Josh Duck

Nokia and Microsoft’s deal has been getting a lot of press in the last week. Nokia Plan B (which has now been revealed as a hoax) got a lot of attention on Hacker News and spawned a bunch of knock offs which I was taking a look through on my morning train ride. By the time I’d got to work I’d decided to contribute my own poor sense of humour to the mix and set off on the quickest web page launch I’d ever done. The result was Nokia Plan XP which was put together in the time it usually takes me to get my morning coffee. (more…)

I was playing with Mootools’ Class implementation today. It has a few nice features like mixins, easy inheritance and sane parent method calling. I did run into issues combining mixins (through the Implements keyword) with parent method calling. The following code fails with the message: The method “setOptions” has no parent. (more…)

Brightlabs, my employer, regularly publishes a web-focused newsletter for small businesses called enlighten. The latest edition contains and article I wrote detailing “Five trends that will change the web in 2011“.

The web ceased long ago of being a mere tool for sharing text documents. Images, sound and interactivity via JavaScript have all shifted the web towards the multimedia future we have long been promised. At the same time the iPhone and its App Store have raised consumers expectations of what their web enabled devices are capable of. Web developers are striving to meet these new expectations and are taking their lead from the desktop to create more interactive web applications.

Read the article on Brightlabs.

My HTML periodic table has been getting a lot of attention on Twitter over the last few days. Because the page has a relatively short URL a lot of people have been tweeting the actual URL rather that using a URL shortening service. This has been good for me because shorteners remove the HTTP referrer and stop me from seeing where my Twitter traffic comes from.

A peek at my error logs did reveal one potential problem though. I’ve had well over a thousand hits to invalid URLs like http://joshduck.com/perio. These are obviously URLs which have run up against Twitter’s infamous 140 character limit and have been truncated. This results in wasted traffic for me and a waste of time for my visitors so I decided to push a quick fix. (more…)

Every time I’m working on CRUD applications it seems like a lot of boilerplate code goes towards displaying appropriate messages when lists can contain zero, one or more than one element. I put together a quick function to speed up the process.

The function takes a string with string fragments marked up inline as its main argument. It then formats the output based on the count passed into the function. (more…)

Should I or shouldn’t I? Should I ditch my well-worn PHP and the frameworks I know so well to go with this new-fangled (silent-d)Jango thingy I hear the cool kids talking about? It’s a big decision, as this project is going to be the big one (you know, the one that will change the world and all that).

I’ve worked with PHP for over six years. It has it’s warts (and how) but it’s very much a known quantity at this point. On the other hand, when I have used Python it’s been a much more pleasant experience. The fact that this is a personal project makes the decision easier: let’s ditch old mate LAMPhp go with LAMPy. It’s almost dinner time and the latter sounds like it’d go well with an ale anyway. So, starting with a brand new dev box, where do I begin? (more…)

Today I stumbled across an unused working folder in a dark and dusty corner of one of our development servers. The directory had a couple of dozen un-checked in changes. Some were from barely a month ago while others dated back years. Not wanting to discard any important modifirations I cobbled together a bash command to show me when each file was last modified (the file’s mtime). (more…)

I was recently looking for a simple RSS reader for PHP. There are a few out there, like Magpie RSS. These seem like adequate projects, but much too high level for the scripts I was throwing together. I need to read a couple of different feed formats: namely WordPress’ RSS feed and Flickr’s Atom feeds. I decided to put together a single-class implementation which didn’t do anything more than the bare minimum.

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Any technical person is interested in solving big challenges. How to scale well (and cheaply) is one of the really big ones; and something that no one really seems to get right. I’ve read some interesting posts discussing Twitter’s problems lately (I’m a little slow to jump on this bandwagon, but like that’s going to stop me). I haven’t been a Twitter-er up until now, but it’s hard to miss talk of them in the blogosphere.

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