Category Archives: Uncategorized

John Crepezzi and I launched GetSparks.org (the CodeIgniter package manager and repository) a little under a year ago, and the response we received from the community was overwhelmingly positive. The best part of GetSparks isn’t the site itself. It’s a moderately simple app that provides a vehicle for quickly dropping other developers’ code in your [...]

If you’ve ever had the need to investigate production issues in a load-balanced setup, you’d know why having a tool to pull down all of your remote log files into a single filtered stream can be handy. I think splunk is great at this, but in many cases, overkill. I wrote chip to accommodate this [...]

If you aren’t already familiar, a package manager and repository for CodeIgniter libraries was released last week at GetSparks.org. In the few days between then and now, some very interesting and useful packages have been submitted. There’s one for combining, minifying and caching assets, one for database scaffolding, viewing logs, geocoding, template-ing, etc. Here’s a [...]

If you’re familiar with package management, you’re aware of how awesome it can be. Yum, Apt, MacPorts, homebrew are examples of package managers on the Operating System level. Need to install some common software package like mysql? On OSX, it isn’t any harder than: $ brew install mysql For software development, you have Python’s eggs [...]

Over the weekend I put a full day into creating and completing a WordPress plugin that probably doesn’t appeal to anybody except for developers: A tool to list your github and bitbucket projects right inside a post or on your side bar. You can see it in action on my projects page. Basically, I was [...]

Brief but intense “holy shit” moments have been hitting me quite a bit in the last couple weeks. For the last 5 years, my social networking experience has largely consisted of Facebook, and I took it for granted as an application that was just really good at what it did. Maybe that’s even what Zuck [...]

After almost two years since the last major release of WPSearch, WPSearch 2 will be released this weekend at Wordcamp NYC. WPSearch 2 has been the highest rated search plug-in in the WordPress repository, with much thanks to the bug reporters, testers, and donations along the way. WPSearch 2 was built for WordPress 3, and [...]

I really can’t stand hard-coding URLs in the views or controllers of my application — and I’m sure most other people can’t either. Here’s an extension for the CodeIgniter Router class that I wrote that gives you a nice way to write routes that are reversible and also have the ability to take parameters. <?php [...]

A common annoyance in the world of AJAX is the ol’ cross-domain request error. That is, a script sitting on domain1.example.com can’t make AJAX calls to domain2.example.com. This is in place for the sake of security, but sometimes developers have legitimate reasons to do so. A common workaround is writing a server-side script that will [...]

I tend to get so wrapped up in the server-side portion of web applications, I probably don’t keep tabs on front-end tips and tricks as well I should. Luckily I work with some of the best client-side developers I’ve ever met over at HUGE, and I generally get exposed to new front-end marvels whether I [...]