Developers: You Need to Attend. No Excuses!

Posted on September 18, 2010 by farrelley

The one and only Cal Evans (twitter account) has put together an amazing group of five speakers to do an 100% online conference for developers to help improve their “soft skills”. We all know you have the chops to code but do you have the skills to keep your career on the right path? Five speakers will talk about everything from your résumé to your open source career. It’s really something you can not miss. Why? Because there are five fabulous speakers, it’s all online and the recordings will be downloadable later, and its CHEAP! Only $35! Even if you can’t make it you should buy the ticket to watch the talks later. If you don’t and miss out, the video downloads will cost more than the real ticket. So no Excuses!

So don’t wait… go and register!

Creating Filler Content with Zend Framework

Posted on August 29, 2010 by farrelley

Need filler content for your Zend Framework (ZF) application? Most clients never give the developer copy up front so it’s always hard show what the site is to look like without some random text. At the beginning of a new application when you are mocking up the html and layout, I like to use static views. I basically create a full static site with Lorem Ipsum content. I hated copying text over and over so I decided to create a quick view helper that will generate the content for you on the fly. You can find the view helper on github. Currently there are four different ways to generate the filler content.

Paragraphs
Words
Bytes
and Lists

You can find more information on optional parameters and how to use the view helper at github.

Custom Zend Filter: Excerpt

Posted on April 20, 2010 by farrelley

So you are familiar with the WordPress template tag called the_excert() right? If not the tag takes a post and trims it up to display 55 or so words and then adds ellipses to the end. I find this very useful when you just want to display a teaser. In the current Zend Framework project then I am working on for a client I needed just this. So I had to create the custom filter which is really easy. You can find a vast amount of info for Zend Filters here.

Custom Filter – Excerpt

// To call the filter use
$excerpt = new My_Filter_Excerpt();
$excerpt->filter($str); //$str is the string of text

//Put this in your library
class My_Filter_Excerpt implements Zend_Filter_Interface
{
	protected $_wordCount = 55;

	public function filter($data)
	{
		$sentance = explode(" ", $data);
		if (count($sentance) &gt; $this-&gt;_wordCount) {
			$sentance = array_splice($sentance, 0, $this-&gt;_wordCount);
			$ellipsis = "…";
		}
		$excerpt = implode(" ", $sentance);
		echo $excerpt . $ellipsis;
	}
}

Add Google Buzz to your Site!

Posted on February 18, 2010 by farrelley

So as everyone knows Google has released Buzz and by now most everyone has it. The number one question is how do I add it to my site so that people can share my content with their buzz friends. Well, if you are running WordPress it’s pretty easy. Head on over to WordPress.org and search for the plugin called Google Buzz for WordPress. If you are not running WordPress you can just use this link and replace out the variables (designated by <<>>)

http://www.google.com/reader/link?url=<<URL>>&title=<<TITLE>>&srcURL=<<SRC>>&srcTitle=<<SRCTITLE>>

Where
URL = Url of the page you want to share
TITLE = Title of the page that you are sharing
SRC = Source of the page that you are sharing. for instance you may share http://www.kapustabrothers.com/ to buzz but found the link and shared it from aol.com so the SRC would be aol.com.
SRCTITLE = The title of the source.

It’s that simple. A box will pop up you can add some tags and some comments and click post. This will post directly to your buzz feed for all your buzzy friends to see.

Next are the icons. What should you use for an icon? Well you can search the net for them but I found some pretty cool simple ones from http://www.chethstudios.net/

All you have to do is wrap the icon with the link and your all set. I suggest setting a rel and a target too if applicable.