A useful reference on character encoding issues and PHP.
Archive for May, 2006
Character Encoding Issues and PHP
Friday, May 26th, 2006Earthlink Ad Challenge
Wednesday, May 24th, 2006
The Earthlink Make Advertising Better Challenge is live at adchallenge.podshow.com.
LA Times Profiles PodShow
Monday, May 22nd, 2006Los Angeles Times profiles AC and PodShow.
Devcast 5
Friday, May 19th, 2006DevCast 5 is up, featuring yours truly, AC, KevinO, the SDK and a cornucopia of Golden Tickets!
Notes on Yahoo! UI Library
Thursday, May 18th, 2006Sim Willison posted notes from his talk about the Yahoo! UI Library, a BSD-Licensed “set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications”.
Podcasts for Your Listening Pleasure
Thursday, May 18th, 2006Subversion Vendor Branching
Thursday, May 18th, 2006The Subversion book has a good treatment of vendor branching. Their calculator example nicely sums up the utility of vendor branches in the following two sentences: “A few weeks later, the developers of libcomplex release a new version of their library—version 1.1—which contains some features and functionality that we really want. We’d like to upgrade to this new version, but without losing the customizations we made to the existing version.”
PodShow SDK Module Available!
Thursday, May 18th, 2006The first release of the PodShow+ Module SDK is available for download. Many thanks to Tomas Salfischberger for reviewing a pre-release version. A frequently asked questions sheet is taking shape here.
Module SDK
Wednesday, May 17th, 2006Â The PodShow Module SDK allows you to develop modules for the PodShow user and show profiles. (examples: user profile, show profile). These modules allow content from outside (and inside) the PodShow website to be displayed to website browsers. Examples of currently used external modules include: Google Maps, Del.icio.us and Last.fm. Interested in building your own module? Check out the details below!
Q: Where can I download the PodShow+ Module SDK?
A: Right here: http://tinyurl.com/rp378. If the connection fails for some reason, just choose another mirror.
Q: What is the current release of the SDK?
A: Release 1, uploaded to Sourceforge on May 17, 2006.
Q: How do I install and use the SDK?
A: Instructions may be found in drinkme.txt in the top directory of the distribution.
Q: What is required to run the SDK?
A: To run the SDK you will need: PHP 5.0 or later, the Curl extension (recommended) and Apache 2 (recommended)
Q: I’m getting a “Cannot open file” error. What gives?
A: Most likely you need to make your /mods directory writeable by the webserver.
Q: How do I get a Google Maps API key?
A: Go here and fill out the form. It’s free and takes about 30 seconds.
Q: How do I connect into PodShow to develop my module?
A: There is no need to connect into PodShow — the SDK provides a standalone development environment. You will need Apache and PHP to do the initial development as described above, but that’s all.
Q: I’m having trouble with my Apache configuration, can you help?
A: This is a large topic, in general we suggest checking the Apache documentation. Here we’ll create a list of specific tips. Virtual hosting configuration is discussed here (Apache 2.0). Remember to include “index.php” in your DirectoryIndex declaration.
Q: The SDK supports both curl and file_get_contents for fetching remote content. Must my module support both, or can I assume that curl is available at runtime?
A: You can assume that curl is available.
SVN vs CVS for our SDK
Wednesday, May 17th, 2006We’re starting to get our heads around Subversion as we set up the modules SDK area. It’s dead simple and well documented. Interesting contrasts from CVS. I don’t mean the obvious stuff like atomic commits or repository maintenance. I mean, for example, the way tagging works. In CVS you mark a moment in time by applying a symbolic name to a set of file/version pairs. But in Subversion the individual files do not carry version numbers. Instead, versioning is applied to the entire repository, and this version number is bumped up on every commit. As a result, a tag in Subversion is simply the version number or release number at the time of the snapshot. Since worded names tend to be more memorable than numeric names, Subversion administrators typically use a place metaphor, and create tags by copying the project to a named subdirectory of tags. This is accomplished using svn copy. Another interesting contrast — tags are just a convention in SVN, and are committable unless you do some extra permission setting on the directory. On the to do list: try out merges.