web development & photography by phil banks
One of the things we do at Helpful Technology is provide digital skills training. As part of that we have a sandboxed Twitter style social network platform that allows users to get used to the medium and practice in a safe environment. I’ve been re-building this system recently, and one feature we wanted to add… Read more RegEx to match / link Twitter usernames and hashtags
Updated 4/6/15 – now with added key/salt generation When deploying a new WordPress site, there are two (potentially) needlessly time-consuming steps – logging in to MySQL to setup a new database and user, and then copying the WordPress files to the directory. The script below lets you do this in one step, pass in your… Read more Bash script to configure MySQL database and install WordPress
Very short post to share a few useful links from the weekend, all related to Sublime Text: Nice collection of colour schemes for iTerm / Terminal / Sublime Text (links to each theme are at the bottom of the page). If you want to apply a theme to Terminal on OS X, remember to look… Read more Colour schemes, plugins, expandrive
I recently started using Panic’s Coda as an alternative to Sublime Text, and it looks really slick – the inbuilt SFTP particularly could make a big difference to my workflow. But I hit a snag pretty early – Coda wouldn’t accept my SSH key – neither would Transmit (a straight FTP app from Panic) –… Read more Panic apps “ssh key is not in a supported format” error
6am Saturday the 24th I headed down to London for UK GovCamp 2015 – an unconference centered on the public sector. As usual the was a huge variety of topics pitched, and personally I really appreciated the lack of an “introductions” session – it got things moving much faster. My day went sonething like this:… Read more UK GovCamp 2015
After hearing a lot of good things about Servers for Hackers by @fideloper I joined the mailing list, and then recently started the ebook. You should really at least check out the articles on the site, if not grab the ebook and related materials.
Nivo Lightbox isn’t the most widely known of Dev7studios products, but it’s a solid and simple image slider. However one feature it doesn’t currently have is transition effects when navigating left/right through a gallery. It turns out though that a couple of small modifications were all that was needed to provide the required hooks. You… Read more Adding gallery transitions to Nivo Lightbox
I recently setup a small server monitoring script using the APIs from Gandi and Monitor.us – both services I would recommend – to use as a module within Status Board. There was one small quirk – I decided to run it from a Gandi PAAS instance and discovered that the PEAR install they provide doesn’t… Read more Running the Gandi.net API on their PAAS
Lately I’ve been working with the conservation group in a local village. They were awarded Big Lottery funding for promoting and growing the group, and decided a website was an ideal partner to traditional leaflets. A local designer was contracted to design the print media and I built the web site around the identity he… Read more Red Lodge Conservation Group
Background WordPress offers quite a friendly hybrid WYSIWYG / HTML editor that makes publishing easy even for those with no HTML experience. One of the ways it accomplishes this is through a function called wpautop. This runs on the_content as the page is drawn to insert <p> and <br/> tags as needed. By inserting them… Read more Resolving wpautop and Shortcode problems