Japh

Get yourself a Satellite developer

Japh — Sat, 30 May 2009 05:08:34 +0000

If you don’t already know, I recently started full-time freelance development. The idea is that anyone who needs development work done, wherever they are, can contact me to help out on their project.

Whether you are a freelance designer who needs some development done (or even some training), or a freelance developer who needs an extra pair of hands, or even a bigger business who needs to bring someone else in on a project… I’m available for hire!

I would love to hear any feedback on the new website too, so feel free to leave any comments in that regard as well.

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WP-IE6Update plugin for WordPress

Japh — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 07:15:12 +0000

Everyone wishes they could get rid of IE6, and now there’s a nice, elegant way to prompt users to upgrade! The website for IE6Update provides a snippet of code to place between the tags on your website, which will then trigger a small warning bar on users of IE6 prompting them to update to IE8.

I liked the idea so much, I decided that rather than simply copy their code snippet for my website, I’d make a handy little WP Plugin I could install on any of my sites. Save me editing themes etc!

If you want the plugin, here it is: Download

If you want to know more about IE6Update, you can read their blog post about it Announcing IE6 Update – Help kill Internet Explorer 6

Update: The download link above now points to the WordPress official extensions directory for download.

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Custom default Gravatar in WordPress 2.7

Japh — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 03:45:06 +0000

If you’ve been using WordPress for a little while, and don’t really much like the default options you have to choose from when a commenter doesn’t have their own Gravatar, why not make your own?

Make yourself a little square image to use that matches in with your theme, and then insert the following line of code:

 echo get_avatar( $comment, 86, 'http://example.com/custom-default-av.png' ); ?>

Note: you must provide the full absolute URL for your image.

What this line does, is show a Gravatar for the user if they have one, and if not, show your custom one instead. The number “86″ is the pixel width and height you want the Gravatars to display at.

Remember that this will only work in WordPress 2.7+, or possibly in older versions if you have the Gravatar plugin installed (not tested).

Update: If you don’t know what a Gravatar is, check out the comments. The avatar’s shown beside each comment are automatically pulled in from Gravatar’s service, so you upload your avatar once, and it appears everywhere when you comment etc. Get yourself one here: Gravatar

WP-IE6Update plugin for WordPress Everyone wishes they could get rid of IE6, and now...

Time-sensitive CSS

Japh — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 09:18:28 +0000

Have you ever wanted to load a specific stylesheet depending on what time it is? It is actually very easy to do!

View Demo

I’m using jQuery in this just because it makes it look a little simpler, it’s not much more complex to do without jQuery… but let’s face it, you’re probably already using jQuery anyway, so why not

Make yourself a new file to put your javascript into, I’ve called mine “script.js”. Include the new javascript file by putting this line in your HTML section with the following line:

Now open your “script.js” file, and put the following lump of code into it:

// This line depends on jQuery, and tells the browser to kick off this stuff once
// everything's fully loaded
$(document).ready(function () {
    // These two lines make set a Date variable with the current date and time
    var currentDate = new Date();
    var currentHour = currentDate.getHours();
 
    // Here we're creating a new  to insert in the 
    var newCSS = document.createElement('link');
    newCSS.type = 'text/css';
    newCSS.rel = 'stylesheet';
 
    // This is where you can determine when to use which stylesheet.
    // If the current hour is before 9am or 8pm (or later), use "night.css"
    if (currentHour < 9 || currentHour >= 20) {
        newCSS.href = 'css/night.css';
    }
    // Otherwise, use "day.css"
    else {
        newCSS.href = 'css/day.css';
    }
    // This line actually does the deed, and attaches the selected stylesheet
    $("head").append(newCSS);
 
    // This line isn't necessary, it's just showing the actual time in the demo.
    $(".satellite").html(currentDate.toTimeString());
});

Read the commenting to understand what’s actually going on there, but that should do it! Easier than you thought, I bet

If you have any questions or suggestions, leave a comment!

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Excuse me while I change in front of you!

Japh — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 02:59:47 +0000

Have you ever seen that in shopping centres when a new store is moving in where an old store used to be? I liked it, thought it was clever, and now I’ve used it!

So I’ve decided to shift to a different domain name, and have (again) re-skinned the blog. This time, I think I’ll stick with it. Maybe a few tweaks here and there. I also hope to blog a little more, and do a few guest posts around the place, which I’ll link to from here as well.

While I’m here, I might just tell you about an iPhone app I recently tried and love. It’s called Instapaper and it’s fantastic!

You’ve possibly already heard of it, but if you haven’t, I suggest you give it a try. I read quite a few different blog posts around the place, some from feeds in Google Reader, and some that people link to on Twitter. More often than not though, I’m not in a position to read a full article right at that moment, and this is where Instapaper comes in. What to do when I’m lining up to use the ATM, or sitting in a small room contemplating life? I could read those articles!

Instapaper provides a bookmark you can use to say “Read later”, and it’ll save the page (in a readable format) to your Instapaper account, which you can then open on the iPhone. The big bonus for me, is that it actually downloads the articles to your phone, so even if you have no connectivity you can still read them (assuming you sync while you still have a connection). Considering the coverage some of the networks local to my area have, this is a particularly awesome feature.

Keen to hear your thoughts, both on Instapaper, and the blog in general, so feel free to leave a comment.

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Must-have iPhone apps (update)

Japh — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 04:16:50 +0000

It’s been about six months since I got my iPhone, so I figure it’s time to revise the must-have app list. I’m not going to list all the apps I have installed, just the ones I’d recommend to a new iPhone owner (Luke, I’m looking at you. Congrats!)
The list is as follows (prices are as of 13th March, 2009):

Currency (free)
DomainScout (free)
eBay Mobile (free) (official app this time!)
~~FTP On The Go~~ ($12.99 AUD, stricken from the list… poor value for money)
Google Earth (free)
Google Mobile App (free)
iSSH ($5.99 AUD)
Koi Pond ($1.19 AUD) (ok, this one’s not really a must-have… but it’s relaxing)
Live Poker (free)
Midomi (free)
Ocarina ($1.19 AUD) (by Smule, they do really nicely made apps)
OzWeather ($2.49 AUD) (better for us Aussies than the Yahoo one, comes from BoM)
reMovem ($4.99 AUD) (I mainly bought this one for my wife…)
SnapTell (free) (like Midomi, but for books and DVD covers, etc.)
Tweetie ($3.99 AUD) (yes, Twitter is all the rage right now, so get this and follow @japh.)
Units (free)
Wikipanion (free)
WordPress (free)
Zenbe Lists ($3.99 AUD) (You’ll need to create an account at http://lists.zenbe.com/)
Zen Bound ($5.99 AUD) (an AMAZING game!)

So that’s the update in alphabetical order, if you know of any other must-haves, let me know!

Excuse me while I change in front of you! Have you ever seen that in shopping centres when a...

Sending scheduled emails with PHP

Japh — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 14:09:33 +0000

Ok, so there are two main topics being covered here:

Sending emails with PHP
Running PHP scripts with a cronjob

Sending emails with PHP

Step 1

First of all, we’re going to install the PEAR::Mail package. PHP’s built-in mail() function isn’t particularly secure, so using an actual SMTP email account seems nicer :)

If you don’t already have PEAR::Mail installed, you may need to request from your host that they install it. If you have SSH / shell access to your server, you can probably do it yourself by running the following command:

pear install mail

Now you should be able to use this library with the following code in the top of your PHP script:

require_once('Mail.php');

This may seem odd, because you have no Mail.php file in your web root, but trust me it works. This is because PEAR is in PHP’s path variables, so if it doesn’t find the Mail.php file in your web root, it already knows to look there.

Step 2

The next part is actually writing some PHP that will send a message. You will need a few details of your mail server for this bit, such as SMTP server name, your username and your password. You will also need an email address to send to, and one to send from, of course!


require_once "Mail.php"; // Inclusion of PEAR::Mail
$from = "Joe Bloggs ";
$to = "John Citizen ";
$subject = "Test message";
$message = 'Test message.';
$host = "smtp.domain.com";
$username = "jbloggs";
$password = "password";
$headers = array (
    'From' => $from,
    'To' => $to,
    'Subject' => $subject
);
// Now we will create an SMTP object with the appropriate details
$smtp = Mail::factory(
    'smtp',
    array (
        'host' => $host,
        'auth' => true,
        'username' => $username,
        'password' => $password
    )
);
// Here we actually send the email
$mail = $smtp->send($to, $headers, $message);
// And check for errors, or if the email was sent successfully
if (PEAR::isError($mail)) {
    echo("" . $mail->getMessage() . "
");
}
else {
    echo("Message successfully sent!
");
}
?>

I’ve put some comments in this script, just to make sure you know what’s going on, but basically that’s it!

Running PHP scripts with a cronjob

Step 3

Using cronjobs seems difficult, and some people are put off by the slightly archaic looking format… but they’re actually very simple. You put multiple entries (cronjobs) into the crontab, and then they run! Look at the following crontab entry:

0 * * * * /usr/local/bin/php -q /path/to/script/schedule.php

What this says is, everytime the minute is 0 (i.e. on the hour), run that command. Look at this crontab entry:

*/5 2 * * * /usr/local/bin/php -q /path/to/script/schedule.php

This one says, each time the minute is a multiple of 5 (i.e. every 5 minutes) and the hour is 2 (i.e. 2:00am), run that command.

So that’s basically it! With both those entries in the crontab, our emails will be sent every hour on the hour, and also every 5 minutes between 2:00am and 2:59am.

Hopefully this helps some people. If you have any questions, or if I made any mistakes, feel free to let me know in the comments :)

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Please vote for Cali!

Japh — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 23:57:04 +0000

You may (or maybe not, I guess) have heard of “The Best Job In The World” website? Well they’re down to finalists now! 50 finalists, the top 11 of which will be sent to Australia to continue the selection process.

As a follower of GeekBrief, I’d like to support Cali Lewis coming on over to Australia and briefing from our beautiful coast for a while! So if you could please send her a vote (at least one, but one each day would be nice!), that would be much appreciated.

You can vote here: http://www.islandreefjob.com/Cali

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First NETTUTS Tutorial Posted!

Japh — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 10:39:09 +0000

I wrote my first tutorial for NETTUTS recently and it was published last night.

Title: Create a Slick Flickr Gallery with SimplePie
Description: I’ve wanted to write a tutorial for quite some time now, and APIs have always been a particular interest of mine. So with my wife’s recent foray into photography, I decided a Flickr tutorial would be first cab off the rank! Using RSS, Flickr and jQuery all together was pretty fun too.

Check it out!

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Tracking memory usage

Japh — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 12:35:51 +0000

Recently I received a warning from my host that I was WAY over my memory limit. I had some long running processes going, and a few cron scripts that altogether were using about 220mb out of my 120mb of allowed memory usage… oops!

Anyway, there’s currently no way from my control panel to see how memory I’m currently using, I have to run a command from a terminal, and certainly no way to tell usage over time. So, after looking at a thread my hosting provider pointed me to, I decided to have a play with the Google Charts API!

This is a pretty rudimentary solution, but it’s working so far for me.

1. A very simple bash script

#!/bin/bash
ps -u username -o pid,rss,command | grep -e mpm -v | awk '{sum+=$2} END {print ",", sum}' >> /path/to/webroot/mem/memdata.csv

The script basically just outputs the current memory usage at the time of running and appends it to a CSV file.

2. Add the script to the crontab

By running the following command (or one similar), I edit my crontab:

crontab -e

I then insert this line:

0 * * * * /full/path/to/script/memlogger

So now that bash script will be run every hour, on the hour.

3. Writing a PHP script to display a Google Chart


// Settings
$max_mem = 120; // Your memory limit, in MB
$data_file = 'memdata.csv';
$chart_width = 550;
$chart_height = 400;
?>
DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>Memory Usagetitle>
head>
 
<body>
<h2>Memory Usageh2>

$md = file_get_contents($data_file);
$md = preg_replace('/(\s+|\n)/', '', $md);
$md = explode(',', $md);
array_shift($md);
$max = 0;
$min = 0;
foreach ($md as $v) {
	if ($v > $max) {
		$max = $v;
	}
}
$base = 0;
if ($max > 0) {
	$base = ((($max_mem) * 1024) / $max) * 1;
	$base = round($base, 2);
}
?>
<p><img src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=lc&chd=t:$md); ?>&chs=$chart_width; ?>x$chart_height; ?>&chxt=y,r&chxr=0,$min; ?>,$max; ?>|1,$min; ?>,$max; ?>&chds=$min; ?>,$max; ?>&chm=r,FF0000,0,$base; ?>,$base+0.005; ?>" />p>
body>
html>

This code basically just imports the data into an array, and then works a few things out for proper axis labelling, and away it goes! It’s pretty quick and dirty, and could probably have been done nicer… maybe I’ll come back and fix it up some time.

It also uses your memory limit amount to show a red line on the graph if you go over

Here’s the chart using some sample data:

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