Collective of freelance web developers and designers

For the latest information on what I am working on, what I am doing or even my random thoughts, click on the articles below.

This week one of our Windows 2008 servers was slowly grinding to a halt and after 2 days of running tests (via Rackspace) various options were thrown to work out what was going on.

A hard disk scan was arranged, RAM checks, faults in network issues, etc, etc.

Then the engineer at Rackspace pointed out that within the WindowsTemp folder, there was over 1million session files in that folder and COULD have potentially be causing an issue.

First thing that came into my mind was, why was PHP Garbage Collection not working, even though by default it was set to 1% chance of clearance, it should have certainly kicked in from 2011.

After spending 2/3hours deleting the files, Google search commenced, various blogs went by and to my mind I thought "its surely a permissions problem against the Temp folder", which PHP could read/write to but not delete.

Rather than playing with the Windows Temp folder, I updated the PHP.ini file and moved the sessions tmp folder into the main PHP folder itself within Program Files.

Assigned the usual permissions, mainly IIS_IUSR, with full control and refreshed my website. Received an error “permission denied”. Baffled at this point to why it would fail, I set the usual permissions I would to a public facing website that needs to write to a folder.
More searching occurred and just randomly reading a forum thread, someone mentioned, “Assign the Users” user also with “Full permissions”. I noticed that the Windows Temp folder did have this permission BUT no read/write/full control was checked.

Now my sessions are appearing in its new location, I also took the advantage of moving the PHP error log out of Windows Temp also and that seems to be populating also (not a good thing).

Prior to leaving late at night, I did have 3000 session files in that folder but come 8:30am and reviewing that folder again, it was 140 odd files.

BASICALLY GARBAGE COLLECTION WAS NOW WORKING :-)

Now I am waiting for the load to increase on the server to see if all this has basically solved my load issue problem.

Today (10/04/2012), I imported a csv file with over 8million rows into SQL Server which created the database table for me which I mapped out via the import method.

Since Facebook is slowing pushing the timeline feature across its Pages I noticed that assigning Apps to Pages also changed compared to how easy it was before but Chris from Feed London enlightened me to this Facebook page: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/dialogs/add_to_page/

Although I have used the FB Open Graph META tags before, more so when sharing URL's of everything I have developed, the META tags came in useful when I wanted a personalised description and image to appear on my FB wall.

 Supporting a Wordpress website for a client and came across an issue where when they were adding in <iframe> tag into the WYSIWYG and switching from html to visual - visual to html, the code would disappear.

I had a task for a potential project where I required PHP to print to a network printer.

Recently, and its been a while since I did it, had to basically assign some bespoke Google Analytics tracking to various links on a website I was working on.

Had this issue where when I made an ajax call with JQuery 1.5.0, Firebug would throw an error saying "Invalid label".

Heard some really good news this morning coming into the Saint London office.

Today I had to create short list of timezones for a project I was working on and basically created a list that I used within a MYSQL database, which I hope saves someone else the hassle. Once in database, it can be used in selectlists using PHP, etc.

Working on a project called Can You Draw The Internet? I was hit with a problem with my thickbox modal when content was loaded via AJAX. The thickbox modal would appear twice as the function TB_init() would be initiated twice. 

From time to time there will be a situation where you would need to disable open_basedir if you are hosting with Plesk.

Simon Labbett sent some very good news around the Saint office today saying that three of our projects were awarded Commendations by Creative Circle.

Working on a small website for a friend where he wanted a clean way for users to view some of his images similar to how Apple deals with album covers in iTunes.

Working on my latest baby www.twitterknitter.co.uk one of the features was to add in a "like" tweet button. Catch - to prevent the user from liking if they had already liked.

Ahhh!!!

Working on this art gallery competition project for Internet Week where one of the request was:
"Rather then have pagination links, can we have it so that when the user scrolls to the bottom of the browser, new content is loaded in?"

PHPology have recently taken on CSSology for all our HTML/CSS/JS work.

Had to read in an external RSS file from T3 and needed to drill into the "content" node which had a namespace. Using traditional ways of echoing out this node was not working so searching the net found a nice simple solution.

Working on a new project and one of the questions asked by the client was "will Cufon work with screen readers?", as accessibility needs to be considered.

Installed WAMP on my new work machine and jumping the gun a bit I went in and set my vhost config with the rest of it before actually starting WAMP.

Recently hit an issue where when I was converting a video file to a FLV format via FFMpeg (PHP) the duration of the video was lost during the export.

Man, something funny happened at work today.

During the Xmas period, a Word Press blog I was working on required the use of Disqus widgets.

Any junior PHP web developers out and about?

Whilst coding HTML newsletters, found a very useful list of special HTML characters from WebMonkey. Hope you guys find it useful.

Something really quick  about upgrading your Parallels Plesk to 9.2.3.

Working with designers and developers who work in remote locations tends to cause problems when trying to merge their code whether HTML/CSS or Server side (PHP) with mine, but Ben from StudioMohu introduced me to something called Source Repo.

Sooo chuffed, one of our clients just notified us that a custom built shopping cart we built was rated 5 out of 50 recently:

Today (Tuesday 4th Auguest '09) was put in a situation where I had to reorder one of the columns from my 3D array and initially started to use array_multisort as described on php.net.
Getting annoyed that it was not giving me what I needed, I started to read through the comments others had left, and tried cagret at gmail dot com example which worked a treat for me.

Yesterday I was told that we were using the Rackspace Cloud server to store our files rather than on the local server itself.

Working on this flash website for Virgin Media and ran into an issue with @ symbols appearing as " in Firefox and Chrome with flash parameter wmode="transparent" enabled. Works totally fine in IE 7  (not tested other IE browsers).

Beauty by Perfection, a London based beautician and Padz.com, I think the finest portal for property rentals have launched.

The latest redesign of ESPN Classic went live recently, thanks to Ralph and Co for the project.

Ilford, east of London is the area I live in. If you are near or live in that surrounding and are looking for some one who can help you locally then you have came right place. Just give me a call or drop an email; you will get an instant reply from me.

I need a freelance PHP developer to work on a new web application for approx 2 to 3 months. The developer will join a small team based on site in central London, England, close to Liverpool Street Station who are already working on the project. Must have excellent skills in PHP and MySQL integration and be experienced in working with a large and complex database structures. Must provide own computer to work on, with connection to our onsite server. Experience in Google maps, geocoding, address databases and video uploading would be an advantage.

Been keeping myself busy with these 3 projects which over the week have been put live.

Any one for drum and bass at church, check this out, will make you laugh out loud.

Man, its been a hectic few weeks since I've been back, trying to find work here and there, all good though, got loads going on at the moment. At times I feel like I am a women, you know multi tasking and all that with loads of projects lol.

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