to move a web site live.  I knew if I stayed home and asked someone else to do it that it would be more stressful than not going in!

So, to all you other web developers, you know what, let’s not just limit to web developers, to all you other courageous people who get up in the morning, feeling like garbage, but still go in to work, CHEERS!

I’m hoping to be back tomorrow to blog another day.

Have you found yourself wanting to remove validation on a specific field in a specific form?  Yes?  Excellent, you found the right place.

If you haven’t had the need for this, a great example of where you would want to accomplish this would be in a users edit form.  Normally in CakePHP we would encrypt the password, especially if you are using the AuthComponent, so we wouldn’t want the password prefilled on our form.  Instead, we’ll make it blank and place a note underneath that says “Only enter a password if you wish to change it”.

The above shouldn’t be difficult, however, when you go to use the form, you will get some unexpected results.  I keep getting a message saying that I must enter a password, because I had setup validation on that field for the registration process.  Below is a simple solution to this problem. More »

About two years ago I started learning AJAX and drag and drop.  The first project I applied it to was an existing project that was using Prototype and Scriptaculous.  So, I didn’t really have a choice as to what library I was going to use.

Two years later, I do not know Jquery all that well, but I am absolutely falling in love with.  Doing things with Jquery seem to be 10 times easier to me.

I always struggled with the each() function that I seemed to be constantly using with Prototype.  Jquery seems to understand this and simplify things for us.

In this article, I’m going to describe my top reasons why I am becoming a Jquery lover over Prototype. More »

During my first job interview as a web developer, I was asked, what I thought at the time, a weird question.  “Jamie, on a scale of one to ten, what would you score yourself in regards to attention to detail?”  I said what every employer wanted to hear “eight or nine, no one is perfect”.

It was enough to get me the job.  However, as I completed task after task, it was clear that my attention to detail was more around a five or six.  This was a contract position at the time with a possible extension, well as you can guess, I didn’t get the extension.

So what’s changed today?  The obvious answer is a lot, but let’s breakdown things I now do differently to increase my attention of detail to the actual eight or nine I originally said it was. More »

So, you are looking to become a better web developer?  Well, the fact that you are willing to read this article is a great start!  It’s actual one of my five tips.  I’ll begin by listing, what I believe, are the most important pieces in becoming a better web developer.

1. Test
2. Adapt
3. Think/Plan
4. Trial and Error
5. Ask for help

More »

In today’s article, I am going to discuss how simple it is to setup a login system with CakePHP.  As the title says, it should be less than 10 minutes.  In theory if you copy and paste the code below, it should be fully functional in less than 5.

Ready, set, let’s bake. More »

One of my first articles discussed YSlow.  An excellent Mozilla add-on to help you understand why your web page may be loading slowly.

In that article, I describe the importance of gzip, minify, and grouping your Javascript and CSS code into one file each.

Just recently I was surfing CakePHP’s bakery and found a nice add-on to simplify the process and make it super easy. More »

Uggghh, I hate to even be writing about this!  I have been spending the past two days cleaning up a project that has been running for over one year.  It was our first ever CakePHP project at our company and we were too lazy to be consistent about using $html->link() when creating our links.

Just recently the client has requested a change for their Facebook application.  We simply need to add a “requirelogin” HTML attribute to every link. More »

I was recently tasked with a situation where I needed to populate about 10 different “Settings” for every user in the current database.

This example is specifically for CakePHP, however, it could easily be used elsewhere.  My goal was the following, I had an array that was key value paired as follows:

array(
 [0] => array(
  ’User’ => array(
   ’id’ => 1)
  ),
 [1] => array(
  ’User’ => array(
   ’id’ => 2)
  ),
 [2] => array(
  ’User’ => array(
   ’id’ => 3)
  ),
 [3] => array(
  ’User’ => array(
   ’id’ => 4)
  ),
)

The result I needed was as follows:

array(
 [0] => array(
  ’UserSetting’ => array(
   ’user_id’ => 1)
  ),
 [1] => array(
  ’UserSetting’ => array(
   ’user_id’ => 2)
  ),
 [2] => array(
  ’UserSetting’ => array(
   ’user_id’ => 3)
  ),
 [3] => array(
  ’UserSetting’ => array(
   ’user_id’ => 4)
  ),
)

With a few simple lines of code, I was able to quickly and easily achieve this, let me show you how. More »