Archive | June, 2009

About Me

by on June 25, 2009 in personal

Recently I decided it would be wise to fill in my “about me” page. The page was looking a little sad considering I’ve been blogging here for a few months. Unfortunately I’m quite terrible at writing about myself. The fact that there was enough content on my plentyoffish profile for Rachel to be interested and message me still amazes me to this day.

Anyway, since I’m not good at writing about myself I tried to think of inventive ways that I could write about myself from a different perspective. And then I remembered reading an article on How to Hack Someone’s Mind. And I thought, hey, why can’t I hack my own mind?

And so I did. I started reviewing all of the bookmarks I’d saved to delicious while making notes on the categories and themes of the articles. I came to recognize that:

  • I’m a frugal entrepreneur trying to create a site in an established market (an underdog)
  • I’m a self-starter planning to develop the site myself (programming and design)
  • I’m planning to market the site using primarily social media

Sounds about right to me. Makes me wish I’d been using delicious back when I was dating — it would’ve made creating profiles roughly 27 times easier.

Making CodeIgniter’s Pagination library play nice with jQuery

by on June 22, 2009 in development

I’m back, and despite the fact that I haven’t posted in a bit I’ve been accomplishing quite a bit on the site …or maybe not. You see, I started keeping track of the hours I’ve been spending working on the site. Over the last 6 days I’ve put in 11 hours on the site. That’s a pretty good amount of time I’ve put in, actually, considering that my goal is to put in at least 8 hours (the equivalent of one work day) a week on the site.

On the (perhaps) not so good side, the majority of that time has been spent implementing pagination on the search results page. You would think this would be incredibly easy considering that CodeIgniter has a Pagination class. It shouldn’t take me approximately 8 hours, right? Well, apparently it does when you’re trying to use AJAX to handle your pagination. I was even perfectly willing to accept a complete hack for a solution, but alas, anything I tried to do to cobble together a fix for one issue only introduced another issue somewhere else.

Eventually jQuery came to my rescue. In the configuration for Pagination I set the base_url to ” (an empty string) so that the href on the pagination links would contain only the number for the search results. Then I set up jQuery to find all of the anchor links in my paging div, stop the normal link function, and call my function to load in the search results. The jQuery code came out like this:

$(document).ready(function(){
  $("div.paging > a").click(function(e){
    // stop normal link click
    e.preventDefault();

    $('div#search_results').load("/search/get_results/"+$(this).attr("href"));
  });
});

This is still something of a hack as I’m basically creating fake href values for the anchor tags, but whatever, it works! I can come back later and fix it. At this point hacks are okay. Speed is much more valuable than perfectly elegant code as I want to find out if my idea is solid before investing oodles of time in it.

Form validation callbacks and private functions

by on June 1, 2009 in development

If you’re familiar with CodeIgniter you probably know about callbacks within form validation. Callbacks allow you to do your own validation of fields. For example, if you want to verify if a username is unique then you could create a username_check function to validate the field. You add the callback rule like this:

$this->form_validation->set_rules( 'username', 'Username',
  'trim|required|callback_username_check' );

And then create a matching function like this:

function username_check( $username )
{
  // some code
}
?>

However, as this is currently implemented someone could access your function as a page at a URL like example.com/index.php/login/username_check/ if they guessed the function name. While that may not have any ill side-effects, it’s probably just as well if no one can access the function besides you.

In come private functions for controllers, which allow you to create a function like this:

function _utility()
{
  // some code
}

And if you try to access the function via a URL, like example.com/index.php/login/_utility/, you’ll get a 404 (page not found).

You probably see where I’m going with this. If you create your callbacks as private functions, no one will be able to access the callbacks as pages. It’s quite simple to do. You add an underscore before your callback function name:

function _username_check( $username )
{
  $valid_username = TRUE; // You would perform some kind of check on the field here

  if ($valid_username == FALSE)
  {
    $this->form_validation->set_message('_username_check', 'The username you have provided is not valid.');
    return FALSE;
  }
  else
  {
    return TRUE;
  }
}

And then add an underscore in your callback rule (note the two underscores after callback):

$this->form_validation->set_rules( 'username', 'Username',
  'trim|required|callback__username_check' );

Done!