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PHP: Framework Faceoff

I was away from the PHP world while traveling in Europe and in four short months some nice PHP MVC frameworks seemed to crop up out of nowhere. I’m starting a fairly large project and was determined to use one of these new frameworks as the design and ‘free’ functionality that they offered seemed too good to pass up. However, there was almost too many choices. It was hard to choose between: Cake PHP, Code Igniter, Akelos, PHP Dev Shell, and many others. For me it ended up coming down to Code Igniter (CI) and Kohana…

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Videobox & Mootools 1.2.x

I love MooTools. I’ve been using it before the 1.2 days; it has been great watching how much it has matured. One of the best things about MooTools is the amount of components that have been written for it: Videobox, SlimBox, and TextBoxList just to name a few. However, the switch from 1.1 to 1.2 broke alot of existing functionality and with that broke alot of the existing components. Just the other day I found just the component I was looking for: Videobox. The examples on the site looked great, but it didn’t work with the newest version of MooTools. I spent some time converting the animation code over to the new 1.2 syntax and fixing some other random bugs, you can grab the fixed version here…

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Regex Revisited: Ack, SED, and TextMate

Grep has long been considered the de-facto regex command line tool for unix developers, but I’ve never really liked it. Grep has always seemed slow, buggy, and limited in its regex capabilities; I always resorted to using the built in regex functionality of TextMate or Python’s built in regex abilities. As great as Python and TextMate are, they are not a clean solution to a simple problem and do not play nicely with shell scripting. Thankfully I’ve finally found a regex tool that fulfills my expectations: ack. There is an even a “Ack in Project” TextMate Plugin (so long Grep in Project) which works blazingly fast…

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Best CSS Compression Around: CSS Optimizer 1.1

After almost four years I’ve released the next – and possibly the last for a very long while – version of CSS Optimizer. Aside from minor optimizations, I’ve fixed the last remaining parser bug having to do with “font: 62.5%/1.2em”. I haven’t yet updated the GUI application, but the command line application for linux and os x is updated. I’ve also fixed all issues with the online web css optimizer. Also a little while ago I added a css optimizer web service to allow easier integration to custom automation systems. I’ve tested CSS Optimizer against some of the newer CSS optimizers such as YUI compressor as well as other online compressors and CSS Optimizer has always come out on top…

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Interactive PHP Shell

PHP is an amazing language, I’ve appreciated it and its community more and more since I’ve been forced to mull through some ASP code. One thing it lacks in comparison to other languages such as BASH, Python, or Ruby is an interactive shell to test code in. A while back I found a nice little command line script that creates a quasi PHP shell. It isn’t perfect but it works pretty darn well for simple code testing and makes developing PHP scripts a bit easier. In addition to the command line shell a couple days ago a simple GUI PHP console, PHP console, was released. It seems to work fairly well, although I prefer the command line shell.

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Installing Custom PHP5 In Leopard

Lots of improvements have been made in Leopard, but the built in installation of PHP still lacks some essential packages and extensions (PDO, GD, etc). You could download MAMP or Marc’s package but either of those isn’t exactly a drop in replacement for the built in PHP installation – I’d rather not have two separate PHP installations floating around on my computer. Below is a script to compile PHP as a drop in replacement. I didn’t come up with this completely on my own, these two sources were a great help. You’ll need to make sure you have MacPorts installed in order for the installation of additional modules using the script below to work…

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CSS Compression Web Service

I’ve been making more use of my css optimizer in my recent web projects and put some work into creating an automated compression system for css and javascript files in a web project. In an effort to release a script that automates the compression of css and javascript files without compromising the ease of development and debugging I’ve setup a css optimizer service allowing you to use css optimizer without using the web interface or downloading the command line application. Here is how to access this service through the curl command line application: [code lang=”bash”] # compression on local css file curl http://mabblog.com/cssoptimizer/service.php -F “data=

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STM Evolution Laptop Backpack

About a year ago I was able to get a MacBook Pro at an incredible low price. I’ve had many of my friends break their laptop screens simply by walking from one location to another because of inadequate padding and protection and I didn’t want my laptop to suffer a similar fate. Putting the laptop in a incase sleeve wasn’t going to do it for me, and I didn’t want to lug around a ‘laptop bag’; I wanted a backpack specially designed for laptops. Luckily, to my surprise, I found exactly what I was looking for – the STM Evolution. The price on the bag was a little steep: $110. But thats a small price to pay for a easy to carry backpack that provides adequate padding. For the first couple months the bag worked great…

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