David Smeringe weblog » Uncategorized http://people.merea.se/david programming and web design centric weblog Mon, 28 Feb 2011 08:59:25 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Speed up your basic work for new sites http://people.merea.se/david/2011/02/24/speed-up-your-basic-work-for-new-sites/ http://people.merea.se/david/2011/02/24/speed-up-your-basic-work-for-new-sites/#comments Thu, 24 Feb 2011 08:24:57 +0000 David Smeringe http://people.merea.se/david/?p=101 From time to time I create a new site (actually, that’s kind of what my job is all about.. :) ). Such job is usually quite similar from one site to another. In order to simplify this process and – perhaps even more valuable – increase the production quality, I use frameworks and boiler templates. Currently my favourite setup is the HTML5 Boilertemplate together with grid960.

Let me introduce the two of them for you.

HTML5 Boilerplate:

This is what it sounds like. A basic proof-of-concept foundation for any website what so ever. No need to invent the wheel all over again. It’s important to notice though that it’s not a framework, but a ready made template setup which you then can (usually) scale down safely as well as add on to, to fit your needs.

That’s where the nice CSS Framework grid960 comes in! :)

The Grid960 is much more of a framework (as far as you can speak of frameworks in CSS). It gives you ready made CSS classes for a grid-splitted layout with a set width (960). Quoting their site;

“All modern monitors support at least 1024 × 768 pixel resolution. 960 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 16, 20, 24, 30, 32, 40, 48, 60, 64, 80, 96, 120, 160, 192, 240, 320 and 480. This makes it a highly flexible base number to work with.”

There are really nice plugins for Photoshop/AI/Fireworks/Dreamweaver that makes life even easier.

Applying the 960 grid to your boiler template is just a matter of adding the 960.css right after the boilerplates style.css link-tag (Ignore the reset and text css).

Read more about these two at

http://mashable.com/2010/09/02/html5-boilerplate-guide/ – Short intro

http://html5boilerplate.com/- Home of the boilerplate

http://960.gs/ – Home of the CSS grid

..and Some QA for boilertemplate @github

Next up will be chopping it upp all again to fit the CMS or whatever system it needs to fit into ;) (TYPO3 maybe?!)

Updates 24 feb 2011:

Here are some adjustments or additions when working with boilerplate and TYPO3:

config.doctype = <!doctype html>

config.renderCharset = utf-8

config.htmlTag_langKey = sv

config.htmlTag_setParams = class='no-js.js'

[browser = msie] && [version = <7]

config.htmlTag_setParams = class='no-js.js ie6'

[global]

[browser = msie] && [version = 7]

config.htmlTag_setParams = class='no-js.js ie7'

[global]

[browser = msie] && [version = 8]

config.htmlTag_setParams = class='no-js.js ie8'

[global]

[browser = msie] && [version = 9]

config.htmlTag_setParams = class='no-js.js ie9'

[global]

]]> http://people.merea.se/david/2011/02/24/speed-up-your-basic-work-for-new-sites/feed/ 0 nominate FLOW3 and TYPO3 for SF community awards http://people.merea.se/david/2009/05/19/nominate-flow3-and-typo3-for-sf-community-awards/ http://people.merea.se/david/2009/05/19/nominate-flow3-and-typo3-for-sf-community-awards/#comments Tue, 19 May 2009 21:26:12 +0000 David Smeringe http://people.merea.se/david/?p=55 Show your support for TYPO3 and the upcoming framework FLOW3 and nominate them for a soure forge community award.

Hit this image to nominate FLOW3 for “Best New Project” and “Most Likely to Change the Way You Do Everything”

..or, hit this button to nominate TYPO3 for “Best Project” and “Best Project for the Enterprise”

There aint much more to say about that ;)

]]> http://people.merea.se/david/2009/05/19/nominate-flow3-and-typo3-for-sf-community-awards/feed/ 0 je t’aim MS Exchange – not! http://people.merea.se/david/2009/02/17/je-taim-ms-exchange-not/ http://people.merea.se/david/2009/02/17/je-taim-ms-exchange-not/#comments Tue, 17 Feb 2009 10:17:38 +0000 David Smeringe http://people.merea.se/david/?p=52 Seriously. We’re using Exchange as our group and mail server. And it’s been working rather good I must say. What I thought. Found out now that – at least since SP2 – we’ve had serious troubles sending to mail servers using grey listning. funny… One fix is to add a batch script restarting smtp server every day (forcing it to resend the queued mail). I gave up and added a smarthost instead and now I rely on my broadband provider.

So now I’m waiting for people to start reacting on my old mails finally delivered. Wooho. :)

For anyone else forced to play exchange-guru on your own due to costs or whatever.. this is what I did:

  • Added a scheduled batch script restarting the smtp server
    net stop smtpsvc
    net start smtpsvc
  • Added a non-existing registry key:
    HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\SMTPSVC\Queuing\
    “GlitchRetrySeconds” – DWORD set to 300.
  • Added my broadband providers smtp server as a smarthost in Exchange following http://www.arrowmail.co.uk/howto/smrthost.aspx

Hope helps someone else. Now back to real work. Back to my PHP code, away from Exchange, away from Windows server..

]]> http://people.merea.se/david/2009/02/17/je-taim-ms-exchange-not/feed/ 0 create new record link with TCE http://people.merea.se/david/2008/08/08/create-new-record-link-with-tce/ http://people.merea.se/david/2008/08/08/create-new-record-link-with-tce/#comments Fri, 08 Aug 2008 06:57:33 +0000 David Smeringe http://people.merea.se/david/?p=38 If you need a ‘create new record’ link in BE of TYPO3 and also need to supply some default values, this is the way;

  1. $params = "&amp;edit[$mapTable][123]=new&amp;defVals[$mapTable][name]=banana&amp;defVals[$mapTable][codename]=hajaja";
  2. $aOnClick = t3lib_BEfunc::editOnClick($params,‘../../../../’.TYPO3_mainDir);
  3. $icon = ‘<img’.t3lib_iconWorks::skinImg($this->doc->backPath,‘gfx/edit2.gif’,”).‘ title="Create secret agent" alt="" style="border:0;" />’;
  4.  
  5. //print a pen icon with the link
  6. $HTML = ‘<a href="#" onclick="’.$aOnClick.‘">’.$icon.‘</a>’;
  7.  

So, what we do is setting up necessary parameters for alt_doc.php to perform cmd actions. In this example I use;

edit[table name][uid OR pid OR -uid]=command – use uid and the command edit to edit a uid, otherswise (as I do  above) use pid and new as command to create a new record in a certain pid. A negative uid together with the new command Creates a new record right after the supplied uid.
defVals[table name][table column]=value – two times. This sets default values for my two fields; name and codename.

Then assemble the parameters with the TYPO3 API call t3lib_BEfunc::editOnClick(); into a javascript call.

]]> http://people.merea.se/david/2008/08/08/create-new-record-link-with-tce/feed/ 0 It’s a boy! http://people.merea.se/david/2008/06/08/its-a-boy/ http://people.merea.se/david/2008/06/08/its-a-boy/#comments Sun, 08 Jun 2008 08:12:31 +0000 David Smeringe http://people.merea.se/david/?p=36 I’ve become a father once again, and once again it was a boy! a truly lovely one as well. See some pictures (“bäbis 08″) at http://people.merea.se/david/site/index.php?id=23

]]> http://people.merea.se/david/2008/06/08/its-a-boy/feed/ 1 Screen dump of the day http://people.merea.se/david/2008/05/22/screen-dump-of-the-day/ http://people.merea.se/david/2008/05/22/screen-dump-of-the-day/#comments Thu, 22 May 2008 07:45:43 +0000 David Smeringe http://people.merea.se/david/?p=33 Just for the nerd fun of it and for that I really like the look n feel of my desktop right now – here’s screen dump of my every day ubuntu environment..

]]> http://people.merea.se/david/2008/05/22/screen-dump-of-the-day/feed/ 0 Fixing an eclipse crach http://people.merea.se/david/2008/05/06/fixing-an-eclipse-crach/ http://people.merea.se/david/2008/05/06/fixing-an-eclipse-crach/#comments Tue, 06 May 2008 18:40:48 +0000 David Smeringe http://people.merea.se/david/?p=28 Recently I wasn’t able to start up my Eclipse (vaugly remembering having an X-hangup – x-windows crach I mean). All I got was a small error dialog with a reference to eclipse log file containing huge traceback of java exceptions.. I didn’t have the time or energy to trace this so I swaped to jEdit for a while.

Sooner or later one has to deal with the problems. The later was today.. My method became deleting each plugin path under [workspace path]/.metadata/.plugins/

The solution was quite simple.. I removed the file .snap in the [workspace path]/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.resources/ path and it started working again! :-)

I’m no expert in how Eclipse handles it’s workspace data, but apparently I lost associated projects.. ..but that’s that not so tuff to add again.

]]> http://people.merea.se/david/2008/05/06/fixing-an-eclipse-crach/feed/ 0 GMENU/GIFBUILDER broke my swedish characters http://people.merea.se/david/2007/03/08/gmenugifbuilder-broke-my-swedish-characters/ http://people.merea.se/david/2007/03/08/gmenugifbuilder-broke-my-swedish-characters/#comments Thu, 08 Mar 2007 10:01:56 +0000 David Smeringe http://people.merea.se/david/2007/03/08/gmenugifbuilder-broke-my-swedish-characters/ We’ve been working on a site for a customer for some time now based on TYPO3. As the the respect to typographical issues where important we decided to go forth using GMENU and GIFBUILDER for menus and headings. I really like the concept of GIFBUILDER and working with it. Sadly we got problems with non ascii characters like our swedish åäö and such. They where replaced by ugly boxes.

Character Ö is replaced by a box..

So, why on earth did this happend I questioned my self.. and people on #typo3 @ irc.freenode.org.

I ended up with these suggestions/requirements:

  1. Make sure you use utf-8 all the way. Gifbuilder (probably GD/freetype really)
  2. Check that the font you use is unicode
  3. Check configuration for mbstring (or iconv) that gifbuilder uses

I did all this. Utf-8 was a requirement for the project as the site will be on both chinese, swedish and english. The font seemed to be in Unicode as well (as far as I could tell). And mbstring was working like a charm..

It’s importent to mention that the development server was a windows server.

Anyway. I copied the site to my local windows computer and tested it. The same buggy result. The I copied it to my own webserver running on debian linux and there it worked! Why? Donno.. However. I went back to my local computer and replaced the font with arial. I got nifty åäö all the sudden. This at least allowed me to assume that it had something to do with the font file (a .otf file btw). The only solution I could think of now would be to convert the font hopfully to utf-8. I got merely no experience with typographical things so this was a blank area for me, but after som googleing I stumbled upon fontforge (http://fontforge.sf.net). It’s actually a *NIX application but I installed Cygwin (along with xfce4), and the cygwin port of fontforge. Wow what an app! A really crappy gui, but wow! :)

fontforge with cygwin

So, I went on and converted my .otf font forcing it to Full unicode, replaced it in my exsisting font on the site. It worked like a charm!

My final configuration on every aspect turned out like this:

localconf.php:

  1.  
  2. // UTF-8 support
  3. $TYPO3_CONF_VARS[‘GFX’][‘gdlib_2′] = ’1′;
  4. $TYPO3_CONF_VARS[‘BE’][‘forceCharset’] = ‘utf-8′; 
  5. // For GIFBUILDER support
  6. // Set it to ‘iconv’ or ‘mbstring’
  7. $TYPO3_CONF_VARS[‘SYS’][‘t3lib_cs_convMethod’] = ‘mbstring’;
  8. // For ‘iconv’ support you need PHP 5!
  9. $TYPO3_CONF_VARS[‘SYS’][‘t3lib_cs_utils’] = ‘mbstring’;
  10. // For Asian languages
  11. $TYPO3_CONF_VARS[‘SYS’][‘multiplyDBfieldSize’] = 3;
  12. //force db communication to utf8
  13. $TYPO3_CONF_VARS[‘SYS’][‘setDBinit’] = ‘SET NAMES utf8;’;
  14.  

Typoscript

  1.  
  2.  
  3. ## GIFBUILDER HEADING RENDER SETUP ########
  4. ##
  5. ##### Header 1
  6. cHeader1 = IMAGE
  7. cHeader1 {
  8.     alttext.cObject = TEXT
  9.     alttext.cObject.field = header
  10.     wrap = <div class="h1gfx">|</div>
  11.     file = GIFBUILDER
  12.     file {
  13.         format = gif
  14.         reduceColors = 15
  15.         transparentColor = #ffffff
  16.         XY = [10.w]+2,[10.h]+8
  17.         backColor = #ffffff
  18.         10 = TEXT
  19.         10 {
  20.     text.field = header
  21.     fontSize = 14
  22.     offset = 0,20
  23.     fontColor = #333333
  24.     fontFile = fileadmin/fonts/NewsGothicStd_utffull.ttf
  25.     antiAlias = 1
  26.     value.case = upper
  27.         }
  28.     }
  29. }
  30.  

Database was set to full utf-8 charset in all tables from the beginning.

See http://wiki.typo3.org/index.php/UFT-8_support about utf-8 support for TYPO3.

]]> http://people.merea.se/david/2007/03/08/gmenugifbuilder-broke-my-swedish-characters/feed/ 3 About http://people.merea.se/david/2007/02/28/about/ http://people.merea.se/david/2007/02/28/about/#comments Wed, 28 Feb 2007 22:56:01 +0000 David Smeringe http://people.merea.se/david/about/ Well. I’m David. See http://www.merea.se/ (swedish) if your curious on what I do for a living.

]]> http://people.merea.se/david/2007/02/28/about/feed/ 1