The standard htmlentities() function will encode special characters so that they display OK in the browser. However, sometimes you might want to encode different languages to entities too. I just found a script that will do that in the form of an html encode application. The source is browsable but a little bit impenetrable so I fixed it up a little:... Read More

Update (2010-08): There is now a newer tutorial on jQuery UI’s sortable, using a much simpler GUI than in this tutorial.... Read More

Setting up default installations of Apache, PHP and PostgreSQL is really easy, I’m using a Gutsy setup and writing this in a terminal:... Read More

This piece covers creating a proper folder structure so that we can have a skin system. I’ve also created a folder for the admin section which is fully contained with it’s own controllers folder and so on. Another unrelated change that has happened since the last part is sub menu logic which we will also take a look at.... Read More

Update: Since writing this I’ve instead opted to work with Pico Lisp, this is not really a criticism of Weblocks per se, it has more to do with a general frustration with Common Lisp. ... Read More

Time for some nice links again, as usual most links are from Dzone.... Read More

The process of setting up Merb and Datamapper can easily derail, these are my experiences of setting them up on Ubuntu with XAMPP.... Read More

The blog saga continues, we still don’t have any fancy Wordpress style filtering of the content. You know, creating these nice looking quotes and filtering potentially nasty html and stuff. Sure enough, TinyMCE has some function for allowing only certain tags and discarding others but I haven’t had time to look at that yet, I will though… Fancy filtering is not in the requirements for this project either however. But changing and deleting blog posts are necessary actions though, so is some kind of search for articles. Let’s begin by looking at what’s been added to the desktop menu:... Read More

Update Aug 4, 2008: The below 2D sorting stuff has been superseded by the sorting section in the fluent article. The below example should be seen as something merely anecdotal and not be taken as a good example of how to sort 2D arrays by column. Alternatively, if you’re fine with a really simple approach see the end of the below article.... Read More

I just shut down my dual boot by reformatting the Linux partition and running Ubuntu in a virtual machine instead. This is the walkthrough:... Read More