Category: Web Things

How to make Dreamweaver recognise .thtml files as .php files

Flipflops

The trouble with Search Engines isn’t that the things you want to find aren’t there (they usually, but not always are) – the problem is wracking your brain to find the right bloody words to search for.

Still got there in the end – this is how you make Dreamweaver recognise CakePHP .thtml files as PHP – and give you the pretty colours you need and love. 

http://friendsofed.infopop.net/2/OpenTopic?a=tpc&s=989094322&f=5283032876&m=3441048931

Locate the following file: C:\Program Files\Macromedia\Dreamweaver 8\Configuration\DocumentTypes\MMDocumentTypes.xml.

Open the file and locate the following line (around line 75): 


winfileextension="php,php3,php4,php5"
  macfileextension="php,php3,php4,php5" file="Default.php" writebyteordermark="false">
Change it to this:
  winfileextension="php,php3,php4,php5,thtml"
  macfileextension="php,php3,php4,php5,thtml" file="Default.php" writebyteordermark="false">

Save and restart Dreamweaver.

Still Pottering Slowly with Ruby on Rails

Flipflops 1 Comment

I wish I could bring myself to use Ruby on Rails, but I can’t not just yet. I wish I could – but I can’t its just too slow. Everything about it is lovely, the books are nice the name is funky and young and makes you want to go yes like Meg Ryan, the ideas make so much sense, the code is beautiful… but in the real world you aren’t going to get hosting for $4 / month.

I want to use it but I don’t want to have to piss around with fastcgi… If you read /. et al. then slagging of PHP is de rigeur – but the thing is PHP works – and its fast like a very fast thing. Hosting is cheap and ubiquitous and everything pretty much works out the box. There are more tutorials on LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) than you can shake a stick at. It’s gonna be hard to drag myself away from that goodness. I kicked the ASP habit smartish, and not a day goes by when shudder at those hatefull ASP memories, but…

ROR is nice and I thought about it a great deal when I wrote the Rocket CMS framework for my day job, but it is time to move on. Been looking at Cake (not it’s a made up drug) and I think I’m going to give it a shot – all the MVC goodness but a bit of speed too.

One day I’ll finish pottering and build a real Rails app. – hopefully very soon.

Bye Bye Blogger

Flipflops 1 Comment

I’ve just moved to WordPress from Blogger and this post was going to be the final draft that has got dragged over (although actually it isn’t (make sense of that)) – or actually not get dragged over – the setup and transfer went pretty smoothly all things considered. Blogger is a great little thing – I found it wonderful after the horror of Movable Type, but I can’t help thinking oh bugger why the hell haven’t I been using WordPress all this time?

Music to code by

Flipflops

Sometimes only a particular piece of music will do. Perhaps you want to murder your colleagues, dismember your clients or throw a chair through a window. Maybe your designer has just returned from a two week bender or an unscheduled lobotobmy…

Music is an intrinisic part of the creative process, it is tied very closely to memory but it can also be used to help the way we think, to manipulate our states of conciousness. Not all creativity is the same though – here are my personal preferences.

Music to code by

  1. The Pixies
  2. The Killers
  3. Groove Armada
  4. Cure
  5. 2 Many DJs
  6. Bowie

Music to make art by

  1. Orbital
  2. Curve
  3. Cure
  4. Radio 4

With the exception of the Cure there is very little crossover – but then the Cure are a pretty versatile band… there is plenty of music that will blow your creative processes right out of the water. The final list:

Music to unwind from work with

  1. Radio 3
  2. Arcade Fire
  3. Pixies (in case of emergency break glass)

Strange but true – a rag bag of classical music is often the only way to silence unwanted thought processes and restore a sense of still tranquility to a fevered and code burned brain. It provides noise and interest but no lyrical distraction and no interfering beats. The trouble with silence is that it promotes thought and many of us think too much and do too little.