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Domain name generator (www.dompanion.com)
Thu, 02/18/2010 - 22:49 — colinI have been working on a domain name generator which has been quite a fun project. The project came about when I was using generators to help come up with a company name. I found that maybe there is room for just one more ;)
It uses a database of 200,000 related words to help create hundreds of domain names. Just enter 2 words and the system will do the rest. Hopefully it will be useful to somebody. It also checks the whois record to see if it is available.
Its name is Dompanion and its address is http://www.dompanion.com.
Check it out!
Jquery UI Dialog Moving Elements
Thu, 02/18/2010 - 15:45 — colinThe Jquery dialog which is part of the ui set of widgets is great for adding pop up functionality to your pages. However the plugin will move the element that is being turned into a dialog to the bottom of the DOM. This can be problematic if you are displaying part of a form in a dialog because the form element will be popped out of its form element and not be posted.
The only solution to this was to move the elements back manually when the dialog closes. You can do this with the following.
Linux Mysql Client
Thu, 01/07/2010 - 13:48 — colinToday I came across the Mysql Workbench GUI tool which for me is one of the most useful web development applications you can install on Linux.
The mysql website used to host a section called GUI Tools which gave you the awful Mysql Administrator and the incredibly buggy Mysql Browser. Both constantly crashed and were a nightmare.
Mysql Workbench seems to be a replacement of these 2 applications and handles SQL development, data modeling and server administration all under one app.
Text Indent and Text Align
Fri, 12/18/2009 - 10:57 — colinLike most web designers if I have a link or button that uses a background image instead of text I leave the text in anyway but hide it using text-indent: -9999px;.
A problem occured for me where the text was just not moving and I found out it was a text-align: right in a parent element that was causing the problem. I had no idea that these 2 classes effected each other.
To fix the problem just make the text-indent a positive number like 9999px. It seems that the text-indent switches direction based on the text align which make sense when you think about it.
A great PS3 and XBOX repair place in London.
Fri, 11/13/2009 - 09:29 — colinA few days ago the blue-ray drive on my PS3 broke and as normal it was a couple of months over the warranty.
I found these guys on Google and was interested in their fix while you wait option. So I phoned up made an appointment and headed down to sunny bromley by-bow.
The place is on a business park near Devons Road DLR stop. I handed over my PS3 and was shown to a waiting room with a leather sofa and a PS3 with wide screen to game away the 20 minutes it took them to replace my blue-ray lazer.
Drupal Supports PHP 5.3
Thu, 10/01/2009 - 14:18 — colinThe new version of Drupal 6.14 now supports PHP 5.3. This news was tacked onto the bottom of the 6.14 release notes and read:
Drupal 6.14 is the first stable release to support PHP 5.3.0, but this might not be true about the contributed modules you are using. Watch out for updates to your contributed modules if you experience problems with PHP 5.3.0 support.
This is great news for me because like many OS X users I upgraded to snow leopard which comes bundled with PHP 5.3 and stop all by Drupal projects from running.
Snow Leopard
Tue, 09/08/2009 - 07:12 — colinWell my Snow Leopard disk came through yesterday and I upgraded the same night. I'm running it on a Black MacBook 4.1 which does not support the 64bit kernel.
The only problem I have had is the upgrade changed my httpd.conf and commented out the line LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.s. This stopped PHP from being loaded.
Other from that im impressed with the install and my development environment is working just as before. Impressive Mr Jobs.
hook_uc_cart_alter
Thu, 08/20/2009 - 15:56 — colinhook_uc_cart_alter is a really useful hook if you need to change items in the shopping cart. It replaces the need to theme all the check out pages individually.
The shopping cart items come through as a by reference parameter. This means you don't have to return the variable.
$items[0]->title = 'testings';
Drupal Location searching by UK postcode
Thu, 08/06/2009 - 07:57 — colinI have been asked to configure the location 6.x-3.1-rc1 module to allows a postcode proximity search. This allows you to search for nodes within 5 miles of a postcode which is very powerful. Out of the box location 3.1 looks like it supports it, however when activated for the uk the search will just return nothing.
New! Garland Based Theme
Mon, 07/27/2009 - 13:36 — colin
I have created a new theme based on Drupals very own garland. Nothing has really changed in the default Drupal theme for as long as I can remember. So I thought I would have a go at a revamp and this is what I came up with.
I have kept all of the original styles and put all the new changes to garland in splash.css. This means upgrading this theme to Drupal 7 should be a snap.
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