Category: Technical Tips

Google OAuth2 Class for Phil Sturgeon’s Codeigniter Spark

There’s a lovely Codeigniter Spark by Phil Sturgeon which does OAuth2 login for Facebook and GitHub and Windows Live. The spark is here. I’d set it up for Facebook a month ago, on our dev site for the Community Media Project. Then yesterday and this morning I checked the spark again, still no Google auth,… Read more »

Simple caching in Zend Framework

A couple of years ago Ponderwell built a site on Zend Framework (ZF) as a bit of fun. It’s been moderately successful, getting a steady flow of traffic, but every now and then it catches people’s imagination and gets a huge spike of traffic which makes the server fall over. We needed caching. ZF has… Read more »

Converting SVG Paths to Objective-C Paths – Updated Again!

Bezier spline

Further update: Ariel over at arivibes.com has turned this into a GitHub project and, I believe, greatly improved it: HERE   Update: Bob Monaghan from Glue Tools LLC was kind enough to clean up some memory leaks, make the thing compatible with OS X as well as iOS and put in some positioning of the… Read more »

Perils of Design: @font-face and Legendum

When @font-face CSS font replacement became supported by enough major browsers to get designers off the “web safe” font treadmill, most of us took a quiet moment to cry a small tear of relief.   We knew it would have challenges, we knew that Internet Explorer would demand we did something extra and finicky to cushion… Read more »

How to use HTML in WordPress’s widget’s title

If you want to use HTML in the title of any of the standard wordpress built-in widgets, you’ll find that the WordPress core doesn’t have any support for this. The functions that create these widgets hard code a PHP strip_tags() function call into them, making it impossible to remove in your functions.php file with something… Read more »

WordPress Featured images, and custom image sizes

I recently built a site that let me explore the relatively new WordPress features of post thumbnails, along with the  ability to auto scale/crop images while they are getting uploaded to WordPress. The site, ImageAsheville, called for an unusual design, one similar to the fantastic AutoFocus WordPress theme (which I used as a basis for… Read more »

Starting a Web Design / Programming Firm

I was recently asked by an acquaintance what it took to start a design/programming firm, as he was considering getting into the business. I’ve learned a few things about it, having run a one-man company, and now a company that now has four staff, and hires out bits of work that we don’t have the… Read more »

CodeIgniter XSS Protection is good, but not enough by itself.

I have been looking at CodeIgniter lately mainly because a lot of my colleagues are using it already. As with most frameworks, I usually start using the framework in a project and then as I am developing the application, I notice some issues with the framework. One such case is with CodeIgniter’s built-in XSS protection. This functionality is quite nice (at least they included it in the framework) but there are some issues with using it that developers should be aware of.