Dev Blog

Recently, while working on the site for my father in law (in Dutch), I wanted to create an XML sitemap for the many publications on his site, that are downloadable PDF's. I regularly add PDF's to his site too, and since I'm a tad bit lazy I don't want to keep updating the XML sitemap. So …

At the end of March Twitter released a cool new feature called "Web Intents". I didn't really see the value of it till recently, but I've now started using it way more. When you have a Tweet button on your site, you're already using the Web Intents API, but you can do way more cool …

A while back I outlined my system for preventing comment spam. One of the core fundamentals in there is that I send people an email to verify their email address before their comment is published. For this to work well, I need to trust on my email to be received. As it turns out, email …

So it's friday, I've been coding all day and I thought I'd share some of the cool snippets I've come across and/or developed today. I've mostly been working with Custom Post Types and Taxonomies, so let me share some of that goodness. Let's geek out in a bit, but first let me show you why …

For a small project, I had to create a smart mailto link to make my life a bit easier. I wanted the mailto link to hold not only a to and the subject (I'd figured that much out) but a multi-lined body too. Turns out that is pretty darn easy to do. So, for my …

As regular readers of this blog might know I have written quite some tools using the different API's of search engines, and always found them quite useful. When I was implementing my sitewide search function, one of the things that bothered me that it was a bit slow. I knew that I had seen some …

Those of you coming to this site more often might have noticed a small change in the search box. It's now implemented sitewide, and I've built a sitewide search functions using the Yahoo! API. It was quite nescessary because I found that people were searching for "sortable.zip" on the blog, and they wouldn't find anything …

I'm doing some work on a site which has like 4,500 pages indexed with a PHPSESSID in the URL, causing some major duplicate content problems. I got the server admin to disable the PHPSESSID's by adding the following to the vhost config: I also wanted Google to get a clean URL when it decided to …

Recently (I honestly don't know when), MSN launched a Digg clone in the Netherlands, called MSN reporter. You can submit your story, and others can vote for it or against it. The top stories go to the MSN.nl homepage. Now the boys at MSN haven't really thought this through, as they store what stories you've …

I got an email from Mozilla's director of product management Sherman Dickman today, that my sortable table script wasn't sorting numbers above 1 million which have comma's in them correctly (they do have a lot of Firefox downloads 😉 ). The problem was caused by the fact that replace only replaced items once, where they …