There have been quite a few, “hate on PHP” articles being posted lately it seems as though the let’s hate on PHP train rolls around every couple of years and the hate articles come out to play. This recent article got a lot of attention, it was well thought out and well-intentioned somewhat but that one single post spurned a new-found hatred towards one of the webs most popular languages from other bloggers.
I’ve been an avid Mediatemple customer for about 4 or so years now. In-fact I still remember 4 years ago Mediatemple having the occasional outage issue, but now they have quite a solid offering that has basically no unscheduled downtime. But recently due to wanting more power I made the move to a 512mb managed Linode VPS plan instead of a Mediatemple DV or VE plan, but why? The grid server plan from Mediatemple is quite good for basic sites but that’s all it is really good for. I hosted about 20 sites on my Grid Server plan, about 3 of those were pretty active blogs with one currently fetching 17,000 unique visitors a month. The Grid Server plan never stopped being a great plan, even though my traffic rose the cheap offering from Mediatemple kept on running without breaking a sweat, in-fact I would be willing to bet running the same amount of sites on Hostgator would have caused some issues.
I just got myself an invite to the popular music service Spotify which has yet to launch in Australia but I’ve been able to obtain access to via n exclusive invite and first impressions are it’s friggen awesome. I used the US version via proxies for a while but then lost access so it feels good to have access to such an awesome service legitimately. It’s so new it won’t let me upgrade to premium just yet and all prices are in euros, so there is still a little work to do but the service works and it’s amazingly smooth and just as fast as if you were playing the music via iTunes.
I finally received my suit in the mail a couple of weeks ago. It came beautifully packaged and the suit looks amazing, the quality is so good. So what ended up happening? After a million emails back and forward with the non-existent customer service about why my order wasn’t showing up in my order history (to this day my order still doesn’t show up), my suit just randomly turned up. I wasn’t sent any email giving me a tracking code, nor an email to say it was on its way. I’m not sure if the trouble I went through was just unfortunate timing during server issues or if Indochino is always like this. The bottom line is I got my suit and on time as well, there were no delays. It would have been nice to know it was on its way so I didn’t keep sending emails to the one person customer support team though.
Recently while doing my daily trawl through Hacker News I came across this blog post titled, Sim Cards Must Die. The article claims that one day we’ll choose phone networks like we do wireless networks and can change plans whenever we want. The sim card is quite possibly one of the best things to have ever been produced and used in the telecommunication industry. Could you imagine buying a phone, then choosing a network like it’s a wifi hotspot only to find your new shiny Apple phone deliberately comes with lack of support for that provider you wanted to use?
Recently on a client WordPress website I needed a simple way to get Vimeo video thumbnails via video ID. I couldn’t find anything readily available or even a snippet, so I created a function that helps out and even has a return or echo option as well. [code]function get_vimeo_thumb($videoid, $size = “large”, $return = false) { $imgid = $videoid; $hash = unserialize(file_get_contents(“http://vimeo.com/api/v2/video/$imgid.php")); $the_thumb = “; switch ($size) { case ‘small’: $the_thumb = $hash[0][’thumbnail_small’]; break; case ‘medium’: $the_thumb = $hash[0][’thumbnail_medium’]; break; case ’large’: $the_thumb = $hash[0][’thumbnail_large’]; break; }
After wanting to order a suit from online store Indochino for a while now an upcoming event made me decide to take the leap and order one. I had only read great things about Indochino so being sceptical or worried about forking over a few hundred dollars wasn’t an issue. Choosing and creating your suit is quite easy. Providing measurements is a rather tedious process but you only have to do it once and then save your measurements. Each different measurement is a step in a modal box with a helpful guide video showing you where to measure. It’s a beautiful process, well thought out and easy to understand.
Recently I was working on an e-commerce website that had a custom modal box show a Youtube embed. The Youtube video is embedded using an iFrame (seems to be the best approach for embedding) and a close button need to be absolutely positioned above the video to close the modal. After scratching my head for what felt like ages, reading documentation I found the solution. Append ?wmode=transparent to the end of your video URL, see below for an example.
I recently worked on a project where the wonderful jQuery Isotope plugin was needed to sporadically reposition items for depending on the height of the browser and the size of each item being positioned (in my case, unordered list items). Everything was going well, looking great in Firefox and surprisingly IE until I had a look in Google Chrome. Basically what was happening is that some of the items are being stacked on top of each other and looked completely broken, sometimes several of these items would stack. The fix? Well after much trial and error the following code in the main JS script on the site within a DOM ready call was all that was needed. The issue is due to the fact that Isotope applies before everything has loaded, so waiting for the page to load before applying fixes the issue in Chrome and any other browser.
There seems to be a lot of outdated code out there from WordPress 2.x days on how to redirect a user to any page of your choosing after logging in, the below code will redirect a user to the homepage directly after logging in without taking them to the usual admin panel (in-case you have a custom page you want users to see). This post is more of a self-reference for future projects, but thought I would share.