Codeigniter Vanity / Username / Personalised URL’s

Vanity URL’s are best described as a personalised URL, for example if you want to create a website where a user has their own space, e.g. example.com/username. Companies use this method to advertise a specific product as it’s easy to remember and more to the point. I decided to give the a whirl in Codeigniter which out of the box does not allow this to happen because of the MVC pattern. If you...

PHP 5.4 Shorter Array Syntax

I use PHP pretty much every single day from an in house content management system, to WordPress to Zencart and bespoke stuff. I’ve been keeping a close eye on the latest PHP developments and i’m so glad they have implemented Javascript’s syntax for handling arrays. You did simple arrays the old way like this:- $array = array( "foo" => "bar", "bar" =>...

Codeigniter Version 2.1.0 released

Codeigniter is my first choice framework for PHP for it’s small footprint, documentation and easy learning curve. I have built quite a lot of projects using Codeigniter, none of which are online, just internal stuff. Codeigniter has been updated to version 2.1 and here’s what has changed. You can get the very latest version on Guthub as the framework is now updated constantly. General...

iPhone iOS 5 lock screen camera icon missing

Apple has recently released ios 5 to the world and it’s a rather big update. With more than 200 new features one of those was the ability to access the iPhones/iPad’s camera from the lock screen. I bet you are wondering where the hell it is, well it doesn’t appear when you go to unlock your phone, it’s hidden and can be seen by double tapping the home button when the lock screen in...

My Alienware m15x laptop

I own an Alienware m15x and have done so since September 2010 when i made the life changing decision to go independant and live with my girlfriend in a nice cosy flat. Before the Alienware i owned a Dell Desktop and it did me proud until i wanted something a bit more practical and it started to get a bit dated. I kept my eye on a lower budget laptop, namely the Dell Studio XPS 16 but after reading bad...

Redirect http to https htaccess apache

Are you wondering how to redirect to SSL via htaccess? Alot of users won’t type in the https or even http for that matter so if your site has an SSL certificate you will want to make sure your visitors get redirected to the secured site. This is very useful for websites with a secure layer. I will explain in this post exactly how to achieve this. Presuming you have an Apache server, first off you...

Playing with Codeigniter and Migrations

I’m currently developing a Content Management System for the company i work for and one thing i’ve spent alot of time looking into is how am i going to keep track of updates when it comes to updating 100+ client websites. I ran into a rather great idea, inspired by Ruby on Rails Migrations. Basically Migrations alter the database in an organised way where anyone can come in and look at what...