A man walks along the bank of a frozen river. Snow is falling. There is already a thick carpet of flakes crunching beneath his feet with every step. The fall is heavy and the sky is white. Reaching the bridge he begins to cross the wide, high structure keeping one eye on the usually-flowing, unusually still body sitting motionless tens of feet beneath. ‘I wonder,’ he thinks ‘how I can give unique IDs to my Drupal menu items.’
Setting a timeout on file_get_contents for URLs
Just a quick post since this doesn’t seem to be very well covered, but could be useful to someone. PHP’s file_get_contents function is an easy way to load the contents of a file or URL into a variable. But what about timeouts?
Kohana get a witness?
I’ve blogged in the past about building my own PHP framework. I’ve found little time to further this goal in recent months and so I started looking around for a good foundation to work from. I’ve used Code Igniter before, but it’s lesser known, PHP5-only, strict OOP fork, Kohana seems a better fit with my tastes.
Base jumping with PHP
Since my last post, and yet another private self-promise to post on a more regular basis, with more interesting or in depth info than my previous rambles, I have managed to think of around 6 different post ideas, then forgotten about them. So in absence of depth or interest, here’s some code, instead. Or at least some writing abotu some code.
Freelancery
After the post about the rather unrealistic expectations of freelance jobs board posters, I started occasionally looking for more of the same. This was partly an investigation into the devaluation of the “industry” I work in, but mostly because I find it funny. What I found was a world of ignorance and bad English.
A little resurfacing work
The theme I started this blog with was one of the many off the shelf ones as I didn’t have the time to make one of my own. It was about time I got round to it, so here it is. It’s nothing too fancy or exciting but hopefully it’s not too offensive!
What price my time?
For those outside of the world of web design/development, it can be hard to understand what we do. Why does it take so long? It’s only a website, right? But getting things just right, as with anything, takes time. Here’s an example of a lack of this appreciation.
Hooks and Modules
Following on from the post where I vaguely mentioned building a framework, I thought I would get started on two crucial elements of it today, namely hooks and modules.
Ok, what the &@*$ happened?!
Once upon a time, I could make pretty things. I mean, I was no Van Gogh, but it wasn’t terrible. Certainly not compared the majority of the comedy design work you see strewn across the web. So, given the difficulty I seem to have these days designing even the simplest site, what the &#$% happened?
But my nails are simply too pretty to get my hands dirty
I like writing code. Writing code, especially good code, takes time. As developers, over time we build up a stash of functions or tricks which we can re-use in future projects and this certainly helps to mitigate the cost in time, but this only goes so far.