One problem with the ways that Wordpress handles excerpt is that it always strips the HTML out. This is fine for most casual bloggers but when you are really trying to customize something for a client, it simply doesn’t cut it. What we wanted to do was use some of the NextGen Gallery markdown code in the “Excerpt” box of the post and have Wordpress render this in the category archive. After some initial research I discovered that this markdown code is called “shortcode” in WP terminology. They have a whole Shortcode API. Now it was just a matter of finding the correct...

Obviously web reporting is nothing really new; one basic approach is this: Aggregate your data and output it in some kind of structured format, usually XML Request this information and generate some visualizations of it Serve these visualizations through a web server Pretty basic stuff. All of the tools that I have seen essentially make one or all of these processes easier. Unfortunately no matter what tools you choose, the rule of engineering stands: Fast, cheap, good – choose two In this context it is more like: Less proprietary code, free software, easy to use/maintain – choose...

CSS Sprites – A Background The idea of combining images into a larger one and displaying this using CSS tricks has been around for awhile. There are a couple big benefits to doing this: First it reduces the number of HTTP requests that the browser has to make, by combining say 5 images into 1 big image, the number of image requests has been reduced by 4. This can increase the effeciency of page loading and you can see gains in the speed at which your page is loaded. Second, when working with elements like rollover images, you can “preload” all of the states of the rollover and...

During development of my cSprites application I ran across an interesting problem when generating my sprites with GD. When dealling with transparent GIFs, GD does not take care of processing by default you must enable some specific settings to get it done correctly. The default behavior is that imagecreatefromgif adds a black background to the transparent gif. The way I solved this was a lot of trial, error and research. Here is the original Image I used. Initially I thought I could just use the basic image copy functions in GD and it would take care of the rest. Well this isn’t the case....

For the past few days I have been setting up my mac environment and trying to get symfony up and running under the MAMP environment. I thought I would try my hand at a step by step tutorial. Many of the tutorials I found were geared toward people who were familiar with the Mac and/or MAMP. However I wasn’t one of these people. In this post I will cover how to set up your MAMP and virtual hosts. I am using Mac OSX Leopard so some of this may be different for other versions.  First after installing MAMP, Open MAMP and click on Preferences and then click on the Ports tab. Here click the “Set...