Chris Mckee Designs, by Chris McKee, who'd of guessed | ChrisMcKee.co.uk

Creating URL Slugs / Permalinks in C# (csharp)

Chris McKee — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 11:01:05 +0000

Bit of a code dump but what the hey it will have to do. In wordpress we have a wonderful set of functions that takes your title and converts it to a URL friendly version in the slug or permalink area. This also handles foreign characters converting them to their standard ascii equivalent.

Faux Font and Text Rendering the future is nigh and its fuzzy

Chris McKee — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 10:59:08 +0000

Note* This will only really be different for Windows/Linux users where font-aliasing isn’t a standard feature (like the mac); but seeing Windows is 95% of the market it’s worth it. This is the standard font aliasing This is the faux-font aliasing using text shadow (using RGBA) text-shadow: 0px 0px 1px rgba(0,0,0,0); This is the … Read on Squire

Handling TripleDES (ECB with PKCS5Padding) in PHP

Chris McKee — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 19:33:57 +0000

I came across an issue a few years back that I was supposed to post about there and then; what the hey no buggers bothered to fix it. Basically PHP – MCrypt is great, it handles lots of nice encryption algorithms very simply and provides just the right amount of abstraction to the user to … Read on Squire

My Pre-HTML5 & HTML5 CSS Reset

Chris McKee — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 20:07:07 +0000

These resets were a mix of my own stuff, YUI and various others I mashed in during development Resets, the necessary evil Some people will say that you don’t really need a reset, and that it creates extra work; unfortunately this is only true in the case of tech-sites and small sites that don’t need … Read on Squire

Good Sir, Before you UnLoad – cross-browser JavaScript headaches

Chris McKee — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 03:27:25 +0000

Sometimes when working with Booking processes and long forms you come across the need to slap that old cross-browser tart, the before-onunload event to warn the user that they appear to be trying to exit the page in a dramatic way (close tab, browse elsewhere) which contradicts the purpose or intentions of the page they’re … Read on Squire

Upgrading your Bitnami Redmine Install (Windows)

Chris McKee — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 23:10:24 +0000

New Redmine versions come out every month or so which is great, top software, free and it saves us all from having to suffer silly corporate ideas like using Sharepoint for project management or bug tracking. Wouldn’t it be nice if you had some simple instructions… SSDD. *Note Next Week(ish) I’ll add a PDF which … Read on Squire

Setting up ASP.Net MVC 2 on IIS6 with IISRewrite

Chris McKee — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 23:34:24 +0000

This will also work in ASP.net MVC, as in the first one.

It's a somewhat well known fact, (by somewhat I mean for amongst web devs, my mum wouldn't understand any of that), that IIS6 is the IE6 of Servers, its slow, dim-witted, annoying, crap and here to stay.

So to make life a little more bearable and to save the rest of the web-society from a life of .net 2 webform's, bloated view states and ugly urls here's a quick "how to".

CSS3 Recipes for Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8

Chris McKee — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 12:24:40 +0000

Recently as a quick fix to a headache I resorted to adding ‘behaviour’ css modifiers to my IE scripts to add CSS3 style behaviours for IE6/7/8; its a quick and easy thing to do simply refer to http://fetchak.com/ie-css3/ , but before you wonder off test one thing for me. Grab the file from that site … Read on Squire

Fix Magento 1.4.1 @domain.biz Checkout issue

Chris McKee — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 13:11:04 +0000

Magento as of 1.4.1 will not allow a customer to move on in the shopping journey if theyre using a .biz domain name. This is a simple bug to fix and simply an omission in the original code and someone forgetting to test it...

Validating UK Credit & Debit Cards With LUHN to Type

Chris McKee — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:20:00 +0000

Credit Card validation is a Pain in the Arse *Updated April 2010 But its not going anywhere fast. So I’ve combined two of the scripts I’ve found to meet my needs, added UK credit card data (Maestro/VisaDebit etal) and a bit of optimization and here it is. Algorithm Sources: * http://www.codeproject.com/KB/aspnet/UltimateCreditCardUtility.aspx * http://orb-of-knowledge.blogspot.com/2009/08/extremely-fast-luhn-function-for-c.html * Extra … Read on Squire

Install CouchDB on Ubuntu/Debian with Lighttpd

Chris McKee — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 20:57:55 +0000

Depending on your version of Ubuntu ~ Debian, you may be able to install the latest version of CouchDB via APTITUDE; chances are though, you wont. As its really not that difficult to install it from scratch we may as well do it from source. Here we’ll cover the installation; basic configuration and how to … Read on Squire

Get Lat,Long from Google Maps Bookmarklet

Chris McKee — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 21:14:50 +0000

I was getting slightly bored (and pissed off) with using the “link to” on Google Maps to get the Latitude,Longitude for making a market file. So this will be a storage area that I’ll be adding more and more bookmarklets to, to simplify my life and hopefully to simplify someone elses. Get the longitude and … Read on Squire

Google Maps jQuery plugin

Chris McKee — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 22:06:33 +0000

A new plugin to simplify some of the more irritating bits of Google maps (i.e. GeoCoding and all the usual gubbins)

Magento Developers Lend Me Your Data

Chris McKee — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 21:35:11 +0000

I’m looking at testing the new developments that Magento plan to release in version 4, but I need a few sizable databases to test the new speeds etc with. My own test bases generally range up to 1000 products, 30 attributes. So if anyone has higher and wishes to help-out by lending me their database … Read on Squire

Magento Beginners Guide… Its a Book for Magento Beginners, No-Really

Chris McKee — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 21:09:05 +0000

Anyone who already knows me knows I have a ridiculous amount of books; mostly e-books thesedays (the future-wifey takes exception to a book-based house-invasion) and mostly for reference. I am by all definition a book whore. So when PACKT offered to send me their latest so I can review it and didn’t stipulate any real … Read on Squire

Ever wondered why Magento Layered Cache Was SOOOO Slow and Greedy

Chris McKee — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 15:13:01 +0000

Ever wondered why Magento Layered Cache Was SOOOO Slow and Greedy, as in it sees mysql as its bitch and likes to consume as much resource as humanly possible.This is a SINGLE update query based on my test 'footwear' store, several attributes etc. Course the more attributes you have the slower it goes.

Curl HTTP 417 – Expectation Failed

Chris McKee — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 10:30:50 +0000

I was nocking up a client script to drag down a news-feed and post it to a Wordpress blog; the script ran fine, no posts appeared and no errors occurred… irritating.

So I figured I'd share this pain in the arse issue fix to the "HTTP/1.1 417 Expectation Failed Error"

Magento Commerce – Layered Navigation Cache Error – Part Badger Part Duck

Chris McKee — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 16:09:30 +0000

PHP-CLI Edition * Auto Product Count * Auto On Completion Destroy Temp Files * Various Optimizations*NEW* PHP Web Browser Edition * Three files; * Wrapper (which you run from your browser) * Two IFRAMES: The main functional script and a counter to show its not fallen asleep

Saving user content to XML aka How to Remove Invalid Characters in UTF-8

Chris McKee — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 08:58:26 +0000

Error Contains None UTF-8 Content… Bleh When encoding use content to XML there are often issues that occur… 99.9% of the time stemming from users copy-pasting from MSWord in to text boxes and all the odd characters being carried through. PHP will play dumb and happily save this, then winge like a b’tch about displaying … Read on Squire

A Survival Guide for Decent Folk

Chris McKee — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 13:18:26 +0000

Taken from http://nightjack.wordpress.com/ before Sir David Eady QC merrily allowed the removal of anonymity privileged to the the author, losing him his blog and very nearly his job. That’s Sir David Eady of Tenterden, Kent who values anonymity up to the point where it exposes legal incompetence. Source: NightJack In these days of us increasingly … Read on Squire