website development

I've got a pretty long-running script. In our live environment this runs under command line PHP, but for convenience on my dev machine I just run it through Apache.

Initially I got an error

Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded

No problem - just up the max_execution_time parameter to zero in my php.ini to give an infinite execution time, restart Apache, and start again. Trouble was, after about ten minutes, I got a slightly different error:

I've been doing some interesting work lately using Google Website Optimizer to help with our signup page on Analytics SEO. The full gory details are over on the Analytics SEO Blog.

If there's one thing us software developers love more than a good geeky joke, it's learning how other developers work - what hardware do they use, their OS choice, and all their developer tools. It's a great way to improve your own working environment - working with great tools makes our job a joy, while the wrong tools can make every line of code painful.

Our latest venture, www.analyticsseo.com, is a pretty complex app for a Drupal site. There are two parts to the system:

1. a back-end application, which crawls the web, analyses sites and competitors, and does all kinds of clever stuff
2. a front-end application, which summarises this data, generates tasks, and manages workloads

Fortunately, Drupal makes it really easy to work with multiple databases. Simply add two database connection strings in the settings.php:

All the Drupal sites I build use the FCKEditor module to provide a nice WYSIWYG editor for the content administrators.For most sites, this works fine. However, my current site has rather a lot of pictures to manage.

For the past 16 months, I've been working almost exclusively with Drupal to build websites, and I've got pretty good with it. However, I'm always conscious of the old adage that "When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail", so in the interests of expanding my toolbox, I'm taking a look at Ruby on Rails.

I've used a nice bit of CSS to style all the buttons throughout our web site, but it all falls down a bit on the file upload button. For reasons best known only to the various browser developers, this button only has limited styling capability, if indeed any at all.

There are a few solutions out there, but they are all pretty messy in terms of adding a lot of cruft to your site code. I was looking for something a bit more elegant, and which would fit neatly in with the architecture of my Drupal-based site.

One of the things we're really eager to get going on Save A Million Shots is the idea of video conversation threads. The trouble is, commenting is a fundamentally different activity from posting.

If you're posting an article, you're putting in a reasonable amount of time and effort (probably!), which could include making a video file, saving it to your computer somewhere, and uploading it when you write your post

All the hard work over the past four months has now gone live at Save A Million Shots. It's still in beta (like all good web applications!), so there'll be some more polishing and data quality work over the next few weeks, but we're getting quite a lot of traffic already. Stop on by and have a look!

Drupal includes the jQuery framework by default, which gives you easy access to a bunch of neat javascript eye-candy. I've been meaning to look into this properly for a while now, but I have at least figured out how to resolve a fairly common Drupal requirement - displaying submit buttons as text links.