Like my work? If you're looking for a Bracknell Web Design Agency then drop us a line at 'Nine Four' and we can hook up for a chat.

ExpressionEngine Plug-in: Encode/Decode Jul 22

Comment

Every time I come up against something which I once would have resorted to PHP to solve, I end up writing a little plug-in these days instead. It just feels less dirty that way…

Anyhow, this one was developed to help me out when I needed to pass a string of data from one page to another in the URL. The string in question would occasionally include a forward slash and as such the string would become split as Expression Engine interpreted it as two separate URL segments.

The ‘Encode/Decode’ plug-in takes any string of text and encodes or decodes it. Typical usage of the plug-in is as follows:

{exp:np_encodedecode style="base64" direction="encode"}{title}{/exp:np_encodedecode}

The plug-in offers ‘base64’ and ‘url’ encoding and decoding but it would be easy to add more options. For me base64 seems to work best.

Download: pi.np_encodedecode.php.zip

Obviously let me know in the comments if you have any thoughts on how this can be improved. Enjoy!

ExpressionEngine Mug! Jul 17

1 comment

A white box arrived today containing an ‘ExpressionEngine Mug’ from the good folks at EllisLab as a thanks for my video short on ‘Why I Choose ExpressionEngine’.

It’s most awesome, primarily for its capacious capacity and then also for the ‘cut in’ ExpressionEngine ident. Now all I need is a matching T-Shirt and my life will be complete.

Thanks to all at EllisLab! :)

Automating an availability statement in PHP Jul 16

Comment

We have a small statement on the Nine Four website which advises new clients as to our current availability.

In general we need between 3 and 4 weeks notice to fit any significant new work in, so rather than continually update the availability statement or explain that we need 3 or 4 weeks lead time, I just used the PHP date function.

<p class="availability">We're available to work on new projects from the <?php echo date('jS of F Y', strtotime(date("d-m-Y").'+21 days' ) ); ?>.</p>

Simple really but I just thought I’d share.

ripe jobs

For designers and developers.

Web Developer - London, UK
Jobs @ Erskine Design
2 x Web Developers - Berkshire, UK.
Web Developer - Berkshire, UK.
ColdFusion Developer - Windsor, UK

Want to advertise a vacancy, email hello@nathanpitman.com.

noteworthy

A selection of noteworthy sites, articles or neat 'stuff'.

Helpful hints for DVD producers
Craig provides some top hints for DVD producers before they all drive him utterly insane. I’m in total agreement.
37 Signals: Goodbye IE6
37 Signals are phasing out support for IE6 as of the 15th of August. Good stuff.
Adobe Fireworks Team Blog
Nice to see Adobe putting a bit more effort behind communicating what’s going on with Fireworks.
Rawnet prototyping Ubuntu OS UI
Rawnet are working with Canonical to prototype the UI for the next-generation of the Ubuntu OS. Wow, exciting stuff, congratulations guys!
Some background
The body tag has been used forever as a good place to put a background image. But there might be a problem lying in wait.

All noteworthy...

fireworks extensions

People keep asking, where did all your Fireworks Extensions go? They've been on holiday for quite some time, but with renewed enthusiasm for Fireworks mounting, they're back.