How to remove login popups

I'm sure you saw at least one site where you have to log in to see the content. Today I clicked on a link from Lance Armstrong's twitter account and I got a nasty popup on top of the page.

Here are the steps to get rid of this popup and view the page without loging in (for this tutorial I used Firefox with Firebug, but you can do this in all browsers):

1. open Firebug

2. select the popup div (in this case mobli_dialog)

3. hide the div (display:none)

4. select the overlay div (in this case pop_overlay)

5. hide the overlay

It only takes a few seconds to access the information without logging in or creating an account :)

XAMPP, CodeIgniter and virtual hosts

This is a short tutorial for using CodeIgniter with XAMPP and setting up virtual hosts.

For developing web applications with php I use XAMPP wich is a free and easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. I used CakePHP for a few years but CodeIgniter is my favorite MVC php framework. 

It's very easy to install XAMPP, you just download it and than next-next-next. CodeIgniter is just the same, download, unzip and you are ready to go. The tricky part is to use virtual hosts. If you don't like to pile up all your projects in the XAMPP htdocs directory than you need to set up some virtual hosts.

I have dowloaded CodeIgniter and I've unzipped all the files to D:\temp\mydocs. To run the application I need to modify two files (XAMPP is installed on my C drive: C:\xampp\):

1. httpd-vhosts.conf from the apache (C:\xampp\apache\conf\extrahttpd-vhosts.conf)

after

NameVirtualHost *

  <VirtualHost *>

    DocumentRoot "C:\xampp\htdocs"

    ServerName localhost

  </VirtualHost>

add this:

  <VirtualHost *>

    DocumentRoot "d:\temp\mydocs"

    ServerName mydocs.local

    <Directory "D:\temp\mydocs">

      Order allow,deny

      Allow from all

    </Directory>

  </VirtualHost>

2. the host file from Windows (C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts)

add this to the end of the file:

127.0.0.1       mydocs.local

After restarting apache I can run my project if I type http:// mydocs .local in my browser.

You can use whatever name you want for your projects (I like to use projectname.local), you only need to add the ServerName to your hosts file. You can store your project wherever you want, specify the location in the Directory.

Blogger is about to change

Blogger (the platform I use for this blog) is about to change. Here is a short video about the changes:

The End of IPv4

IPv4 addresses will be exhausted in a few weeks...

The power of CSS3

Take a look at these pages in Chrome or Safari or other webkit based browsers:
 - Our solar system
 - CSS-TRICKS

Via Doctype.

Opencart - my choice for a shop on the web

It's been a while since my last tech post... I enjoy my work but usually it's just work and not always you get to do something that you really like. But sometimes I get to do something very interesting and than I can call my work a hobby.

My new hobby is called OpenCart. Yes, I like open source and I try to use open source as much as I can. I understand that you have to pay sometimes for software but I don't understand why you have to pay hundreds of dollars or euros for some software that you just use sometimes because you have to. And yes it is ok to pay for software if you make money using it. So this is why I will ask for some money for what I'm working on.

So you ask what am I working on... I am developing filtering options for OpenCart. If you take a look at this great shopping cart you can observe that it is a great software but it lacks some filters. So I'm developing some filters for this cart, some filters that can be fully customized. You can choose the filters for your product and you can even choose for which category to display filters.

I like OpenCart because it is open source, it is mvc and it doesn't use any templating language (like smarty).

I hope I can finish this project next week and than I will try to make an install version. I was thinking that I will ask for about 5 euros for this extensions and donate at least half of it to OpenCart :)

The new YouTube

I just love the new YouTube, the user experience got way better :D

Besides the fancy Ajax they have a cool feature, you can create your playlist on the go. I was listening to a song, and I searched for another son. The search results were shown in the sidebar and the music didn't stop playing. You can now add more videos to your playlist, so you can choose what do you want to listen next :d

Here is a screenshot:

And the song I was listening to:

The state of the Internet

IE6 Updater

We all know (I hope) that ie sux. So if you know this site http://ie6update.com/ tell about it to your friends, if you don't take a look, if you are using ie6 use it  :)

HTML 5

HTML 5 is here! One of the best things in HTML 5 that you don't need to install Adobe Flash Player for watching videos. This is a great thing especially if you have a slow computer (like my laptop @ work). To test out this new feature you need Firefox 3.5, Google Chrome or Safari 4. Simply go to http://www.youtube.com/html5 and click "Join the HTML5 Beta". To try out this new feature you can watch this video (watch it on YouTube if you want to see HTML 5 in action):



 Another example you can find here. For more cool feature in YouTube visit this link (http://www.youtube.com/testtube).

Cool js

FishEye is a very cool js, jQuery magic. I saw this about a year ago and today I've found it on another site so I looked up the code. This is how I found this site. Check it out it's very cool, I hope I can use it in one of my future projects.

Have you ever wondered how to automatically repeat a video in YouTube?

Have you had a favorite song that you wanted to listen over and over again? Today you can find all songs on YouTube, but you always have to click on repeat. But there is a solution!

You have to do 2 thing:
- first you have to install the Greasemonkey extension (if you don't have it already)
- then you have to install Loopy for YouTube

Now you have a loop button under the YouTube player :D

Via

Nabb goes on Twitter

You can now find me on twitter :)

And I am using twitterfeed to post my blog posts on twitter.

PS:I am searching for an app that syncs twitter with my yahoo messenger.

Blogger pack

To make life easier I modified two js scripts to work with Blogger, the __Emoticon.js and the lightbox.js. The __Emoticon.js is a cool script for adding emoticons(smileys) to your blog. I modified it to make all the links open  in a new window and all the pictures open n in a lightbox when you click on them. These thing were already happening on my blog but I always had to edit the html :(

But now everything is done by my blogger_pack :D

You can use these files only by including them on your blog or downloading and modifying them.


This is how you can do this (if you dowload the files to another server change the links - http://www.kibadvertising.ro):

You need to put these right after "<head>" in the template file:

<script src='http://www.kibadvertising.ro/blogger_pack/js/prototype.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='http://www.kibadvertising.ro/blogger_pack/js/scriptaculous.js?load=effects,builder' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='http://www.kibadvertising.ro/blogger_pack/lightbox.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<link href='http://www.kibadvertising.ro/blogger_pack/css/lightbox.css' media='screen' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'/>

Your template file should end like this (if you have a custom template and you have changed the class names please use those):

</body>
<script type='text/javascript'> 
addSmileyById("comments-block");
addSmileyByClass("post hentry");
</script> 
</html>


To download my blogger pack click here. Enjoy :)

Fix Chrome to support extensions

I bumped in to another problem with my new browser. My AdSweep just stopped working so i started to search for a solution. The fix is to switch from Beta to Dev, because it seems that they disabled extensions in the beta version. I found the fix here :)

Pull the finger

Click here!

The browsers I use

A few weeks ago I started using the Google browser, Chrome 4 beta. It is a lot faster then Firefox :D
The only reason I still use Firefox sometimes is the Firebug :)

The only problem with Chrome is that it doesn't display pdf files. I searched around and I found the fix. Just resize the window and the document magically appears :D

Firefox vs Chrome
What is better in FF:
    - Firebug
    - how you can search in the history, you just type part of the URL or the page title and it searches in the history
    - you can delete pages from the history just pressing "Delete"

What is better in Chrome:
    - speed
    - syncing browsing data with your Google account, this way if you have more computers you can have all your bookmarks and history everywhere :)

I'm waiting for FF 4, and I'm curious if it will beat Chrome 4, but if Chrome will have Firebug I will downgrade Firefox to testing browser  :)

My Browsers:
    - Chrome: main browser
    - Firefox: only for debugging
    - Opera: did you know it has a torrent client? ;)
    - ie: just for testing or downloading other browsers on a fresh windows install :D

Happy Birthday Firefox

FIVE YEARS OF Firefox

ie sucks

I had to disable the lightbox on ie because it throws an error...

 Use FIREFOX!!!

 

ie is evil, stop using it!