This is the first in what will be a series of blog posts for the Mozilla-Knight Journalism Challenge. This week we heard from Aza Raskin, former creative lead for Firefox and head of user experience for Mozilla, talking about the power of prototyping for understanding problems and building momentum behind your solution.
Category Archives: Programming
Experience importing an existing Drupal site to Aegir
(Cross-posted from the Aegir group on Drupal.org. Aegir is a brilliant new framework for managing web sites built in Drupal – upgrading, migrating, enabling, disabling and so, SO much more.) Hi all, I just wanted to share my experience migrating an existing site to Aegir, in the hope that others will find it illuminating andContinue reading “Experience importing an existing Drupal site to Aegir”
Git in one minute
Based on notes from a recent BarCamp, here’s my one-minute introduction to Git, a distributed revision control system (a system for managing collaborative changes to files, usually used for software development). This is probably only useful to someone who’s already a programmer and already trying to use git, as a kind of cheat-sheet. git notesContinue reading “Git in one minute”
Synchonising Google contacts with your OS X Address Book without an iPhone
So, I lost my iPhone a while ago and that was annoying. Then my annoyance doubled when I realised that my Google contacts were no longer being synced to my OS X Address Book. It turns out that Apple will only let you synchonise Google contacts when you have an iPhone connected to the system.Continue reading “Synchonising Google contacts with your OS X Address Book without an iPhone”
Guest Appearance on Byte Into It
Last week on Melbourne’s 3RRR, Georgia Webster, Andrew Fish, Keren Flavell and myself discussed Windows 7, TinyXP, iPhone security, defamation, video games, the seeming success of the Australian ‘net filtering trial and my experiences at the Open Video Conference. It was a really fun experience and reminded me how much I miss radio. There’s somethingContinue reading “Guest Appearance on Byte Into It”
Brix Rules
Ok, so I’ve been playing with Brix, a CMS toolkit from the creators of Apache Wicket that uses Apache Jackrabbit as its content repository. And it rules. Jackrabbit (a JCR implementation, i.e. a hierarchical repository for all sorts of content) is maturing fast, with 1.5.0 hot off the presses. It’s performance is really quite goodContinue reading “Brix Rules”
Sending HTML Email with Wicket part II: Converting links
In my previous post, I showed how you can use Wicket‘s HTML rendering engine to render HTML emails by faking a request/response cycle. In this post, I’ll show you how to use an IVisitor to change image and anchor URLs to be absolute instead of relative. This is absolutely essential in order to make yourContinue reading “Sending HTML Email with Wicket part II: Converting links”
Render a Wicket page to a string for HTML email
Something that’s very desirable to do in Apache Wicket is create HTML emails using Wicket’s brilliant component-oriented markup. I’ve been working on this problem on and off for ages — it’s tricky because of teh way that markup rendering is so deeply tied to the requestcycle, which in turn is deeply dependent on the httpservletrequestContinue reading “Render a Wicket page to a string for HTML email”
Free SMS service notifications using Google Calendar
Today I had a small revelation. I was wracking my brains trying to figure out the SMS messaging provider to use to send myself service outage notifications for my clients’ web sites. Given that I have just a handful of clients so far, it makes no sense to use a provider that requires a minimumContinue reading “Free SMS service notifications using Google Calendar”
Confused Narcissus
Ok, so a while ago I set up a Google Alert to inform me of happenings related to myself, and periodically it tells me someone on the web called “Dan Walmsley” (typically an Irish F1 Engineer, but occasionally me) has been written about. Today, however, the results were far more disturbing. Dan twinned the StewardContinue reading “Confused Narcissus”