Lately I’ve become fanatical over web frameworks, mainly Django, Rails and CakePHP. Something about them just clicks, maybe its because I can go back to a rails app months after I’ve written it, even with no comments, and just know where each file is likely to be and where to find a certain method. Also I can create CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete) functionality in seconds as most frameworks provide some form of scaffold, something that would take time to produce without a framework in something like PHP.

If there is one thing that pisses me off about frameworks - it’s the people who don’t like them. If like me you’ve read a lot of people talking about how crap frameworks are? How they don’t see the point: “What’s the point in a framework? I can just find all the different library’s I need such as templating, databases and include them in my app”. Why? Why would you want to waste your time including a database class, setting it up and then going to find a template engine to include and then setting that up too! When the framework will just give you that from the word go. It just confuses me. Then there is the fact that with most frameworks you get nice clean URL’s, free without having to do anything. try doing that in your simple PHP app without doing some form of mod_rewrite YOURSELF.

Most frameworks will log errors, show debug information (in development mode), give you the option of simply editing a file (not having to set it up too) to get nice 404/500 type errors. Something that would require you to make your own form of exceptions, your own error logging if you were not using a framework, which would do it all for you.

Another thing that pisses me off about not having a framework - is validating form inputs. Argh, it annoys me so much having to do lots of if statements to check if a field is empty, having to do a query to check a field isn’t already taken. In a framework, for example rails I just have to do:

validates_presence_of :title

Tell me again why people prefer to spend ages writing if statements and queries to check form data?

People will always try to say “I don’t like being told how I should code” - Fuck me, yes maybe…maybe there are some standards you have to stick to in frameworks and if you’re totally mentally retarded you might think this is horrible idea to have to agree on a naming convention for the benefit of others. It’s like these people have never worked with other people? At work we’ve had entire meetings just agreeing on a standard form of code to use, have you ever tried submitting a PEAR class?! talk about anal. I’ve found apart with some naming conventions you can pretty much code however the hell you like in a framework - much like you can if you were not using a framework!

From my experience so far I’ve never had a website that has not fitted the framework type model… now I’m sure there are loads of sites that would not work at all in a framework and the anti-framework people will be the first to tell you but that’s fair enough if it doesn’t fit the model then you don’t have much choice. But these people do it out of choice?! Are they better than us mortals? Do they know something we don’t? No! from my experience the people who shoot down using a framework to speed up development, to help bring out creativity, to help with debuging, these people are generally scared to learn something new, scared to well…learn. They refuse to even look becuase they know it’ll be something else that’s not what they know, even if the current method they use is rubbish.

All this technology, all the advances in medicine we have, space travel, you name it. It all comes from people wanting to discover, people wanting to learn. So I beg you, don’t just push the framework out the window as though it’s all ‘hype’ and doesn’t have any real world use.. please please please just give it a try. There’s a reason it’s popular, even among the big names, because frameworks are damn good.

Man have I been busy the last two weeks what with travelling and doing projects for other people, feels like I never get time to write a blog post - which of course will be my excuse. You see I get home from work have some dinner, do a bit of a project and before you know it the night has gone, gone like the acting skills of Keanu Reeves in, well anything?

I’ve missed youtube Friday twice now and quite frankly that just needs to be sorted out right now. So bring on youtube Friday. Before I post some videos I’d like to bore you, come on entertain me for a second or too - I’m of course talking about what I’m up to and stuff.

Lately I have been busy doing a website for someone which I initially started in cakePHP and switched to rails - don’t ask me why!? Maybe it’s because I’m a fan boy (GO RAILS, GO APPLE!) and like a good fanboy I do as I’m told. Not to say I don’t like cake, I love cake! Frameworks in general are just a really neat idea.

I did manage to finish the project from scratch in a weekend though - which was handy and I even tried JRails to replace prototype with jquery, much much better and all the helpers and RJS I normally use still work.

While we’re in that framework sort of area - I’m going to relearn the limited python I know and do readinfra.com in django and here’s the twist I might just record screencasts of what I learn and how I learned it right from the beginning so if anyone else wants to pickup python and/or django feel free to watch along.

For the project I did at the weekend I decided to switch to using GIT to revision control it, and I has to say I do really like it. Yes! More fanboyisum but I just love how quick it is, how easy it is to do branches. I actually use branches now with SVN I’d always create a branches folder but did I ever use it? Nope. For readinfra I’m going to try Mercurial (HG) though see if I perfer that to git, has better windows support and while I personally don’t care about that as I don’t ever see myself trying to run rails/python apps on windows and pretty much always developing on my Mac, others however may differ so easier for team projects.

Enter youtube fun

The first video I’m posting is of good ol’ Thom. Thought I’d start off with a quite video but doesn’t Thom just look the perfect picture of strange folk at the start, when he takes a nice glare at the crowd. Anyhow enjoy - oh and shutup Jools.

The second video is from someone accross the pond, so to speak from Thom. Stephen Malkmus, singing in a lift, while clapping.

I’m a new soul, I came to this strange world, Hoping I could learn a bit bout how to give and take, But since I came here, felt the joy and the fear, Finding myself making every possible mistake…..macdell air.

Ah, Tony and Bush - at the gay bar?

I went to intergrate Syntaxhighlighter into the site tonight, something I’d forgotten to do in the redesign and I thought it would be nice if I could just click a button in tinymce and paste in the code, select a few options and click insert. Which of course is entirely possible so I’ve written a tinymce plugin to do just that.

I did encounter one little bug writing the plugin. When inserting the pasted code it keept repeating itself if there was currently no content in the body of the textarea (tinymce). I finally managed to fix it by putting a space at the end of the variable I was trying to insert (and with the power of highlighting here’s what that looked like).

textarea_output += '</textarea> '; /* Note space */
tinyMCEPopup.editor.execCommand('mceInsertContent', false, textarea_output);

You can download the plugin here:

  syntaxhl.rar (5.1 KiB, 245 hits)

  syntaxhl.tar.gz (4.6 KiB, 252 hits)

  syntaxhl.zip (5.7 KiB, 284 hits)

UPDATE: The project has been moved to github, this is the preferred way of obtaining the files. I will leave the old download links up for now. Also feel free to fork, modify and send pull request with changes to the project… improvements are always welcome.

http://github.com/RichGuk/syntaxhl/tree/master

Getting it to work

First you need to download Syntaxhighlighter and get that working by including the CSS file and Javascript files. I combind all of the syntaxhighlighter javascript files into one on 27smiles, you can get it here.

Extract the plugin

Next you need to extract the plugin to your tinymce plugin directory. When extracted it should be something like this:
/path/to/tinymce/plugins/syntaxhl

Configure tinymce

Finally we need to configure tinymce to use our plugin we also need to stop tinymce from stripping out <textarea></textarea> html tags as this is needed for Syntaxhighlighter.

tinyMCE.init({
theme : "advanced",
plugins : "syntaxhl",
theme_advanced_buttons1 : "bold,italic,underline,undo,redo,link,unlink,image,forecolor,styleselect,removeformat,cleanup,code, syntaxhl",
theme_advanced_buttons2 : "",
theme_advanced_buttons3 : "",
remove_linebreaks : false,
extended_valid_elements : "textarea[cols|rows|disabled|name|readonly|class]"
});

We tell tinymce to use our plugin by adding syntaxhl to the plugins list and also adding the sytnaxhl button to the buttons list also note that extended_valid_elements contains the textarea tag this tells tinymce to not remove it.

If all went well you should see a new highlighter icon button in tinymce and when you click it you should get a dialog popup allowing you to insert code into your content.

If you encounter any bugs or have any problems getting it to work please contact me I’d be happy to help/fix bugs. Please note that I’ve only briefly tested this on Safari/IE7/Firefox 2/Firefox 3b5 and a quick blast on IE6 and from first tests it seemed to work. Also I was unsure if you have to stick to any standards when writing plugin’s for tinymce so it might not be the correctly way of doing it.

Wow, is what you’re thinking eh? A final return of the youtube Friday, my weekly collection of music video’s that I’ve listened to/watched throughout the week? Well yes… but I’ve decided to open the weekly event to more than just music…I’ve decided folks to open it up to any youtube video (what you’re crazy!), that’s right any video. Now before you all go shouting and all the craziness makes me want to become Amish let me tell you this tonight’s videos are of a music nature.

Sleeping is the only love

How fucking creepy are his eyes in this video? The first video tonight is from one of my favrioute musical bands. Silver Jews. This song is off their 2005 album Tanglewood numbers (track number 6).

Radiohead - 15 Steps (Seven)

This video is funny with Thom in a box, yay. 15 Steps is from their latest album In Rainbows and this video was on one of their webcasts. You can checkout greenplastic.com or ateaseweb.com for some Radiohead fansites.

What What, in my butt Lets fighting love

This video was on the latest south park, which was funny as normal the south park boys basically trying to make it big on the internet and this is the kind of video that’s big on youtube. Ok so some stupid ass company removed all the videos from youtube that I could find, so for now another song from south park, lets fighting love. Enjoy and happy youtubing.

New website

I’ve finally fixed the website, from that file I
deleted. True it wouldn’t of required
that much effort to fix but I thought I’d give the site a re-code/design while I was at it
- I seem to have a habit of that but anyhow since I’ve improved on my Rails skills since the last code this build went much smoother which leads nicely into the next change. The layout.

I’m
sure you have noticed the new layout but I bet you did know that it in
fact changes between a night theme and a day theme at 6AM or 6PM….
but if you prefer one theme over the other why not click one of those
little icons in the top right? They change the theme to whatever one
you choose for that session (while the browser is open) you can even
switch back to the time based theme if you prefer that.

You’ll also notice the flickr, twitter and last.fm
integration on the right of the page. Apart from twitter they are all pulled in from an RSS feed and then using fragment caching with memcache in rails to do
some time based caching so the flickr feed is updated every hour and the last.fm one every 5 minutes. I will talk more about how I did this in a later post.

The twitter feed is updated/imported using their javascript code so that should be real time. Oh and about twitter I’ve finally decided I’d get one after months of thinking hmmm is there much point in telling people what I’m doing all the time? Well I thought meh why not? People don’t have to read it and its something all the ‘cool’ kids are doing.

Holiday

So for the past two week I’ve had some time off work and was lucky enough to spend 5 days in Edinburgh and 3 days in London with my girl friend (Kerry). Both trips went smoothly and a I thoroughly enjoyed both (I even enjoyed London :o).

Edinburgh is both amazing and beautiful me and Kerry had a fantastic time here looking around both the city, art galleries and museums of which there are lots! We took a Flybe flight up to Edinburgh from Birmingham on a small plane which was nice. When we arrived in Edinburgh they had a very handy and excellent bus service from the airport which took us all the way into the centre, the buses run every 10 minutes - I really did think this was excellent. We stopped in the Royal Garden Apartments which was a very nice apartment. The apartment was but 5 minute walk from Prince’s Street and any shops we needed also being close to most of the attractions. Oh and the national portrait gallery was right opposite the apartment so of course we went there first =) (left image was view from the window).

On the second day we went to Edinburgh castle, although I’d been before I was quite young so I only remembered bits so going again was a very fun day out, it also meant I got to take lots of pictures and blend in with all the cute Japanese tourists taking all their pictures. The castle was quite busy as you expect though there were a lot of school trips there with all these Scottish kids, I love the Scottish accent its cute.

On the third day we decided to visit all the galleries - national, modern, etc… these were spread all over the city so it took all day to get around. They were quite interesting but I’m sure Kerry enjoyed/appreciated them more so than I.

On the fourth day we went to the Museum of Scotland and the Royal Museum, which are attached, these were both very interesting and fun :), while being quite big and hard to navigate around at the same time.

The 3 days we spent in London were very fun too, again we visited the art gallery and the natural history museum which were both very big and full of interesting paintings and animals the real excitement of course for me was the science museum getting to play with all the interactive stuff like a little child, amazing amounts fun indeed. Although we did get evacuated from the building for some reason, and I’d love to know why lucky for us though we were in the last room.

The tube was not to bad at all, we found our way around with ease and although it got a little busy now and then majority of the time it was pretty empty. Also for some strange reason unbeknown to me I like the smell at the tube station, must be all that unclean air plus the tube kinda reminds me of the 60’s, maybe its because the icon looks all retro.

So all in all the holiday’s went very well and I enjoyed both lots and lots, although going back to work was a shock to the system.