Why is coding so personal?

Benjam,on the topic of  JavaScript, PHP, Tools, Usability
02.25.2010   |   5comment

Why is coding so personal?
I’ve been noticing that often times, when getting or giving feedback on code, or browsing my favorite programming forum, or just reading posts about programming, that people often get very emotional about their code. I was wondering why this is, and because I am not a psychologist, I’ll just give you my thoughts.

Coding to me is like creating art, and there’s a great quote that backs me up on this:

Programming is an art form that fights back. —Unknown

Because code is like art, I get very attached to my code, as well as my style of coding. My code is like my baby, my something from nothing that wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for me. It’s just a bunch of characters on the screen that, from somewhere in the blue smoke, creates a function, or a game, or a website. I have received criticism on my code (as everyone has), as well as given criticism on other’s code (as everyone has), and those times when I’ve received criticism on my code, depending on how it was delivered, or what was said, it was almost like a personal attack on me. And I’ve noticed a few other coders react the same way to criticisms on their code. It’s like the person who called your code ugly or inelegant was saying that your child was ugly (and those of you who have kids know… that’s a huge no-no, punishable by any means available).

It may be because I think that my coding style is the best, it’s what I’m used to, and it’s the format I use because it’s the easiest for me to get at the information I need as fast as possible. I know this because I’ve tried other styles (sometimes flipping back and forth in the same day), and looking at someone else’s code that uses a different style from me, is often times hard to peruse easily. It’s what I like, and sometimes I have to hold myself back from reformatting code I come across into my own style.

So maybe we should stop thinking of code and coding styles as being “right” or “wrong”, and think of them more like the tool that they are, a means to an end. And the way you react to someone else’s means should be a little more like a suggestion for a different method of painting. Not a matter of fact, but just another tool for the tool box.

To continue the art analogy, it’s like everybody is given all the art supplies in the world, and told to make/paint/draw/create a box. Everyone will come up with a different way of doing it, some will be huge and bright red; others will be small and drawn in pencil; others still might be made of clay or brick. No matter what, it’s the way you chose to do it, and it’s no better or worse than the person’s next to you. You might think so because yours was faster, fancier, more elegant, or more “boxy”; but they might think the opposite. In the end, you still have a box, and so do they.

Tags: ,
Posted in JavaScript, PHP, Tools, Usability | 5 Comments »


Redirecting to parent or child pages in WordPress

Benjam,on the topic of  Usability, WordPress
01.12.2010   |   4comment

A few of our projects here at Code Greene required the use of WordPress, and those projects had situations that I have since encountered in a site I built in WordPress for someone in my family. That situation was trying to redirect to a parent or child page when a certain page was clicked on.

I know that may seem a bit confusing, but let me give an example. Say I have an “About” page, and that “About” page has three child pages; “Who I Am”, “What I Do”, and “Why I Do It”. Now let’s also say that my “About” page doesn’t have any actual content, it’s just a container for the other three pages, and I just want to redirect my visitors to the “About | Who I Am” page without ever hitting the “About” page. Well, here’s how I do that.

First we need a page template that we can use for the “About” page that will do all the magic for us:

In a new file in your theme folder called redirect_down.php (you can really call it anything you want, this is what I used), put the following:


<?php

/*
Template Name: Redirect Down
*/

// grab the direct children pages of this page
// (both child_of and parent are needed)
$sub_pages = get_pages(array('child_of' => $post->ID, 'parent' => $post->ID, 'sort_column' => 'menu_order', 'number' => 1));

$URI = get_permalink($sub_pages[0]->ID);

// redirect the user down one level in the tree
header('Location: '.$URI);

How this works is it finds the first child of the page you are on, grabs the URI for it, and redirects you to that page.

Now when I create my “About” page (the one with no content), I set my page template to “Redirect Down” in the template drop down, and voilà, when a visitor clicks on the “About” link, they automatically get redirected to the “About | Who I Am” page, no questions asked. If I had pages under the “Who I Am” page, and it was just a container for those, I could also set my template for the “Who I Am” page to “Redirect Down”, and when my visitor clicked the “About” link, it would redirect to the “Who I Am” page, which would then redirect to the first child page.

To complete the collection… in one of the projects I worked on recently, we had a situation where if a child page link was clicked, we needed to redirect up the tree to the parent page. This is basically the same thing, just the other direction, but also a bit easier to code. Here is how it is achieved:

In a new file in your theme folder called redirect_up.php (again, you can call it anything you want, this is just what I used), put the following:


<?php

/*
Template Name: Redirect Up
*/

// redirect the user up one level in the tree
$URI = rtrim($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], ' /');

$URI = substr($URI, 0, strrpos($URI, '/') + 1);

if ( ! in_array($URI, array('', '/'))) {
	header('Location: '.$URI);
}

The way this works, is it grabs the URI given, and simply removes the last directory from the URI. (You could also find the parent ID from the $post data and use that to find the permalink, much like the previous template, but this works for what I needed it to do.) If you have your permalinks set up properly, this should work beautifully. And again, with this one, you can set it on as many pages as you want, redirecting all the way up the tree if you wish.

Hope this helps someone. Let me know if it helped you in the comments below.

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Posted in Usability, WordPress | 4 Comments »


“What does that do?” - Cake functions I’ve found

Benjam,on the topic of  CakePHP, PHP
05.07.2009   |   0comment

In this episode of “What does that do?” we’re going to look at a few helpers and methods of (probably) well known classes that may or may not be that well known, as well as enlighten you to a few gotchas that I’ve discovered during my Cake usage.

First is the Set::extract method. When I first started using Cake, I was using the dot notation in my extract and combine calls, that is until I discovered the XPath notation that was also allowed which offers more control over your returned values. One gotcha that I discovered early on, was that to emulate the dot notation {n}.Foo, you can’t just use /Foo, you have to add a /. to the end to make it work properly. So you end up with /Foo/.. One other thing I noticed while poking around in the source, was that the argument order for extract is opposite from that of combine. With combine, you put $data, then $path[12]. With extract, you put in $path first, then $data. I was doing it wrong for a long time, but the Cake developers thought of this, and silently flip them in extract if you get them backwards.

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Posted in CakePHP, PHP | No Comments »


Filter images from WordPress [gallery]

Benjam,on the topic of  Usability, WordPress
05.07.2009   |   19comment

EDIT: This post has been deprecated by the recently released WordPress 2.9. Please update your WordPress installation to get this functionality in your blog.

If you don’t wish to update your blog software, then please continue reading.

I was writing a post on my personal blog recently and wanted to show a gallery of pictures, but I also wanted to show one of those pictures near the top of the post, but not in the gallery, and if you’ve ever tried to do this with [gallery], you know it can’t be done.

Well, now it can, and I’ll show you how.

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Tags:
Posted in Usability, WordPress | 19 Comments »


Dynamically inserting JavaScript and CSS with JavaScript

Benjam,on the topic of  JavaScript
03.25.2009   |   0comment

Before we start this discussion, I’d like to point out that while dynamically inserting JavaScript and CSS can easily be done with PHP, or your server-side scripting language of choice, those solutions don’t apply to static HTML pages (what? static pages? what are those?), and I came across a situation where I needed a non-PHP solution.

On my personal website, I have a single static page, my home page. This page does nothing but provide links to the rest of my site, and as such, it does not need to be PHP driven with all the bells and whistles that go with it. Just some clean code, and some clean CSS to make it pretty. Recently I found a small JavaScript snippet that I wanted on my home page, so I added it, and it looked good. The trouble is that it’s a seasonal script, and it makes no sense to leave it on all year. So instead of editing my page twice a year to add and remove this script, I figured I could go one better and dynamically add the script to my page via JavaScript. After a quick search I found Dynamically Loading External JavaScript Files which has a couple of methods listed to do this. After looking them over, I decided the DHTML method would suit my needs better.

Here is that method:

function load_script(url) {
   var e = document.createElement("script");
   e.src = url;
   e.type = "text/javascript";
   document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(e);
}

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Posted in JavaScript | No Comments »


cssWithVars: jQuery plugin review

Benjam,on the topic of  jQuery
03.23.2009   |   5comment

A colleague of mine (Tim) introduced me to a jQuery plugin that I had not heard of before. The plugin is called cssWithVars. This plugin makes use of some JavaScript and jQuery magic to bring variables and reuse to the CSS world. I recently looked through the example given with the download, played around with it, took a look at the backend magic, and here is what I thought about it.

While the background magic is actually pretty simple (look for any properties using a variable, which are wrapped in [ ], and if found, look for the related selector, and insert the properties defined in that selector into the variable instance), the implications are great. What this means is that you can create various pieces of style that can be reused anywhere and when it comes time to edit those styles, you simply edit the one instance and they all work. Here is an example style sheet:

text_box { /* this becomes a variable */
	width: 100px;
	height: 100px;
}

notice { /* this becomes a variable */
	color: #F00;
	font-weight: bold;
}

p {
	[text_box] /* a variable in use */
}

h2 {
	[notice] /* another variable in use */
}

h3 {
	[h2] /* normal selectors can be variables as well */
	font-size: smaller;
}

p.alert {
	[text_box]
	[notice]
	/* normal properties can be used as well */
	border: 2px solid #000;
}

As you can surmise, changing the details of the [notice] variable (or any of the other variables) would be extremely easy. Simply change the color, or font-weight, in the selector where it gets defined and it propagates through to all the other instances. This, to me, is what got me intrigued by this plugin. It has far reaching implications, and can be a very powerful thing. But as with all great power comes great responsibility (and confusion.) With this, it becomes increasingly difficult to say what properties are applied to what selector, or even where they come from. Say for instance I have a variable that sets a border style and I use it in a property that also sets a border style, which one gets used? I would imagine the one that is set explicitly in that selector gets used, but then what if I am using two variable styles that both try to apply conflicting styles, one floated left, and the other floated right… what then? Which one is the intended style?

This could get ugly.

One more thing that you may or may not have thought of… What if JavaScript is turned off?

This little question is a deal breaker for me on this plugin. Not only is it a deal breaker, but it completely turns the tables on my recommendation of this plugin. Not only is the CSS completely invalid, but in the (not so) rare case that the user has JavaScript turned off, they are going to see, in the best case scenario, a completely unstyled page, and in the worst case scenario, a page that looks like it was rendered with IE (yes, that’s bad.)

It is for this reason that I recommend that, while this plugin has it’s intriguing ideas, and is certainly fun to play with, should not be used in a production environment, because it has a poor execution (through no fault of the developer, but due to the possibility of broken pages due to invalid CSS and disabled JavaScript.) But CSS spec writers take notice, this would be a great and powerful addition to CSS. But it would take a lot of thought to get some of the caveats I’ve mentioned here (and more that I didn’t) working together as the designer intended.

Posted in jQuery | 5 Comments »


Why we use CakePHP

Benjam,on the topic of  CakePHP
02.26.2009   |   15comment

Cake LogoWhen I first started working at Code Greene, I was building my PHP applications and sites the “old fashioned” way, with nothing more than a collection of common functions and a single MySQL class that I carried around with me everywhere. I have grown very accustomed to my small collection of code, and have begun to rely on it a bit (and actually almost failed the entrance test to Code Greene because I couldn’t find it).  But I always built my applications from scratch, every time. 

As I progressed in my PHP career (and hobbies), I noticed that I was building the same things over and over again, but only slightly different every time.  This was an issue that I had noticed but never really put some serious thought into… until I started at Code Greene.  My first day there, I was told to take a look at CakePHP and learn it, because it was to be the defacto PHP framework for the office.  I took a quick glance at the code base and was instantly overwhelmed.  There is so much stuff going on behind the scenes in Cake that it boggles the mind a bit.  I went through a few online tutorials, and still felt that I knew nothing about it, let alone how to use it, but I could tell that it would either make or break my new job.
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Posted in CakePHP | 15 Comments »