webdev
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Simple, reliable local WordPress development on macOS. 2020.
Is *AMP-stack web [design and] build is what you do? [Hacking WordPress!] You need a local dev environment. You need and want your dev environment to be a fuss-free, stable, reliable and long-term partner. The thing about the options I’ve used to now (macOS’ built-in Apache web server, MAMP Pro, VVV) is that they’ve failed…
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Fixing HTTPS on DreamHost with Cloudflare
One solution to fix an ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH error
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Deleting an element from an array in Dreamweaver with RegEx
You have a multidimensional array where the elements’ keys/values are each on their own line. You want to remove all elements that have the same key.
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Resizing a VirtualBox Windows hard drive on a Mac
Distilled info from this OSX Daily article: “How to Resize a VirtualBox VDI or VHD File on Mac OS X“.
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Responsive images – 2014 and beyond
I’ve read a couple of interesting articles about the future of images on the web. The Picture Element from HTML5 Rocks Responsive Images in Practice on ALA There are two image problems that need solving in our multi-dimensional device landscape: bandwidth and art direction. Firstly – the bandwidth problem is easy to understand: an smartphone user roaming…
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Prevent line breaks on a forward slash
Need to prevent “£/$/€1,000,000!!!” or similar breaking over two lines at the forward slashes? CSS word-break, word-wrap, white-space not working for you?
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On migrating and merging WordPress (local to remote)
Few things to note on the process of bringing this site to life…
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Mac OS Apache ownership fix
Because the Apache user on a Mac OS X box is called “_www” not the more Linux-common “apache”…
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Building a GIT changelog with PHP
The below PHP generates a cachefile used to display a GIT changelog. (Because I didn’t have the power to get GIT installed onto the production server…) If the following simple script in your repo directory doesn’t do it you may need to explicitly add git to you PATH. Even if it’s installed and running fine…
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Dynamically create a PHP variable name
Thanks to this post “Dynamic variable names in PHP” for enlightening me on how easy this is. There’s a lot of stuff out there about PHP variable variables but if you just want to craft a variable’s name based on some other variables that are already set – this is the way to go. Basically…
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Remove and ignore dreamweaver dwsync.xml files from your GIT repo
1. Remove any files already added form the working directory. For example: $ git rm -f *dwsync.xml 2. Set up (or create) your global git ignore file in your home directory: $ printf “dwsync.xmlnThumbs.dbn” >> ~/.gitignore 3. using git config add this to you git prefs (For repos that may be worked on by multiple…
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Hard coding your site URL in WordPress
I discovered this handy feature when troubleshooting a login problem for a client of mine. If you swap your WP database between your local development and production server at all regularly — and don’t fancy editing your site URL and WordPress URL in the wp-options table each time (either directly or via the WP admin…
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Nice WordPress article in .Net
Nice article about WordPress in my favourite web design and develpment magazine (issue 217 of .NET). Usual stuff but well written without either speeding or jabbering. There’s a nice overview of Custom Menus, Multisite, Custom Post Formats, Custom Post types and Custom Taxonomies. WP Custom Heaven One thing I’d never heard of before was the new…
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PHP 101. Basic stuff: get value from URL querystring with PHP
As I’m still an idiot when it comes to media queries and mobile devices and can pass this stuff on to other folks – but needed to give myself and the interested parties a visual representation of how different sized graphics will be delivered to different mobile devices… I was after a simple ‘switch’ that…
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JavaScript redirect based on referrer
Basic stuff (as often the case not immediately findable). You want a simple script to redirect to a different page if te referrer is such and such. In the following example the two referral page options ( foo.html and bar.html ) are separated with the double pipe (the ‘or’ bit)…
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CSS 3 pseudo-classes and attribute selectors in Internet Explorer
Thanks to my mate Tony I’ve been introduced to this rather delicious (and very small) jQuery plugin that adds support for, among other things the :nth-child pseudo class. If this had been around a year ago ‘d have avoided having to craft this php counting system for a custom WordPress loop. What’s the link already?…
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Getting a page ID in WordPress
Q. Want to get something in your theme to work with data from a particular page or post – but don’t know for sure what that post’s ID is? A. Try this in your functions.php file: …then you can then pass a variable about in your theme’s templates.
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Passing a variable about in a WordPress theme
I’m used to using php variables set in included file being used in another included file if all are included in the same document. This doesn’t work in WordPress theme parts. It’s easy to overcome though… you just need to recall the variable first… somewhere in functions.php Now i can do this somewhere in header.php
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Multiple WordPress excerpt lengths
Q. Got a theme that needs two different excerpt lengths? A. Found here: set the standard, longer excerpt as normal in the functions.php file and the override locally using this code:
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Rollback a GIT commit
GIT is great, Git is good. I mostly use git to track changes (very useful to check on what I’ve been up to when it’s late in the night!) but occasionally I need to use it to roll back to a previous commit. This is the command I always forget, and today it took me…
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Using GIT to manage a website…
Nice little write-up on pushing your local GIT repo to a live web site: http://toroid.org/ams/git-website-howto
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Magazine framework in Javascript
treesaverjs.com/ Incredible, clever, simple looking demo: http://demo.nomadeditions.com/real-eats/index.html
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MySQL Command Line stopped working in Mac OS 10.6?
Do what this guy says and add /usr/local/mysql/bin back into your paths file
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Turn a text list into an HTML Select Option list with PHP
Easy solution to this basic HTML coding need posted over at Stack Overflow by a random clever bloke. Thanks RCB. My only issue was with UTF-8 characters coming through garbled. Bodged a workaround using this encode entities plug-in for Dreamweaver.
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CSS in PHP
The last time I tried to render CSS through PHP was many, many moons ago. I didn’t work and I couldn’t figure it out. Yesterday I tried again and found out why… the MIME type must be set as text/css. D’oh. Set MIME type like this:
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Weird line-height in Chrome?
Specifying line-height on an <a> in a <li> will not work in your webkit based browsers. Line-height needs to be set on the containing <li> to work at all in Chrome or consistently in Firefox. Now you know.
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The CSS reset has been reset
The grandaddy of all CSS resets hits version 2.o beta: Eric Meyer’s Reset Revisited. See also the subsequent thoughts on how to handle :focus. Update! Now at Beta 2.
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Image free CSS arrows/pointers/triangles
Great to finally see [forgive my split infinitive] a well documented walkthrough on how to create these little bit of magical CSS that add triangular pointers onto your navigation elements – or Talk Bubbles as Stubbornella OOCSS has them – without either images or extra markup (reintroduce the extra markup if you want IE6 &…
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The IE9 hate starts here…
Made me grin/grimace…. A piece on how retarded Microsoft’s latest incarnation of Internet Explorer may turn out to be, despite the hype: http://css3wizardry.com/2010/08/14/ie9-is-the-ie6-of-css3/ [waybackmachine] Oh dear.
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On CSS image replacement techniques and SEO
Having learnt that properly structuring headings is very important to SEO but wishing to be able to style and design pages beyond the limitations of HTML text I’ve often reverted to this old CSS hack to replace heading text with nice image substitutes: I’ve been wondering about whether this is still good practice recently and…
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PHP web forms
Websites are a point of contact – and a contact form that sends an email is the way to normally handle enquiries. (Of course phone numbers/addresses must first be easy to find!) A contact form requires a web server to actually do something – ie send you an email – it’s not just displaying HTML…
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Got an “Error establishing a database connection” in Mac OS X 10.6?
At some point in the last month (been on holiday mostly) an Apple system update caused MySQL to stop running – all local development sites using MySQL would give the dreaded “Error establishing a database connection” error message. And phpMyAdmin refused to recognize my user/pass credentials. It seems that Apple has once more made it…
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Getting a local version of Cufon running on a Mac
The easiest route to web fonts, Cufon, is suffering a couple of issues at the moment – somebody may be trying to give the service a hard time with a nasty font. If you ever have this trouble getting a local version on your MAMP server is no problem… First you’ll need to get the…
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Avoid WordPress Trackbacks within your own site
So you’re doing the right thing and crafting internal links within your site to give the thing meaning and usefulness (or SEO)… but WordPress then adds superfluous trackbacks in the comments of the pages/posts your linking to… There are plugins to prevent this (of course!) but there’s no need for them as it’s very simple…