It’s been a while since my first post about Laravel, I’ve learnt a lot recently (mostly from Laracasts and Dayle Rees) but yesterday stumbled on a real problem with how the project was setup, so thought I’d cover here what I did to fix it.

I’ve been itching to learn a new language or new “something” for ages, normally client work gets in the way and I end up focussing on that. I’ve been fortunate enough to come off the end of a group of projects in recent days and due to the impending arrival of child number 2 haven’t taken any new ones on, perfect timing for tinkering.

We recently purchased Gravity Forms for doing some client projects and it’s fantastic… I thought I’d got everything I need but there was one thing it didn’t do that really surprised me, in the notification emails there was no way of getting the exact time the submission button was hit! This really surprised me, this seems like one of the most obvious things you’d want to know. Support were fantastic and answered my query in just a few minutes, it has to be done with a hook (this still surprises me!), so here you go: First create a hidden field in your form, we’ll use a hook to fill this in after submission. Add the following to your functions.php function… Continue reading »

This was going to be a tutorial on getting these two things running to achieve everything I want, sadly I can’t work out how to get the last step working, which is to navigate the returned Ajax page to allow me to extract different information. As such this is more a guide on getting the two things installed and working – if you have any more luck than I do on getting navigating Ajax working then let me know!! XULRunner First things first, I downloaded the Windows version of XULRunner from (look in the runtimes directory!): http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/xulrunner/releases/ (Unpacking takes a while the 8.23MB download contained 302 items totalling 18.8MB!) Crowbar Not such a simple download for the uninitiated. It’s not… Continue reading »

This post is just a reference point for another post, a Subversion client is needed for downloading Crowbar, so I downloaded TortoiseSVN available here. A quick install with the default options and I was away. I created a new folder on my desktop called Crowbar, went into it and did a right click (TortoiseSVN is an explorer extension so there’s no program to run directly!). Alpha Dog release TortoiseSVN -> Export Then pasted in the trunk from the Crowbar instructions page.

I apologise now if I put off some of the more general readers with this post, but I’ve struck upon a bit a problem! I have some automated code that I wrote using PHP and Curl, that retrieves a mountain of information from a website, does some statistical analysis on it and then presents me with a nice little report (having inserted the data into a MySQL database). It’s wonderful – to do the process manually would take maybe 2-3 hours every day, as it is I wake up to a nice report sat in my inbox everyday with all the information in it. Now I have a problem, the website that I crawl to get this information is converting… Continue reading »

I was reading John’s blog today and spotted a link to Mozilla Labs. I’ve always liked some of the Google Labs projects and an avid fan of both Firefox and Thunderbird – so what better way to see some of the things that Mozilla have got on their minds. I’ve only read about one project before I’ve started typing, but already it strikes me a something remarkably simple but such a good idea! Prism notes that: Personal computing is currently in a state of transition. While traditionally users have interacted mostly with desktop applications, more and more of them are using web applications. But the latter often fit awkwardly into the document-centric interface of web browsers. And they are surrounded… Continue reading »