Considering local, dev and live environments

When you develop a website for a client you should usually be considering three or even four (if you also include staging) environments where one code base may be used. Local, development and live.

In this case you may want the code to behave slightly differently depending on where it’s being used.

A good example I regularly come across is when and where to send any emails that a system generates. When you are testing locally or on a development server you certainly don’t want to send out emails to people who have no knowledge of the system.

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Code 365

I do some sort of coding pretty much every day. It might be a tweak to a site’s design, some hardcore php Yii coding or even a bit of applescript on my mac, but I usually have something I can write, explain or rant about.

Code 365 is an attempt by me to publish a post to this blog each day through to 1st July 2013. It may be that some posts are very short and I queue several up occasionally, but the plan is generally for one each day.

I’ll be posting them to my @hjbme twitter account if you want to keep up with what I’m banging on about.

So coming up shortly, day 1 of 365. Let me know how I’m getting on.

Move your Sites folder in OS X with a SymLink NOT an Alias

Two hours of my life were wasted on this one, even though I’ve done it before. So…

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 to dropbox by dragging it (yes you can do this), then 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.

Don’t worry about no longer having a ‘real’ ~/Sites folder. You don’t actually need one.

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

Create Add Root FTP Account in cPanel

When you get a new hosting account you get an account user. These user details can be used to log into cPanel if you have it, but can also be used to connect via an ftp client to upload your sites files.

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.

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Animating Fade Of Twitter Bootstrap Buttons

I came across a curious issue today. You can’t select a period of time over which to fade out and fade in Twitter Bootstrap buttons.

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.

   Button Text