Schonhose

Since my photoblog layout is based upon a very old Mootools version I decided to redesign and reprogram the layout, switching from Moo to jQuery. The initial sliding sidebar along with some other options were quickly established and proved to be ok in Firefox, Chrome and Safari.

Enter the dreaded Internet Explorer, currently at version 8. After having the luxury to debug my JS using Firebug I have to say JS debugging on IE still pretty much sucks. Sure, it will give you errors, but these are so cryptic I couldn’t understand them if my life depended on them. Luckily we have Google at our disposal, so a quick search around the net showed several people having similar issues. So that is a good thing, it means we’re not alone in this.

But after reading several threads it just boiled down to one thing: trail and error. Shape and reshape the code until it finally starts working. It took me several hours, but now the code is working on all browsers, including IE 7 and IE 8. Looking back 1/5th of the time was used to created the page so it worked and the other 4/5th of the time was spend debugging IE specific issues (a fact well known as illustrated by the image below).

The site hasn’t seen much updates lately, but as usual there is a good reason for that. I’ve been busy working on several projects. Inquisitive readers might ask what those projects are. Well, let me reveal at least some of them.

One of the projects I’m working on is the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Export Plugin,, initially developed by my buddy Jay. As not only the author but also user of both the Googlemap addon and the FTP security addon I needed to modify the Lightroom Export plugin to facilitate both GPS coordinates and the automatic opening and closing of both the image and the thumbnail folders. Currently we have a working copy which I use extensively in testing right now. Did I mention we also managed to squash some bugs while producing cleaner code?

The other project I’m working on is the aforementioned Googlemap addon. Since I began working writing code in a more OOP manner I could see how this approach could seriously limit the duplicate code currently found in the addon. I found a nice Googlemap API Class for PHP and intend to use that as a base to rewrite the addon yet again. All features of the (unpublished) third version will be retained, but it will be lean and fast thanks to the use of OOP practices.

Last but not least I’m also working on the new version of Pixelpost. Recently we added two more plugins dealing with both tags and categories. While testing and writing new things resumes we’re building the next-generation photoblog with a solid codebase.

I spend the majority of today running various backup schemes, just to be sure I won’t be losing important data that easily. Sure, it is a nuisance and it does take time, but I do remember the time I lost my complete photoblog and I had to restore it from my backups.

If you haven’t created a backup lately this might be a good time.

Much to my amazement the upgrade of Wordpress 2.7 to Wordpress 2.8 didn’t quite go as expected on my blog. Somehow after the upgrade all content of my posts, pages and comments on the output of my blog just disappeared into thin air.

The first thing I did was checking the database and I was relieved to see the content was actually still there. Then the debugging session began: deactivating all plugins and switching back to the default template showed no improvement. Hence, the conclusion it was not template or plugin related.

So there has to be something else happing with the core files. After some more debugging, with the help of the Wordpress IRC channel, I found out which filter was responsible for the disappearance of my content, a WP filter called: convert_smilies. The obvious step to show the content again is to remove the filter in question by adding the following lines to your wp-config.php:
remove_filter('the_content', 'convert_smilies');
remove_filter('the_excerpt', 'convert_smilies');
remove_filter('comment_text', 'convert_smilies');
At least this will show the textual output again, but smilies are not translated to images. While I’m still debuging the issue I’ll continue to post my findings in this post. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, that is the big question today. Not only haven’t I posted much on my blog, I even forgot posting photos on my photoblog (yet again). So what is the reason for this?

I have been working on a new webbased application which hasn’t got a name yet. But what it does is registering basketball statistics. There are quite a few programs on the market and none of those programs are either free or do what I want. What else was there to do other than trying to build my own? So over the last few weeks I did some programming in PHP, a lot of programming in MooTools and managed to get a working concept.

Below you can see a quick snapshot of the program running on the Samsung NC-10 netbook.

A couple of interesting facts:

• Was built using HTML, PHP and MooTools 1.2
• Uses a SQLite database to store information for each player
• Performs AJAX calls to store information in the database
• Can register made and missed shots per player
• Is able to distinguish shots from behind or inside the arc (based on direction of play)
• Keeps track of almost every statistics important in basketball
• Features a live-scoreboard for tracking the score and the time played
• Doesn’t have an admin interface yet

Leave a note in the comments if you have some ideas about either the program or what it should be called.