Journal

Thursday, September 18, 2008

ExpressionEngine Extension: NoScript Messages

While working on a project recently I noted that ExpressionEngine uses a ‘JavaScript:history.go(-1)’ within the ‘User Message’ templates to allow you to return to the page from whence you came if you submit a form without completing all the required fields, perform a search and return no results etc.

I wanted to ‘do the right thing’ and ‘hacked’ an alternative as documented in this thread on the ExpressionEngine Forums. This hack picked up the referring page URL and passed that to the User Message template instead.

I kept a note of my hack and when I had to upgrade this particular install to the latest point release I set about re-implementing it. At this point Derek Jones helpfully pointed out that I could create an ExpressionEngine Extension to do the same job, negating the need to ‘re-implement’ the hack again and again. Thanks for the prod in the right direction Derek! Here’s my first ExpressionEngine Extension – ‘NoScript Messages’.

Download: ext.noscript_messages.php.zip

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

Sunday, August 17, 2008

Building websites with ExpressionEngine 1.6

This week I had a rather nice email from a lady called Alice at Packt Publishing here in the UK. Packt are a publishing company specialising in IT focused books and have just published a new book last month called ‘“Building websites with ExpressionEngine 1.6”:http://www.packtpub.com/building-websites-with-expressionengine-1.6/book’.

The book, written by Leonard Murphy is aimed at ExpressionEngine beginners. Alice has been kind enough to send me a copy for review so once I’ve had a chance to read it I’ll report back and let you know my thoughts.

In the mean time why not take a look at a sample chapter.

Saturday, August 16, 2008

Catching an expiring domain name

From the moment that I decided to go it alone and start my own business with my wife 3 years back I was keen to ensure that I bagged a .com as our primary domain. However it very soon became obvious that the chances of settling on a name that we were happy with and it being available as a .com were pretty much nil.

After what seemed like an age we settled on a name (Nine Four) and purchased the only available domains, the .co.uk and .net. The .com was already registered but not in use so we held out some small hope that we might manage to get hold of it one day.

How much?

In October 2006, just over a year after we started the business I decided to approach the current domain name owner, hoping that a reasonable offer might be well received. However he was clearly not in the mood to be reasonable and wanted no less than $25,000. Obviously I declined.

Thanks for the reminder

Almost another 2 years passed and to be honest I had for the most part forgotten about the .com. Resigning myself to the fact that I would never be able to get hold of it and that perhaps it wasn’t so important after all.

On the 6th of August I received an email from a company called Tripod UK Ltd alerting me to the fact that ninefour.com had not been renewed by it’s previous owner and that it was soon to be released. They claimed an 80% success rate in catching dropping domains but you know what… I fancied giving it a shot myself.

So I read up on Mike Davidson’s Blog about his experience snatching ‘newsvine.com’ and formulated a plan of attack.

Drop what?

After a certain period (usually 75 days) a domain name ‘drops’ and becomes available for re-registration. The trick is to know exactly when the drop will occur. Unfortunately there’s no way of being privy to the exact time or date so as Mike suggests, your best bet is to enlist the services of a company that will continually monitor the status of the domain name for you and automatically attempt to register it as soon as it becomes available.

Mike suggests using SnapNames.com, Enom.com and Pool.com. Enom.com didn’t seem to have an obvious option for back-ordering a domain name so in the end I went with NameJet.com.

SnapNames seemed like it was going to be my best bet as they have a clear and open auction process and if there was no competition for the domain when it dropped they would automatically register it for me for just $60.

NameJet seemed to offer a similar service to SnapNames but Pool was a lot less enticing. Although I didn’t get to experience their auction process in the end, from what I read on Mikes blog it isn’t great for the buyer, only great for Pool.

The auction

I was one of the lucky ones I guess because SnapNames bagged ninefour.com. I soon discovered though that I was not the only bidder, there were two of us… I guess it could have been much worse.

My counterpart had opened the bidding at $60. I had set a maximum bid amount of $300 prior to the auction so SnapNames had automatically bid on my behalf to $70. The auction process lasts between one and fourteen days, in this case the auction was 7 days so I made a note in the diary and got back to work.

A week later I was regularly refreshing the SnapNames auction page to check the status of the order as the hours counted down. With no come back bid from my counterpart I was feeling confident. I did a little research online based on his/her SnapNames username and found that s/he had a history of opening the bidding on a number of names but didn’t seem to bid any further. This was all good.

The last minutes

With less than 10 minutes to go I’m outbid. I was gutted, all of a sudden from nowhere the other bidder had upped the ante. After a few minutes Jo and I decided to up our maximum bid. SnapNames extends the auction end time by 5 minutes every time a new winning bid is placed so we knew we had to be bold. We entered a maximum bid of $800 and sat tight. 10 minutes or so later we were the proud new owners of ninefour.com, the final bid being $579.

It was more than we had hoped to spend but I think it was worth it. As a business your brand is probably one of your most valuable assets (in addition to your employees!) so in that context $579 seems like a small price to pay. Certainly beats $25,000!

Monday, July 28, 2008

Free ‘thinking’ Breakfast, Reading, UK… Tmrw!

My good friend Glen from Sub Lime is looking for people to come along to a free ‘thinking’ Breakfast at Green Park in Reading tmrw AM…

Find out about the Current Economic Climate and how it is affecting small businesses.

The headline speaker is Entrepreneur ‘Jamie Martin’ who was on the BBC show ‘Did they pay their mortgage off in 2 years”. You can see highlights on his YouTube channel.

The event is tomorrow (29th) and will start at 8:00 – 8:30 and finish at 10:00am – 10:30am.

Here is the agenda:

1. Welcome reception (Tea and coffee)
2. Introduction of Jamie Martin, Regus and Barclays
3. Results of questionnaire survey
4. Jamie Martin talks about success and failure in business.
5. Interviews Mike Garth, former engineer for Toyota F1
6. Barclays will provide expert knowledge about protecting your business during the economic downturn
7. Regus imparts their extensive knowledge of business overheads
8. Summary / Q&A
9. Networking – Free breakfast (bacon rolls), tea, coffee and fruit juice.
10. Live Prize Draw; Barclays Credit Management Tool for a year, Regus Business World Card and21 days free UK accommodation

Signup here: http://www.sub-lime.co.uk/regus

Monday, July 21, 2008

ExpressionEngine Plug-in: Encode/Decode

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!