April 2006

On my internet travels today, I found a list of useful FireFox extensions. One of which I installed as soon as I saw it.

Perfomancing’s Blogger Firefox plug in is a nice little extension that allows you to blog from within Firefox. It supports all the major blog software (Moveable Type, TypePad, Wordpress, Drupal, etc) and seems to work really well.

If you’re setting up for Moveable Type, you might want to read the blurb on setting up API keys and click on the “Advanced” checkbox when entering your XML-RPC url when setting the extension up.

Great stuff.

As alpha testing continues, I’ve been overhauling some areas which haven’t seen much attention for a while. One such area is the files and directories management screen.

I’ve re-done the entire section to make it not only much prettier but much easier to use and more functional. I’ve tried to keep it as “dynamic” as I could and utilized a fair bit of javascript (yes, with AJAX) and some fancy DHTML to produce a display that allows you to upload files and watch the file listing get updated in real time without the need to visit upload forms and have the page refresh.

Also included is drag and drop move and click and hold title editing. I had a small breakdown getting it to work in Safari (argh!) and IE (double argh!). I’m not brave enough to try Opera just yet.

Notice in the movie how, when we move into another folder by clicking on its name, the drop down boxes for the “upload into folder” and “create new folder” change automatically (that was the double argh! for IE).

(Sorry about the light yellow mouse pointer in the movie. Ambrosia Software are working on an intel version of Snapz Pro. The PowerPC version doesn’t work 100% on intel Macs)

IPD Files and Directories (Quicktime .mov 2.1mb)

Sorry for the lack of updates over the past few weeks.

It’s been a car-azy time at IPS towers as we’ve just kicked off the first round of alpha and beta testing for two new products: IP.Dynamic and IP.Converge.

Initial feedback is very positive and we’ve got some great ideas to work with. The ‘biggest’ stumbling block was MySQL 5 support. None of our products install and run with MySQL 5 when sql_mode is set to STRICT_TRANS_TABLES,NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION because of sloppy SQL schematics.

I’ve spent the best part of the day cleaning up IP.Dynamic, IP.Converge and IP.Board so that they all install and run cleanly.

I had some trouble trying to get MySQL 5 installed. Regular readers will known that I’ve upgraded my main machine to an intel iMac. This causes a slight problem as the current PHP and MySQL installers don’t run so well under the intel chipset. I spent a few hours fiddling with MySQL 5 to no avail and came across MAMP which is a stand-alone webserver running Apache, MySQL 5 and PHP 5. It doesn’t interfere with the Mac’s own apache installation which is very handy. It’s enabled me to run MySQL 5 without messing up the rest of my mac. The old iMac is running as a webserver and uses MySQL 4 - and I don’t really want to upgrade that machine just yet.

I’ve also been amusing myself by writing perl scripts to export the latest release from SVN, clean it up and create an encoded (ioncube / zend) release for the alpha testers.