If you want to move your ~/Sites folder into say Dropbox or AeroFS or Google Drive or SkyDrive and then you still want to point to it from its default location don’t use an alias.

I know an alias is only a ctrl-click away, but it means all sorts of pain.

Instead, move the folder. Open Terminal and type:

ln -s ~/Dropbox/Sites ~/Sites

Replace Dropbox with whatever the folder of your service is called.

Restart Apache either by restarting Web Sharing in System Preference -> Sharing or by using Terminal and typing:

apachectl graceful

Cross your fingers and open a virtual host in your web browser. I fought with an Alias and all sorts of folder settings and httpd.conf lines to try and get it working, and then all I needed was to use a SymLink in its place.

Cheers to James Galley, my desk neighbour for helping my brain to click on this one.

https://discussions.apple.com/message/16881510#16881510

The app switcher contrast issue:

If you click the image above you will see the app switcher has very high colour contrast.

The White / invisible app switcher icons:

Click the image above for a better quality image.

Other issues I have seen, but haven’t got screenshots of yet…

White / invisible app switcher icons
Distorted (bold and blurry) text in app windows
App windows which contain diagonal coloured noise

A restart of my mac seems to fix the issues temporarily.

This always puts me on edge though. If someone gets your details they can’t just access your ftp but can also log in and make any changes that they want to your site.

For this reason I generally set up a new ftp account just to use for ftp access.

Until now I’ve never worked out how to access the root of a site with an ftp account. Generally I just accept access to the public_html folder and leave it at that. But today I finally worked out how to give an ftp account root access to a hosting accounts files.

When setting up your new account you have to choose a folder to give access to. Leaving the field blank is not valid, but strangely putting just a single forward slash is, IF you can work out how. Generally no matter how hard you try cPanel chooses a folder it thinks you’re trying to type and fills the field with it. Grrrrr, annoying. But…

If you focus the folder field, type / and then reverse tab you can exit the field leaving just a / there. If you’re wondering what a reverse tab is, it’s done with shift-tab and tabs back up the form.

Behold, a new ftp account with root site access to the file structure.

As an added tip, I always end ftp accounts with -ftp so they are obviously not email addresses and generally start them with the name of the person who needs access:

harry-ftp@example.com

If it’s access to a specific area then I add that too:

harry-templates-ftp@example.com

Happy ftping!

If you apply jQuery fadeTo() or animate() they fade out and they fade in, but they do it in their own time.

This may be related to a css transition which is applied in the bootstrap css, I haven’t had a chance to look, but the workaround for me is to put the button in a span and fade the span in and out instead.

   <span><a href="#" class="btn small">Button Text</a></span>

Mysql can easily generate md5 strings and update all rows in the table for you

UPDATE thetable
SET thecolumn = MD5(RAND())
WHERE thecolumn IS NULL

Be aware that keyframe animation is still very poor in Chrome and cases freezing and jumping if multiple items are animated at once.

The animation css below results in a hovered element rotating back and forth around it’s centre point. You can update the number of degrees and length of animation to change the appearance.

Just add this css and give your element the class ‘wiggler’ to implement

 
/* safari and chrome */
@-webkit-keyframes wiggle {
	0% {-webkit-transform:rotate(4deg);}
	50% {-webkit-transform:rotate(-4deg);}
	100% {-webkit-transform:rotate(4deg);}
}
 
/* firefox */
@-moz-keyframes wiggle {
	0% {-moz-transform:rotate(4deg);}
	50% {-moz-transform:rotate(-4deg);}
	100% {-moz-transform:rotate(4deg);}
}
 
/* anyone brave enough to implement the ideal method */
@keyframes wiggle {
	0% {transform:rotate(4deg);}
	50% {transform:rotate(-4deg);}
	100% {transform:rotate(4deg);}
}
 
.wiggler:hover {
	-webkit-animation: wiggle 0.5s infinite;
	-moz-animation: wiggle 0.5s infinite;
	animation: wiggle 0.5s infinite;
}

 
$users = User::model()->findByPk(2);
$posts = $user->posts(array('order'=>' created Desc '));

There were just ordered our users posts by created date descending.

We can also do filtering…

 
$users = User::model()->findByPk(2);
$posts = $user->posts(array('condition'=>' status=1 '));

So now we only have active posts. We could also combine a condition and a status.

You can find out more here: http://www.yiiframework.com/doc/guide/1.1/en/database.arr#dynamic-relational-query-options

Note how some html is escaped and the multi-friend-selector is inside the form.

The code below allows you to add the large version of a friend select in the form of an invite tool to your iframe facebook applications:

<fb:serverFbml style="width: 755px;">  
     <script type="text/fbml">
        <fb:fbml>
            <fb:request-form
                action=""
                method="post"
                invite="true"
                type="XFBML"
                content="This is a test invitation from XFBML test app
                &lt;fb:req-choice url=&quot;see fb:req-choice docs for details.&quot;
                    label=&quot;Ignore the Facebook test app!&quot; /&gt;
             ">
				<fb:multi-friend-selector
                    showborder="false"
                    actiontext="Invite your friends to use Socially." />
             </fb:request-form>
         </fb:fbml>
    </script>
</fb:serverFbml>

We’ll stick to existing naming. Twitter use secondary-nav within topbar so let’s use that…

.tabs .secondary-nav {
	float:right;
	margin-left:10px;
	margin-right:0;
}

The the html for the tab you want to float right you need:

<li class="secondary-nav"><a href="#">Link Text</a></li>

The outcome is most tabs on the left and any with the new class positioned over to the right.

At very least Alfred allows you to quickly start applications. If you choose to delve deeper you can use it to search and open files, run applescripts, quick jump to webpage searches, send emails, control iTunes and 999 other clever tricks.

When you first get your Mac you will likely have heard of Spotlight, a built in application that can be used to search applications and files. It’s hotkey is cmd-space. It isn’t as flexible as Alfred App but it has the best hotkey combination going.

Before we start if you’ve turned off Alfred’s menu bar icon, turn it back on in Alfred appearance preferences. It’s makes for the easiest method of opening during hotkey move.

Here is how to move Alfred App to use cmd-space and Spotlight to use ctrl-space:

System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts

1) In the left column click Spotlight.
2) In the right column click the current key combination for spotlight of ⌘Space (cmd-space) and input your replacement key combination. I recommend ^Space (ctrl-space) although some other applications occasionally reserve it (such as Things App). At this point if you can see it you could also switch the second hotkey combination over to ⌥^Space (alt-ctrl-space).
3) Don’t worry about remembering the old hotkeys. If you change your mind later as you can click Restore Defaults to undo your changes.

You can close system preferences now.

So we’ve moved Spotlight, but now we need to move Alfred to ⌘Space (cmd-space).

Click on Alfred’s top hat menu bar icon and select preferences. (you may need to restart Alfred at this point for it to recognise that you’ve moved Spotlight to a new hotkey.

Choose General and you should see a large box Alfred Hotkey box. Click it and press our new hotkey for Alfred App.
⌘Space (cmd-space)

And that’s it. You should now see Spotlight when you hit ^Space (ctrl-space) and Alfred when you click ⌘Space (cmd-space).