New forum on the block
July 24th, 2007 by morning
If you are into blogging, you will definitely want to join this new forum The Blog Experiment. It’s fairly new, but it grows really fast.
If you are completely new to blogging, this is the right place for you to start getting to know the field or if you are blogger for sometime, come and talk about content for your blog or how to monetize it or just come in to chit chat with other fellows bloggers.
So come and register today 
Draw with html
June 27th, 2007 by morning
Safari on Windows installed with no luck
June 12th, 2007 by morning
I was very happy to see that Apple released beta version of Safari browser for Windows users and I installed it immediately, BUT with no luck and it seems that I am not the only one having the same problem. Once I started it, none of the fonts loaded at all, so it is practically useless. This is a screenshot of google homepage viewed in this buggy Safari version:
To be honest, I have no idea how I managed to open Google home page. I just clicked randomly on places on the toolbar and it loaded. I successfully opened Amazon and Yahoo as well, however, non of the selects, buttons, text fields have fonts. However, it seems that only small number of people has the same issue as I do.
Luckily, this bug will be resolved soon and we, poor Windows users, should be able to experience one small part of Mac life.
You can download Safari yourself and let me know if you experienced the problem as I did or heard how to resolve it.
Links For Charity or I’ve been tagged again
May 23rd, 2007 by morning
Actually this is an
interesting meme, started by Seo Refugee. The idea behind it is to copy links from the blog which tagged you and add five more links to charity organizations so in the long run it should help them to improve their rank in search engine results which should lead to more exposure of those sites as well as possible better funding.
Mark from search-this tagged me, so here is the list that was published until now:
Service International - Disaster Relief
Pujols Family Foundation - Children with Down Syndrome
National Alliance to End Homelessness - Homelessness
The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research - Parkinson’s Research
Ronald McDonald Care Mobile Program- Child Healthcare
Aids Research Alliance - Aids Research
Wildlife Conservation Society - Wildlife Protection
Cancer Research Institute - Cancer Research
Second Harvest - End Hunger
AARP Foundation - Helping Senior Citizens
Marks list:
The National Arbor Day Foundation
Compassion International
World Wildlife Fund
The Humane Society
Global Refuge International
And finally, my list, all for children charity organizations:
Save the children
Hope and Aid Direct
Variety - Never say no to a child in need.
SOS Children’s Villages
Child’s Dream - support children in needs
I’m tagging: Josh, Dragan, Moses, Egor (once he gets his blog running).
WordPress Theme Generator
April 30th, 2007 by morning
I just stumbled upon this nice tool for all of the people who are not familiar with with html and css and are still interested in customizing their own WordPress theme and would like to change it a little bit and don’t want to use any of the existing. I must admit that I haven’t tested it completely, but it looks like it can be very handy. It even comes with widget support.
Check it out: WordPress Theme Generator.
Boomshine - highly addictive and relaxing game
April 13th, 2007 by morning
Yesterday I came across this highly addictive game - Boomshine. It is very colourful, musical, chain reaction game and the goal is to make dots go away. If you choose to play the music as well, you will find it very relaxing as well, although after some time it might become annoying.
My current best score is 261 and I have no idea how some people from high score list have more than 500 points.
Anyway, try it out. It’s just great!
Write Your Own Smarty Modifier
March 11th, 2007 by morning
I already wrote short tutorial for beginners which covers installation and some common usage of smarty tags.
Modifiers are basically php functions (custom or predefined) which work with variables, custom functions and strings. That means, you can actually call php functions as modifiers. Applying a modifier is very easy, all you need to specify the value followed by pipe and the modifier name. Some of the modifiers can be called with additional parameters. For example:
PHP:
{"<span>This is just a string</span>"|strip_tags}
<!-- Or -->
{$description|truncate:40:"…"}
Even though Smarty covers lots of very useful modifiers, sometimes, you will have a need for new one.
Let’s write a simple modifier which will be applied to strings and will replace smilies shortcuts with actual images.
Create a file named: modifier.grins.php and place it within your Smarty dir in /libs/plugins/
If you open any existing modifier, you will see a phpdocumentor compatible comment which describes modifier. It is recommendable that you use the same when writing your own ones.
For replacing smilie shortcuts with actual images, I will use simple str_replace php function, so the result would be:
PHP:
<?php
/**
* Smarty plugin
* @package Smarty
* @subpackage plugins
*/
/**
* Smarty plugin
*
* Type: modifier<br>
* Name: grins<br>
* Date: March 6, 2007
* Purpose: converts smilies to img tags
* Input:<br>
* - string: input string to replace
* Example: {$text|grins}
* @version 1.0
* @author Jelena Pavlovic <jelena@arraystudio.com>
* @param string
* @return string
*/
function smarty_modifier_grins($string)
{
$url = "images/";
$signs = array(':-)', ':-(', ';-)', ':-|', ':-S' ,':-P' ,':-$',':-O', ':-*', ':-D');
$replace = array(
'<img src="'.$url.'smiley_1.gif" alt=":-)" />',
'<img src="'.$url.'smiley_2.gif" alt=":-(" />',
'<img src="'.$url.'smiley_3.gif" alt=";-)" />',
'<img src="'.$url.'smiley_4.gif" alt=":-|" />',
'<img src="'.$url.'smiley_5.gif" alt=":-S" />',
'<img src="'.$url.'smiley_6.gif" alt=":-P" />',
'<img src="'.$url.'smiley_7.gif" alt=":-$" />',
'<img src="'.$url.'smiley_8.gif" alt=":-O" />',
'<img src="'.$url.'smiley_9.gif" alt=":-*" />',
'<img src="'.$url.'smiley_10.gif" alt=":-D" />'
);
$string = str_replace($signs, $replace, $string);
return $string;
}
?>
What you have probably noticed is function name, which has to follow the pattern of smarty(underscore)modifier(underscore)chosenName, where chosenName will be used to call your modifier.
To apply this modifier we can create example-smilies.php page with:
PHP:
<?php
include "includes/config.php";
$description = "This is one funny sentence. :-) <br />This is one sad sentence :-( ";
$smarty->assign("description", $description);
$smarty->display("example-smilies.tpl.htm");
?>
and example-smilies.tpl.htm page and place it in templates dir:
PHP:
{include file=
"header.tpl.htm"}
<h2>Description without grins modifier applied</h2>
<div>{$description}</div>
<h2>Description with grins modifier applied</h2>
<div>{$description|grins}</div>
{include file="footer.tpl.htm"}
Html code result will be:
HTML:
<html>
<head>
<title></title>
</head>
<body>
<h2>Description without grins modifier applied
</h2>
<div>This is one funny sentence. :-)
<br />This is one sad sentence :-(
</div>
<h2>Description with grins modifier applied</h2>
<div>This is one funny sentence. <img src="images/smiley_1.gif" alt=":-)" /> <br />This is one sad sentence <img src="images/smiley_2.gif" alt=":-(" /> </div>
</body>
</html>
Very simple.
I have updated .zip file which contains example from previous tutorial with those described here, so feel free to download it.
Clients are from different planet
March 6th, 2007 by morning
I’ve read an interesting and funny article at drivl.com entitled "The Web Development Clients' 10 Commandments". Even though it’s funny, it’s very sad at the same moment, showing how clients can be hard people to deal with. The funniest commandment was: “Your website shall not: play music, have a (flash) intro, snow, or use the marquee tag.” It just made me laugh out hard, because it is soo true sometimes, even nowadays.
The rest of the commandments are equally funny, however, luckily those are not happening at our company anymore and are all behind us as a bad dream. We’ve learnt from our mistakes. With right project management, almost 100% of them can be avoided. Every business has its own problems and clients who can be very hard at some points. The same is with web development, with a small different that even today, people know so little about Internet, its possibilities and values.
Anyway, go read it and get yourself a good laugh.
Imified – new web service
February 13th, 2007 by morning
This month new service called Imified was launched. The idea is to allow you to control various web applications such as Basecamp, Google calendar, your blog etc through IM. As far as I know, it should work with MSN, Yahoo Messenger, Gtalk and AOL.
Signing up is extremely easy. All you need to do is to add new buddy to your list. Once you are done, just send him a message and he’ll give you the main menu and how to control it. You can setup to-dos, write notes, setup reminders and modify your account. For reminders, make sure to select appropriate time zone under your account. Mine buddy yesterday reminded me to visit my ophthalmologist .
Very interesting idea after all. It brings more fun into instant messaging. Go, check it out!
