That’s it !

After a battle with Magento (that I lost), I decided to start over and build a whole cart system based on Codeigniter.
It’s still a WIP but it is live and all must have features are there : http://www.bubbletreehouse.ie

Take a look and let me know what you think !

BluePencil Films dot com …

That’s it after a few hours of battle with Internet Explorer, the BluePencil Films website is fully operational and was successfully tested for FireFox, Safari and Internet Explorer. W3C validator is happy with it too and don’t even throw a warning when checking the pages.

We’re going to start distributing flyers around the city which will hopefully create some traffic.

What was not working and how I solved it:
Basically when clicking a video linking, it’s supposed to grey out the page and display the Flash player inside a formatted div. – all of that was working in FF and Safari.

The first thing that didn’t work was (http://www.dreamincode.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=114742&hl=) that IE doesn’t support the method addClassName. So I had to assign differently the style classes.

Then when clicking on the window, the curtain would appear but not the player …
I looked and looked and finally did it differently. Basically the ‘window’ that appeared in the player was a dynamically drawn table element inside a div … IE didn’t like that… I switched to a div view and now it’s working

The calendar has still a few issues in IE, but it’s not as important as not being able to show video samples on a Video Production Website….

Subversion and Mac OS X

After I lost some of my code on the BluePencilFilms.com website I decided to do the responsible thing and install a version control thingy on my dev machine.
As we use Subversion at work I sent for the option of installing a local svn repository. I was kinda afraid he’d be difficult so I was postponing it really…
Turns out, it was really simple as long as you have the steps to follow …
Here is how I did :

1. I have MacPorts already installed (http://www.macports.org/) – for info on installing it Install MacPorts
2. sudo port and install subversion once in interactive mode
3. Wait …. go get a coffee or a sandwich
4. Create a directory to store the repository (/Users/svnrepo in my case)
5. Once completed get to the directory the files have been installed to (by default : /opt/local/bin) and run svnadmin create /Users/svnrepo
6. then in the /Users/svnrepo/conf directory edit the files : svnserve.conf and passwd. the comments in there are pretty clear .. here his my set up


#svnserve.conf

### This file controls the configuration of the svnserve daemon, if you
### use it to allow access to this repository. (If you only allow
### access through http: and/or file: URLs, then this file is
### irrelevant.)

### Visit http://subversion.tigris.org/ for more information.

[general]
### These options control access to the repository for unauthenticated
### and authenticated users. Valid values are "write", "read",
### and "none". The sample settings below are the defaults.
# anon-access = read
auth-access = write
### The password-db option controls the location of the password
### database file. Unless you specify a path starting with a /,
### the file's location is relative to the conf directory.
### Uncomment the line below to use the default password file.
password-db = passwd
### The authz-db option controls the location of the authorization
### rules for path-based access control. Unless you specify a path
### starting with a /, the file's location is relative to the conf
### directory. If you don't specify an authz-db, no path-based access
### control is done.
### Uncomment the line below to use the default authorization file.
# authz-db = authz
### This option specifies the authentication realm of the repository.
### If two repositories have the same authentication realm, they should
### have the same password database, and vice versa. The default realm
### is repository's uuid.
# realm = My First Repository


#passwd

### This file is an example password file for svnserve.
### Its format is similar to that of svnserve.conf. As shown in the
### example below it contains one section labelled [users].
### The name and password for each user follow, one account per line.

[users]
romain = myp4ss


7. then launch the serversudo -u www svnserve -d -r /Users/svnrepo
8. And that’s it … you can now use your favorite subversion client to access your repository – I use svnX

Hopefully this will be helpful to someone … at least to me when in a few month I’ll have to do it again and will have forgotten about it ….

about wordpress

I’ve been looking at a few blog engines and finally picked wordpress…
I’m not sure I like it yet. I have a PHP blog framework mostly ready (I’ll use it in the VIP lounge of BluePencilFilms.com) but couldn’t/wouldn’t wait for it to be finished. To be honest I had other stuff on my plate. Maybe I’ll switch there one day …

One thing I don’t really like is I am stuck to pick a theme if I don’t want to pay to use my CSS skills … which is a shame really. As it’s one of the funniest part of writing up websites. – I’m not getting attached to this particular style as I’ll probably change it.
The admin side of things and the security features looked most promising and I have to admit I am not disappointed so far. – well a weird thing just happened but we’ll blame my newbie status …

I am in the process of writing up an “about” page which I truly hate to do … so it may very well never be published…

Now that’s out of the way time for more interesting posts … :)

Edit : Alright, I changed the theme … to an even simpler one.. And changed the banner to some artwork I did a good while ago .. inspired by Happy Tree Friends and a ‘free’ m&m’s dispenser I got one day as I was buying 2 big packs at the same time…

Hi!

This is the first post on my new blog.

I’ve been thinking of starting up a blog a while back to write down my more or less pointless thoughts. It’s quite hard to predict what’s gonna happen here. It will evolve around music, movies, geek stuff, programming basically everything and anything that gets me to react … I have a few ideas of things I want to mention in the first few posts … we’ll see where it leads us.