I was working on a project which was randomly failing to load certain views outside the development environment. It turns out that the system was running out of memory. After searching some of the error messages output by the script, I stumbled upon the xhprof PHP module. It was originally created by Facebook, and released under an open source license.
Making your site as cache-able as possible is vital to ensure a smooth browsing experience. WordPress in it’s basic form is quite efficient, when you compare it to code-bases such as Magento. Adding functionality such as plug-ins, media, themes and widgets all have a negative effect on performance. As part of the process of making this domain as efficient as possible, a number of caching techniques have been considered and employed.
I came across a problem having developed a site with a PHP 5.3 environment, when moving the site to the live environment the server was running PHP 5.2. Whilst the server gets upgraded I looked into getting the code to work in some form in the meantime. The main issues are the functions lcfirst() and date_diff(). The former is a simple fix, a function which lower-cases the first letter of a string — I was surprised this was only introduced in 5.3!
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Developing bespoke components for Joomla can be quite daunting. There are a lot of resources, books, dev articles and the API documentation; these try to give you a basic understanding of how things should be laid out. A lot of these work on the premise of learning by doing. Many of the documented examples from the API point developers to look at the core components to see how it works.
Configuring an effective component router can be quite tricky, as it depends on how complex your component is. This article serves as a reference for how routing works in Joomla, why it’s important, and how you could make better use of component routing in your projects.
I have been dealing with file uploads a lot recently, and I stumbled upon a few different methods for validating files which provide both basic file-type checking and file size checking before uploading.
The web app was already making use of jQuery with the excellent jQuery validation plugin; so I wrote a couple of extended validators.
Although my online gaming time has been sparse recently, I thought it would be good to take some time out and look at the new features coming to EVE Online this year. After reading the devlog post that Incarna functionality was being tested on Duality, I decided to take a peek. After spending quite a lot of time crafting my character, I was quite happy to wait an hour to grab the Duality client (4GB+) and take my avatar for a spin.
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I’m pretty new to working with the internals of WordPress. It seems very easy to settle for installing hundreds of plug-ins to achieve the simplest of tasks. Plug-ins are awkward for me, as they have the tendancy to not quite do what I want them to. I end up messing with them in some way which breaks updates.
For years, web designers have been yearning for custom fonts in web design. It’s a real shame that web fonts didn’t really take off with IE4 in 1997! The web was a different place back then, web design was a pretty new thing. Bandwidth was highly constrained at the time, so one could not imagine waiting for web fonts to load. Microsoft’s container format of choice is also EOT, which is a Microsoft proprietary technology. Although everybody slates it’s proprietary and closed nature, it was sort of a good idea. EOT provides domain locking, encryption, sub-setting and compression – all good things for convincing those behemoth font foundries to allow web embedding licenses.
Now is a better time than ever to move away from the standard web-safe fonts. Mainstream browsers have caught up with IE, over a decade later. Here is a short history lesson on the many techniques that Web Designers have been using to get beautiful type into their pages.
Just by configuring your site and server in the right way, you can get much faster and responsive load times out of your CMS. With mainstream open source CMS software, you are given the ability to add bolt-on functionality. It’s common for each of these add-ons to provide their own set of CSS definitions, images and JavaScript. This makes these add-ons easy to implement for non-technical users. If you aren’t careful though, you will end up with tens or even hundreds of CSS and JavaScript files. This has a performance penalty, which can affect your rankings in the SERPs.
The 4xx class of status code is intended for cases in which the client seems to have erred. Except when responding to a HEAD request, the server should include an entity containing an explanation of the error situation, and whether it is a temporary or permanent condition. These status codes are applicable to any request method. User agents should display any included entity to the user. These are typically the most common error codes encountered while online.
