Web Development

New Information Architecture book is awesome

I picked up a review copy (review forthcoming) of O'Reilly's new Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 3rd edition, and so far it is a simply inspiring book. I'm only fifty-ish into its almost 500 pages but I've already started to brainstorm ideas for a huge improvement to the website at work, which I intend starting shortly after the holidays.

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Why PHP is still an immature language

A thread came up on Slashdot today about the security problems of PHP and software written using it. Given that this is as much of a major problem today as it was five years ago when version 4 was released (that was supposed to start fixing the security problems), and given how bad most PHP code still is today, I added in my own $0.02:

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WP-Cache + password-protected pages = problems

I have discovered that, despite recommendations, it is not advised to use the Wordpress plugin WP-Cache if you use password-protected pages as it stops them working correctly. If you turn on WP-Cache and view a password protected page that you have not previously viewed it will cache a copy of the login page and never let any visitors access the content; if you view a page that you have previously viewed before enabling the cache it will cache the full page, letting everyone who views your site see the page.

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Image block rotation using Script.aculo.us

Here's a handle little Javascript function that'll let you rotate a set of DIVs as needed, e.g. to rotate a series of images for a slideshow. It uses Script.aculo.us to do a very simple looking yet quite appealing slide in/out. You'll need to load the prototype.js file and Script.aculo.us' effects.js file before running the code. One thing to note is that you can use any object to do this - DIVs, IMGs, etc, just assign the IDs accordingly, which is useful if you need to rotate entire code blocks and not just individual images. Enjoy!

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ColdFusion MX 6.1 with Apache 2.2 on Windows

Apache 2.2 was released to a mixed fanfare. While everyone was pleased at the improvements most had to rest on their laurels while their web programming technology of choice was updated accordingly. At the time of writing, PHP 5.1 and 4.4 have an unofficial connector available (unless you want to run the unreleased 5.2 code), Ruby on Rails has several ways of working with it, and many others have received updates. Adobe's ColdFusion MX 7 was given an update which provides compatibility, but the company decided against including (the older though still officially supported) 6.1, so officially users of 6.1, my current employer included, are up the proverbial creek without an equally proverbial paddle. Or so we thought.

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