We recently wrapped up development with SETX Digital on a website for a custom furniture builder in Southeast Texas using the Mediastar Portfolio WordPress theme and wanted to give a quick review of the theme and how we liked working with it.  The theme has a lot of great features that allowed us to customize it and get the site up and looking great pretty quickly.  However, our takeaway from the entire project is that there is a lot of features that are missing that would make the theme really powerful.

Most of the things that we didn’t like about this theme are things that would have been “nice-to-have” and didn’t make the them hard to work with for the … Read the rest

We recently completed the mobile application for Bizzio and pushed it out to Google Play. The application allows mobile users to see their projects, download files, update their account, create and update tasks, and add/review comments. Future features planned currently are the ability to take pictures and upload files to your projects/deals.

The application was written using the Sencha Touch 2 library and was cross-compiled with Phonegap.  The application has been submitted to Apple and is currently pending review before they allow it to be distributed through the iTunes App Store.

You can snag the application for free from the following link: Bizzio Mobile on Google Play… Read the rest

I recently had a need to create a function that iterates over a list of strings and writes them out to a column in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that I was creating for a client. In Excel, the columns are labeled A-Z, AA-AZ, BA-BZ, etc… and it continues on.  I couldn’t find any existing functions in PHP that did this, so I wrote my own below:

function column_name($index) {
if($index<27) {
$letter = “A”;
for($i=1; $i<$index; $i++) {
$letter++;
}
} else {
$div = intval($index / 27);
$mod = $index % 27;
$letter = column_name($div);
$letter.= column_name($mod);
}
return $letter;
}

… Read the rest

Recently I decided to signup for the adobe creative cloud monthly subscription plan available from Adobe at http://www.adobe.com/products/creativecloud.html.  I have older versions (CS3) of Photoshop and Dreamweaver and wanted to try getting the latest copies of each on my system.  Also thought it was a nice deal as it would allow me to have a full version of Acrobat and I could play with Illustrator in case I ever had clients send me AI files that I needed to work with.

So in theory, it was a pretty good deal…$50 monthly for three/four solid adobe products, two of which I use on a daily basis.  In practice, it turned out to be a pretty bad deal due to the fact … Read the rest

As part of an effort to combat spam for a web design client using wordpress, I have been tasked with removing urls from comments that are posted to his wordpress blog. Most articles and tutorials on the web mention removing the comment input field from the comments form. This, however, won’t work since most spam bots are posting their generated comments directly to wordpress and are bypassing the comments form directly.

The only way to do this completely that I was able to come up with was to use this simple function.  Add the following code to your wordpress theme’s functions.php file.

function disable_comment_url($fields)
{
return ”;
}

add_filter(‘pre_comment_author_url’,’disable_comment_url’);

This code is a hook into the pre_comment_author_url filter in … Read the rest

This is a follow up to this post from two years ago (http://www.halfslide.com//2010/03/14/review-godaddy-dedicated-server-disaster-recovery/). 

This past week, the same client who had her server crash at Godaddy in 2010 had it happen again.  The server went down and we only noticed it when all of the websites she was hosting went offline.  I was about to run to a meeting so I logged into godaddy and requested a hard reboot of the server through their server control panel.  About an hour later, we got an email that the server restart had been completed.  There was no mention that there was still an issue, but the server was still definitely dead.

My client called Godaddy directly to speak with someone in … Read the rest