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Matt Cockayne
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Homepage: http://www.codersarmy.com
Posts by Matt Cockayne
To Gwibber or not to Gwibber
Jul 11th
Note: Thanks to segphault (at) gwibber I can revise my whole post and and say that gwibber is my client of choice. Check the comments for his response to find out how to use the client properly.
So as some of you already know I’m a strong advocate of Ubuntu as a desktop environment.
With the release of 10.04 they have now included a new social media client called Gwibber. My first foray into using it was rather unsuccessful but i recent have revised my opinion.
By default its a rather bland and unimaginative to look at but it does handle a large number of social networks as it stands it currently covers
- Flickr
- StatusNet
- Qaiku
- FriendFeed
- Digg
- Identi.ca
Head in the clouds
Mar 31st
So we have now relocated our servers. After a lot of searching we decided that we would give a cloud solution a go.
We eventually plumped for using the rackspace cloud service.
We found that the Server package was ideal for what we needed. An on demand service that allows you to spin up a server in minutes.
Essentially its a mico hypervisor for you to create your own servers at will.
So far it has been excellent.
The servers holding the cloud up appears to be US based but the response times have been so good you would thing you are working on a box in the next room.
The choice of OS for the Servers is very good and covers quite a few of the big distros.
There was one hiccup in the whole thing in that they require manual verification for account activation. This is fair enough but it took 2 days and 2 contacts made by myself to get them to activate for me. I suspect that this is due to my being in the UK and a lower priority rather than the feeble “Oh we are a bit short staffed at the moment” I got of one of the chat support staff.
That said everyone I have spoken to has been very polite and professional. The ability to test the chat support has been good and shows that ther are very responsive.
The admin panel is a little raw. But its clean and to the point. Also from the look of it they are continually working on it to keep up with the requirements of the customer
The only let down I can see is that there is regular maintenance happening to the cloud wich can cause downtime. So if your after stability I would stick with a traditional set up.
However If your looking for flexibility the you definatly want to consider the cloud.
There is also a wide variety of tools available for you to integrate your own platforms/solutions with the cloud.
The options and possibilities are immense.
So for your enjoyment I am going to attach some marketing bumph for you to enjoy
translate($this)
Nov 26th
So I needed to set up a translatable website and thought I would re-visit the way I use the translate component from the Zend framework. Previously I set up the translate component and would then create a plugin to handle the language change which I would trigger by changing a session variable.
Although this works I tended to feel it was a bit slap dash and that there must be a more efficient and useful way of utilising the component without the need to utilise a plugin.
So having had a nose around the net I decided that I wanted to make the language URL driven. I also wanted to steer away from using a subdomain to drive the language selection (i.e. en.website.com/pagename) and wanted it to be a part of the url (i.e. website.com/en/pagename) as this was more in keeping of the style of site I like to use.
So with a little tweaking code and utilising both the Locale, Translate and Router Resources here is how I did it.
More >
Zend In- Doctrine -ation
Nov 26th
So I’ve been using The framework and Zend_Db for a long tine now and I’m happy using it for some of the simpler projects I have had to do. However I have had a requirement to use an ORM.
I was looking forward to using the upcoming Entity component that was being built but after reading this at nabble. I decided that it was time to investigate using Doctrine.
So after having a little play and reading all the tutorials/guides I could find I had a go @ integrating Doctrine into my latest project base.
So far no single guide/tutorial has gotten it 100% right for me. I was wanting to make it a seamless integration using the frameworks application component.
So here goes my amalgamation of quite a few guides to try and give a more complete picture. My apologies if I forget to attribute any bits of code I may have borrowed/adapted. Let me know and I will add you in.
Some things to make you aware of
- First I built this with 1.9.5 of the framework. I havent tried it with any earlier versions but it should work pretty much the same.
- I used Doctrine 1.2. It is still in beta on their website t the time of writing. But having had a nose through their blog I can see that they are on the verge of releasing it as stable. So by the time you read this it will most likely be stable. My reasoning for this is that 1.2 appears to handle the building of models a lot better than earlier versions.
- In order to get all the features I wanted to use working I had to adjust part of the Doctrine library. As part of the way I wanted to use doctrine was to build models automatically from yaml files. Unfortunately Doctrine appears to be reliant upon using a component from the symfony framework. Not that I’m knocking Symfony but I much prefer Zend and as such have no desire to use Symfony. That said.. for the sake of speed I downloaded Symfony and copied the 4 files I needed. I’ll cover what I did bit later. I have logged this as a bug/task on Doctrines bug tracker (http://www.doctrine-project.org/jira/browse/DC-288) hopefully they will spot it and apply a suitable fix/inclusion.
- All my code is part of my own library which called Zucchi. All of my code is available in my project base in my subversion repository here. feel free to make use of it.
