Add It Up Development Blog

Linklog: Graphs and Personal Project Management

Progress is slow (well, static to be honest) but I’m hoping that I can kickstart my productivity later this month. In lieu of any actual work done, here are a couple of recent items of interest to the project: Ryan Singer over at 37signals writes about how to manage long breaks in personal projects. I’m currently [...]

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Controller, Model, and URL design

What’s in a name? Like I would imagine many programmers, I have a tendency to get a little anal about naming my Controllers and Models. Combine this with the default behaviour of CodeIgniter to parse the URL segments into controller/function/id parts, and it all begins to get very messy unless some careful thought is put into [...]

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Even more independent web apps

In lieu of anything more informative to post (hey, I discovered Warcraft - if that’s not an excuse I don’t know what is), I’d like to link to a couple of new web applications launched recently by independent designer/developers. Cart45 is a simple and easy-to-install ecommerce application developed by Phil Thompson with Soapy Co and Richard [...]

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To Parse or not to Parse, that is the question

When I first began to consider building a web application using CodeIgniter, one of the key aspects I had in my mind was to keep the HTML template files (the View in Model-View-Controller) as PHP-free as humanly possible. At that time, I was planning to develop an e-commerce application (this was before the launch of Magento), [...]

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Woo! A theme for the blog

It’s naturally frustrating to be stuck with the default theme for a blog, so this weekend I took the opportunity to update the look of this site with a theme from WooThemes (via Elliot Jay Stocks, one of the designers for WooThemes). As a complete novice at WordPress it probably took longer than it should to [...]

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Moving the system folder in CodeIgniter

It’s the first real night of actual work on the app, and already I’ve run into my first gotcha! For security reasons I decided to move the /system folder - which contains everything needed to run an application on CodeIgniter apart from the index.php file - outside of the web root. This is easily accomplished by [...]

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Project management for the one-man band

When it comes to managing a project on which you’re the sole writer, designer, developer, and tester - is a commercial project management solution really necessary? The answer, of course, is ‘yes’. Without a consistent workflow for identifying, prioritising, and managing all your tasks across multiple areas, it would be far too easy to get overwhelmed [...]

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Prioritising features: bit by bit, or all at once?

With a two-page functional specification completed, I am almost ready to make with the code, but first I need to decide on the most efficient order in which to develop features. As the final application will be for multiple users, there will necessarily be a significant amount of user account creation, maintenance, and security involved - [...]

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Garrett on Silverback

No sooner had I mentioned them both in the same sentence, but Garrett Dimon posted a detailed review of Clearleft’s Silverback OS X usability testing application. I had a preview/beta copy of Silverback sent to me, but unfortunately I didn’t find an opportunity to use it (aside from filming myself browsing the web for a few [...]

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Is PHP4 worth it any more?

A week or so ago, I posed a question on Twitter: If you were going to build a PHP application for use by others, would you even bother making it PHP4 compatible any more? Responses were - with one exception - unanimous, with most people citing hosting as a key reason. Rachel Andrew, edgeofmyseat: PHP5 all the way [...]

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