WebDev Kungfu

Phoogle Samples Fixed

Posted by justinjohnson on May 4th, 2008

Several of you had emailed me about the Sample Phoogle Maps not working on www.systemsevendesigns.com. I’ve went in and checked out the code and updated the sample Phoogle Maps to make them work again. Keep your eye’s peeled for a major Phoogle update coming very soon. To view the samples visit: http://www.systemsevendesigns.com/phoogle

Internet Marketing and Design Advice for Your Business

Posted by justinjohnson on Apr 17th, 2008

Phoogle UTF International Support

Posted by justinjohnson on Jan 5th, 2008

Phoogle has been updated to 2.03

Here’s a summary of updates:

1. added the utf8_encode function based upon a suggestion from: Luis Lorenzo, which helps hen you try to add an address with special character like ‘ç’ or ‘ñ’ for example. This should keep the class from returning ‘Invalid Points’ on these international addresses

2. Added an SVN repository.

The above SVN repository is located at: http://sub.systemsevendesigns.com/phoogle

If you want to update or contribute to Phoogle, contact me and I’ll give you a username and password to commit to the repository (no password is required to view/download the files)

General , Phoogle
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Phoogle SVN

Posted by justinjohnson on Jan 5th, 2008

Just a quick post to announce that there is now a subversion repository for Phoogle at:

http://sub.systemsevendesigns.com/phoogle

2008 Resolution: "Less is More"

Posted by justinjohnson on Jan 2nd, 2008

It’s that time of year, where people make resolutions for the New Year and 2 weeks from now forget everything they said. I’m been very guilty of this in years past so this year I’m trying a new approach. A one word resolution. Ready for it?

Less

That’s right, less. 4 letters, no more, no less (pardon my pun…). In our society today it almost seems like we are obsessed with MORE. More time in the day, more things to do, more friends, more visits to the gym, more money in our bank accounts and 401ks.

What if we slowed down and all tried to do less? Here’s some examples:

Procrastinate less
Skip the gym less
Worry less
Complain less
Argue less

I’m sure you can think of more that are applicable to you. And you might argue why not say “Go to the gym MORE” instead of “Skip the Gym Less”

More implies that you are adding something to your already busy day, less implies that you are allowing it to work itself into your schedule.

So join the bandwagon with me this year in 2008, do less.

Adobe MAX 2007 Recap

Posted by justinjohnson on Oct 11th, 2007

Sure a-lot has already been posted on this and I’m not going to beat a dead horse, but I will say that Adobe knows how to throw a party. From the individual classes to the general session to the after hours guitar hero, poker tables, Segueway race course and just providing a place to plug in your laptop and hang with other developers, they did it right.

Once of the most exciting things that I saw was a project code-named "Thermo" which is sort of like a WYSIWYG on steroids for Flex applications.

Let’s say you have a team of developers and a designer. The designer can take his/her Photoshop or Illustrator file and import it into Thermo, from there they can turn there designed elements into actual functioning application elements.

On the backend this is writing mxml that can be handed off to a developer in order to connect it to a database or do some more advanced coding with it.

Simply an awesome technology, but it begs the question, should designers be given that much power?

I know a few designers who could handle that, but there are some that I’ve worked with in the past that whom I wouldn’t even tell this application exists.

For more about Thermo check out it’s entry on the Adobe Labs Wiki

General , Web Dev
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Off to Adobe MAX 2007

Posted by justinjohnson on Sep 29th, 2007

I’ll be flying out of North Carolina soon to attend Adobe MAX 2007. Looking forward to it. Maybe even try to see if I can meet the Coldfusion Jedi himself, Raymond Camden. I’ll try to blog some from MAX.

It’s my first time in Chicago as well so I’m looking forward to hanging out and seeing the city some.

Email Templates with CodeIgniter

Posted by justinjohnson on Sep 12th, 2007

The more I use it, the more and more I love CodeIgniter as a framework; in fact I believe I cherish it more than CakePHP due to it's simplicity. One thing that I do like about CakePHP is that by mixing in PHPMailer you get the ability to specify views for your html email and views for your text emails. So you could have multipart emails being sent based off the data in these views.

Sadly, this is one thing that CodeIgniter is lacking. But if you look around the docs long enough (which are absolutely fantastic by the way) you'll see that you can use CodeIgniter's built in template parsing class to do the same thing.

Let's assume that we are building a site that allows users to create an account. When they create an account, they need to get a welcome email from the application. I'm going to assume you know how to build the form and process the data so here's the controller action that handles the mail part of things.

PLAIN TEXT

PHP:

function signup(){
#stripped out the validation code
#stripped out the db insert code
$data = array(
'some_var_for_view'=>'Some Value for View'
);
$htmlMessage = $this->parser->parse('user/email/signup_html', $data, true);
$txtMessage = $this->parser->parse('user/email/signup_txt', $data, true);
#send the message
$this->email->from('test@webdevkungfu.com', 'CSSNinja');
$this->email->to($this->input->post('email_address'));
$this->email->subject('Account Registration Confirmation');
$this->email->message($htmlMessage);
$this->email->alt_message($txtMessage);
$this->email->send();
}

Nothing really ground breaking going on here, but notice the two lines that declare the variables $htmlMessage and $txtMessage, these two lines are what's going to allow us to use these views as email templates.

The template parsing class will parse out a template using the following syntax:

PLAIN TEXT

PHP:

$this->parser->parse('path/to/view',$data_array);

However, if you pass a true value as an optional third parameter (default is false) CodeIgniter does not render the view, it returns its fully parsed text as a string. So the $htmlMessage variables and $txtMessage variables now hold appropriately formatted code for either a text message or an html message which is exactly what CodeIgniter's email function needs for its message() and alt_message() methods.

Hope this was helpful, post any questions, concerns or moral outrages in the comments.