johnsonpage.org

PHP Microframeworks Presentation

2010-12-01T00:00:00+10:00

A week ago I delivered a short talk at the Brisbane PHP Meetup on PHP microframeworks (similar to Sinatra), comparing how to implement a simple “Hello, <name>!” application in each one.

The frameworks covered include: Slim, Limonade, Fitzgerald, Silex and Lithium. (Despite being a fully-fledged framework, Lithium is included as an example of how loosely-coupled components can be reused for simple tasks.)

The slides for the PHP microframeworks presentation are available to view here.

Google Analytics Bookmarklets

2010-08-08T00:00:00+10:00

For whatever reason, Google Analytics doesn’t provide users with any way to easily access their Google Analytics reports for a given period. Every day you want to view a report you need to reselect the date range.

Luckily with a bit of JavaScript you can easily create some JavaScript bookmarklets to direct your browser to the right page within Google Analytics.

To that end, I’ve created a simple tool to assist in the creation of a few different types of Google Analytics bookmarklets for use with your accounts.

Google Analytic Bookmarklets Generator

Mobile Monday Brisbane Roundup

2010-07-19T00:00:00+10:00

Last night, the Exchange Hotel hosted the third Mobile Monday Brisbane meetup. There were maybe 30 attendants, and three speakers at the event: @halfbrick, @chriskettle and @oliverpalmer.

The first two talks centered around iPhone development and how to appropriately market to and communicate with the iPhone owners. Though I’m no longer trucking about with an iPhone, it certainly provided some handy tips and insights into the App Store marketplace.

In the third presentation, Oliver Palmer focused less on iPhones and apps, and instead opted to cover mobile as a “platform”, and how it is growing in importance as mobile technology advances. There was even a mention of HTML5 and the mobile web, suggesting that the almighty app might not remain the choice for all mobile marketing.

The meeting was well organised with good speakers and a great new venue. My only note is that by holding the Mobile Monday on the third Monday of every month clashes with the existing Brisbane Ruby meetup which means I’ll probably have to choose which one to attend in the future!

Persistent Connections With Doctrine 1.2

2010-07-18T00:00:00+10:00

Forcing Doctrine 1.2 to use persistent database connections was a matter that gave me a bit of trouble the other day. It’s undocumented, and appears in the code (Doctrine/Connection.php) that you can set persistence as an option, but that code also appears to be orphaned.

The best way to create a persistent connection is by passing a persistent PDO object directly to Doctrine:

<?php 
$dsn = ""; // As per PDO DSN syntax
$pdo = new PDO($dsn, null, null, array(
    PDO::ATTR_PERSISTENT => true,
));
$conn = Doctrine_Manager::connection($pdo);

Not so hard, after all.

johnsonpage dot org

2010-06-04T00:00:00+10:00

This is the first iteration of the new johnsonpage.org. As the tagline suggests, this is where I’ll be posting some code and some words (probably about code).

If you want some more information, you can have a read about the technical details behind this site or read a bit more about me.