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ExtJS

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 16:40:00 +0200

In the coming weeks, I probably need to take a look at an ExtJS project at Beeldspraak. For that purpose I was trying to do some ExtJS building for myself this week.

But that isn't that easy as it seems. I tried to recreate a grid from the example, but that didn't even succeeded. I'll have to give it another try, but I'm still looking forward working with it.

It just looks good, and the code doesn't even look that complicated. The one thing I do worry about a little is the speed of all that rendering. But for as far I've seen the project I'll be working with and the examples, that isn't even a problem.

For examples you can check it our here: ExtJS Examples
For the API you should be here: ExtJS Documentation

Compiling PHP 5.3.2 on Snow Leopard

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 20:09:00 +0200

Everybody that compiles PHP itself on Snow Leopard, has probably bumped into the iconv errors. When I was building the Wordpress 3 theme, I kept getting errors about imagecreatefromstring and imagejpeg. Somewhere I found that it had to do with GD and libJPEG, so I tried to compile PHP again.

But no luck at first, I ran into the iconv errors pretty fast. But this time I found a post from Sean Coates. The trick was to compile a new version of iconv, and apply his patch. (I forgot that last part, that didn't work, only with the patch I could compile). That's all I used from his post. I didn't install homebrew, I didn't reinstall Apache, I just installed iconv, applied his patch and make was a success!

Wordpress

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 22:18:00 +0200

Since a week or two, I started looking into Wordpress. Last week I downloaded Wordpress 3.0 and started building a new theme. I'm developing a fully customizable theme for a family member. Coming from the Symfony framework and before that a custom framework with the Smarty template engine, Wordpress was yet again a new way of programming. It's still procedural based, but you need to build the widgets OO.

I need to dive some more in all the hooks Wordpress has, that's some magic I haven't figured just yet. But now I've been busy for a few days, the development goes pretty quick. A lot of functionality is already present, like categories, blogroll, recent posts and comments. I just need to figure out how you can alter the output from a widget. Like the categories widget, I like to show them in a tag-cloud manor, but how to change the ouput I haven't found out yet. But I guess that shouldn't be all to hard.

MacJournal and my Symfony blog

Tue, 18 May 2010 23:17:00 +0200

So, now I wrote my blog with Symfony, I lost the possibility to write my blogposts with MacJournal. After a quick search, I discovered they support the XML-RPC protocol, I didn't knew that one yet, but after a quick look, it looked a but like SOAP, but please correct me if I'm wrong!

I also discovered, that the specifications of XML-RPC where last updated June 2003! Also I couldn't find any good documentation about the requests MacJournal does.

Anybody has some tips for me? I did find some Blogger API's, that would be possible to integrate as well. If it all works out, I will publish it as an Symfony Plugin.

Control Panel

Sun, 16 May 2010 00:24:00 +0200

Since about 3 weeks I'm thinking of creating a simple control panel, starting simple for my own domains, but might be expanding and Open Source it. But every time I make some time for it, I keep bumping into the problem: it's not as simple as it seems.

There are a lot of things to keep in mind, for instance, for my own needs I need to create email-addresses and mailboxes. But a logical step is to maintain the domains and there virtualhosts as well. With that, the next logical step would be to maintain clients, because a domain doesn't stand on itself. So every time I start working on it, I soon give up for that time, because I still need to create a solid database design.

If only there were more then 24 hours in a day...

Javascript and jQuery

Mon, 03 May 2010 00:00:00 +0200

Since I learned the power of Javascript and jQuery, I like to build a nice project with them, the only problem is... I have no idea's what to make. I already thought of making a Symfony plugin, something in combination with sfForm. But making a Symfony plugin is from a whole different level, I still want to do that once, but for now I just like to create something free. Not bound to a specific platform expect for jQuery.I already googled for jQuery plugin request, but I couldn't find much. A thing I did think about, was making some sort of desk, something where you can stack blocks, where you could shuffle items. Something like BumpTop, but a bit less complex. But even without a lot of complexity, it still seemed a bit undoable.

Although, now I'm writing about it, it stil sounds pretty cool te at least give it a try. I should build some sort of API for it as well, so you can connect AJaX requests to it.

Have some other ideas I can build? Please let me know in the comments or via the contact page.

Welcome on my new blog!

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0200

I tried blogging multiple times, but al the times they failed. Or actually, I failed. When I started those blogs, I always wanted it to be a bit personal, to tell something about myself, but eventually I found that I'm rather dull, I just can't find enough to talk about. Usually I blogged about something I found on the internet, or I showed by newest photo's. But not enough to really be an interesting blog. Things I sometimes wanted to blog about weren't suited for the people that read my blog, because it was to technical.

So I decided to create a new blog, a blog where I can write about technical stuff, where people would come because of the technical stuff. That is the reason I blog in English now, although my native language is dutch, as I come from the Netherlands. If I screw up on my English, let me know, I'll work on it.

The blog you're now reading is made with the Symfony Framework, a fantastic framework created by Sensiolabs, a french company that develops web applications. The first time I worked with Symfony, it was for the company I work for, Beeldspraak. We had an existing application wich grew pretty fast, and we needed a new solid base for that platform. A colleague that just started to work for us, introduced us. After a while I got totally hooked to Symfony, personally I had not worked with a framework like this, so it took me a while to get the hang of it, but I enjoy it very much.

I hope you enjoy my blog and if you want me to write about specific topic, just let me know.