Last Instinct

I’ve updated the website of my friend Linn Nydrén. New features include online shopping through PayPal and VIP mailinglist. She has just released her new Holiday collection and you can even order Customized Clothing. So visit the l i n n n clothing web shop and make an order!

Now to the tech talk: I added form support, so that she could add forms from PayPal on her own. I also updated the js-libraries to include SWFAdress for deep linking with Flash and UFO for unobtrusive Flash embedding. SWFAdress is really tricky to get working. I think video tutorials take too much time, so someone should really make a great non-video tutorial on how to use it with Flash properly. But once it works, it does an excellent job.

I chose UFO instead to the newer SWFObject 2.0, since the syntax is cleaner and more consistent. Also, I had more trouble with SWFObject than UFO, especially with the static publishing method. I was also looking for an old thing called SWFSize, but I couldn’t find it. Then I realized that I didn’t need it, since the size constraint I wanted to achieve can be accomplished using min-width in CSS3.

One.com just upgraded their systems to PHP version 5.3.1 from 5.2.1. I think it’s great that they keep their systems updated, but it would be really nice if the could inform about these updates somewhere. On the other hand, their chat support was proved to be excellent once again, giving me the answers I needed in a couple of minutes or so.

The problem with the update was however with the new introduction of a very old syntax, used in Basic (and Visual Basic) back in the days when MC Hammer ruled the charts and AJAX was a household cleaner liquid or possibly a soccer team. The syntax is the goto command, used like this:

I would not recommend to use this syntax at all, since it mostly only makes things complicated!

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<?php
goto a;
echo 'Foo';
 
a:
echo 'Bar';
?>

The above example will output: Bar

However, this little command caused a lot of trouble on Linn’s site, where all the scripts included a function called goto(). The timing for all this misshappening was really bad, since Linn have a big fashion show coming up and I was in London at the time the site went down. The function is used for redirecting the user to other URL:s with some nice informative graphics in between. With the new command introduced, the function now caused a fatal error on every page, meaning the whole site was down. The problem was easily solved, but I really cannot understand why they would want to introduce that command?

PHP.net has put together a guide with more info about migrating from PHP 5.2.x to PHP 5.3.x.

I just put up a website for my friend Linn Nydren and her label Linnn Clothing. She is into designing clothes and have a gorgeous new collection for spring 2010. She is originally from sweden but lives in London and have her business there too. You should check it out if yo’re into fashion, design and clothes. You can also follow her work on Linnn Clothing on facebook.

The site is made in flash with my own old CMS shout in the backend, still going strong. I also connected Google Analytics to it, which I by the way love! =)

› http://linnn.co.uk/

This will be the beginning of a hopefully long journey and I’m gonna start it by putting up my old Content Management System. It’s a rather flexible system built on PHP and MySQL. I used to make a little money on it until I got my web developer job at Basilicon. Now I’m gonna put it up on the web for free just for fun, so enjoy!

The first thing I will have to do is rename it. It was called Shout, but I discovered that there was another CMS called Shout, so I have to think of another name. Any suggestions? I think I have to do some fine tuning to get it to work properly on my hosting at one.com, but then it should probably work anywhere.

It is actually powering these two sites, check them out.

› MEM Arkitekter
› Olof Molander