Some Great Examples Of What’s Possible With Cellphone Photography

Check it out here.

Drupal Is Awesome

I don’t know why I didn’t just listen to other developers sooner — Drupal is amazing. It’s taken me a solid two weeks to really get my head around the functionality and modules (especially Views), but, man, this thing is going to change my life. And I’m sure I’ve only broken the surface of its potential.

WP is probably still the simplest and most-customizable for the straight-up single publisher, but, for anything community-oriented (user accounts, forums, etc.), Drupal has to be the best out there.

Only (main) complaint is the lack of official overarching documentation. Seems like every nasty little bug can only be fixed by extensive Google searches and random, one-off forum discussions. But that’s the nature of open-source stuff, I guess.

At any rate, Drupal is awesome, and I am looking forward to this whole new world of possibility.

Hostway Customers Have Accidentally Shared MySQL Databases

Wow, this is one for the books. For the past two months, one of our client’s databases kept disappearing, and I was seriously losing my mind, because I could not solve the issue. Hostway told me that “everything was working” and that the database was either “suffering from programming errors” or “being deleted by another party.”

They even went so far as to suggest that it was being hacked. A long shot, I thought, but what do I know, right? So I spent a good part of a day changing every password, checking every connection — even adding reCAPTCHA to every log-in area.

But the database still disappeared. So I logged in to the MySQL page and saw these two data cells:

WhyAreYouOnOurServer

WhoAreYou

Kind of freaky, I know. So I added two data cells:

IAmJustin

IThinkWeHaveAProblem–E-mailMe__justinc@yadayda.com

Since then, I’ve received not one e-mail, but TWO e-mails from people who are Hostway customers who appear to all accidentally and unexpectedly share the same MySQL database. I have no idea how something like that can happen. Probably a coding error way in the background at Hostway.

In the least, it’s good to know I’m not crazy. I’m assuming my disappearing databases were a result of other customers writing to “their” database, which overwrote my data. Anyway, crazy stuff.

There Should Be An Award For That

Andrew and I just launched a fun little web app, our first collaboration. It’s built around the idea of when people say, “there should be an award for that.” GR8WERK.com empowers you to create those awards. Whether Husband of the Year, Worst Office Party or anything else, it is a simple little app designed to let people express their celebration, sarcasm or humor in a whimsically official manner. For example:

Generally, it’s built with jQuery, AJAX and PHP. Special thanks to the Jeditable Plugin, which made the “editing in place” feature super easy.

Anywho, check out the site! Let me know what you think! There are some updates and new features on the way, but I’m going to let this simmer for a while as is.

How To Add Maxlength To Jeditable

Just a snippet for anyone using the Jeditable Plugin, which enables editing-in-place functionality via jQuery, if you want to add “maxlength” controls to the fields.

• in the jquery.jeditable.js file, add maxlength : ‘ ‘ to var settings={ }, around line 78
• in the same file, add input.attr(’maxlength’, settings.maxlength); after input.attr(’name’, settings.name); which is around line 230
• then in your main $(document).ready(function() { } ); add maxlength : ‘30′, or whatever value you want in the list of properties (indicator, type, tooltip, etc.)

That’s it. I had seen some pointers for this here, but I wanted to expand and add some clarity for all 12 people on the Internet who might be curious about this.