Elliot Haughin

I’m back

Elliot Haughin — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 10:05:15 +0000

My site was recently down for a couple of days. And, it looks like I lost it all. I do have backups, but I decided this would be an ideal opportunity to make some changes. So I’ve decided to start again here with a fresh server (now running lighttpd) and a clean wordpress database. I’ll [...]

CodeIgniter 1.7.x, ‘Core’ 2.0, CodeIgniter Reactor, Bitbucket, Zips… It’s all rather messy

Elliot Haughin — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 02:45:41 +0000

It was just a few months ago that the CodeIgniter community began to explode with a torrent of frustration that CodeIgniter simply wasn’t progressing as a framework. There were also a few prominent developers considering abandoning the framework in favour of more active alternatives. My favourite summary of the whole situation came in the form [...]

CodeIgniter 2.0 In Progress – The Critical Changes, Implications, and What You Should Know

Elliot Haughin — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:21:07 +0000

Well, it’s been a long time coming, but Ellislab have finally done it, they’ve officially let us know about CodeIgniter 2.0. This is a huge step forward and shows that Ellislab are dedicated to this, their only free product. I get plenty of emails asking me if this version of CodeIgniter would be released, and [...]

Search Engine Optimization – The ‘Essential’ Tips

Elliot Haughin — Mon, 04 May 2009 02:16:22 +0000

Most of the companies I’ve worked for have had someone in charge of ‘Search Engine Optimization’. The idea is to optimize your sites for search engines to help improve rankings for specific terms. But can it be done? And more importantly, how should it be done? SEO – What is it? Wikipedia has a rather interesting entry on search [...]

How To Have Successful Client Meetings or Interviews

Elliot Haughin — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 02:07:40 +0000

Since I’m now freelancing full-time, I’ve had the opportunity to go meet some clients, but there are some important things I’ve learned about these meetings that every developer, designer, copyrighter, well… pretty much everybody should know. These tips also translate well to interviews; so if you’re job-hunting right now, bear these in mind. Appearances matter, [...]

Monitor Your Servers and EC2 Instances with Cacti

Elliot Haughin — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 02:24:12 +0000

I recently had the job of setting up cacti on an Ubuntu an Amazon EC2 Instance, so I thought I’d share with you all how to get it running, and what you can monitor with it. Note: This tutorial is designed for an ubuntu based server, but will translate to most unix setups 1. How cacti [...]

Kick-Start Your Web Application With These Tools

Elliot Haughin — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 01:58:54 +0000

Building great web applications doesn’t have to be a long and slow process. In fact, people have been practicing ‘rapid development‘ for quite a while. But if you’re looking to get your web application off to a flying start, you really should consider using these great tools. They can help you get a basic shell [...]

ExpressionEngine 2.0 Accepting Developer Preview Applications

Elliot Haughin — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 00:47:19 +0000

Ellislab have just announced that they are now accepting developer preview applications for ExpressionEngine 2.0. It’s been a long time coming – ExpressionEngine 2.0 was originally anticipated for the Summer 2008. But, as all good developers do, that line has changed to: “When it’s ready”. For many of us, we first saw ExpressionEngine 2.0 in action when it was shown at [...]

10 Reasons I Don’t Like Smashing Magazine

Elliot Haughin — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 12:56:44 +0000

Ok, so the title may be smothered in irony, but I just couldn’t help myself! Smashing Magazine seems to have thrown itself into the limelight as design and development’s ‘must-read’ web magazine. But, it’s time for a change, because it really could do better. Before you jump right to the bottom and call me a heathen [...]

Building Web Applications That Scale

Elliot Haughin — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 00:44:16 +0000

uring my time as a web developer I’ve had the opportunity to work on some application that needed serious scalability. But scaling isn’t something we always think of when we set off to build an application. So, here’s a few tips I’ve picked up on the way that can help you build applications that are [...]

The Truth about Freelance Web Development

Elliot Haughin — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 23:01:18 +0000

Most web developers have thought about going freelance at some point in their career. And for me, that time is now. After moving from London back home to Cumbria, I’ve decided to start freelancing. But there are some important things you should know if you’re deciding to go down the freelance route yourself; or indeed [...]

Building a Web Identity

Elliot Haughin — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 22:56:48 +0000

What is a Web Identity? Your web identity is essentially you, online. It’s everything you do, who you are, and what you get up to on the wonderful and expansive internet. Parts of your online identity can include: Blogs Twitter Flickr Social Networks (Facebook, MySpace, Bebo etc…) And, whilst everyone probably has some form of [...]

Analytics Integrates Adsense

Elliot Haughin — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 02:31:10 +0000

Google Analytics is one of the most-used web stats tools available. Mainly due to its great features, and sweet price point ($0.00)… And now, Google have decided to take the next logical step. They’re going to be integrating your Adsense statistics straight into analytics, allowing you to better analyze your site and how to better [...]

CodeIgniter 1.7.0 – A Step in the Right Direction

Elliot Haughin — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 03:53:37 +0000

It’s been quite some time since CodeIgniter has seen a major update, and this week we’ve finally got one! I actually got the news via twitter, which shows just how much of a mainstream communication platform it’s becoming! CodeIgniter 1.7.0 has plenty of new features and bug fixes, but I’m not going to list them all. [...]

Web Developers – We Don’t Need No Education?

Elliot Haughin — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 23:06:15 +0000

September is the start of the new school year, and we’re all fresh to do some learning after the summer right? When it comes to web development, I don’t actually have any qualifications for my industry. Well, I have an A-Level in Computing (*woo hoo!*). But, let’s face it, that’s not exactly a tough one [...]

CodeIgniter – One Heck of a Can Opener

Elliot Haughin — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 23:00:36 +0000

As a huge CodeIgniter enthusiast, I was asked to say a few words about the framework that’s completely changed my development style. And, always wanting to give back to the community, I decided to write a little bit of text explaining exactly why I think CodeIgniter is so good. There is also an audio version of some [...]

My Pocket Guide To Blogging

Elliot Haughin — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 22:58:12 +0000

Blogging has definitely become the free press of the modern world. With availability to anyone with an Internet connection, blogs are more popular than ever. But, many of my friends, and indeed colleagues don’t know why I blog. What’s my reason for it? And what’s the goal? I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the [...]

Building Web 2.0 Ready Applications with XML-RPC

Elliot Haughin — Thu, 29 May 2008 22:53:35 +0000

For the last month at work I’ve been building an admin backend for a huge application. The application runs as a large Java XML-RPC server which takes request, performs database and cache operations and returns data. At first I hated this idea, mainly because it was so different to the typical lamp development flow I [...]

CodeIgniter v1.6.2 Released

Elliot Haughin — Fri, 16 May 2008 22:50:26 +0000

From CodeIgniter Official News: We’re pleased to announce that CodeIgniter version 1.6.2 has been officially released. This release includes more than 29 bug fixes and 34 feature additions and enhancements. Among these are some improvements to Active Record and transactional database interaction, the introduction of a constants file, improvements to the Zip library, a Compatibility Helper, new [...]

Ellislab Session at SXSW – Video

Elliot Haughin — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 05:47:20 +0000

If you weren’t lucky enough to get to SXSW this year, don’t worry! Andru Edwards from GearLive has posted a video of the Ellislab session. The session discusses the migration of ExpressionEngine to CodeIgniter. After the speaches and demonstration there’s a question and answer session which answered a couple of the points I’d been pondering about. It’s [...]

Exploring Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Elliot Haughin — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 05:39:25 +0000

This week I’ve been reading a great deal about Amazon EC2, a service which lets you rent servers from Amazon’s huge server farms from as little as 10 cents/hour ($73/month). The principle behind EC2 is genius. You select which ‘AMI’ (linux image) you want to start your server with, then choose what spec you want. [...]

Test Sites in Any Platform – Live!

Elliot Haughin — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 05:33:42 +0000

I recently wrote a post mentioning Browsershots – a service which allows you to request screenshots of your site in different browsers/operating systems. While that’s all well and good, how about the ability to test things live? Like AJAX, Javascript and all that other fun magic. Well, now there’s a service that lets you do all that! [...]

Testing Designs – Cross Platform

Elliot Haughin — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 05:28:59 +0000

I’m a huge Apple guy, and I love Firefox 3.0 on the Mac. But, due to the work I do, I find that I’m always having to fire up the PC in the office to test my CSS is working ok in IE. There’s even issues with Firefox on different platforms too (mainly due to [...]

Expression Engine 2.0 Powered by CodeIgniter Coming Soon

Elliot Haughin — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 05:27:23 +0000

At South by Southwest a few weeks ago, Ellislab gave a preview of the new ExpressionEngine 2.0. The demo shows the beautiful new backend in action, with some top-notch new features (I particularly like the full-screen editing). However, the main announcement that stood out to me was this: The big news of the day in my mind, is that ExpressionEngine [...]

Content is Still King

Elliot Haughin — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 05:21:23 +0000

For years search engine optimization gurus and marketing eggheads have been arguing over the best way to increase a site’s popularity and reach. One approach suggested by the SEO geeks is that backlinks alone are what is needs to push your site through the ranks of search results to the golden first page, therefore increasing [...]

Handling Passwords In CodeIgniter

Elliot Haughin — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 05:12:14 +0000

After an extremely long debate over at the CodeIgniter Forums, I’ve decided to compile the ‘outcome’ of this discussion here, and show you all the best practices for storing passwords in CI. First of all, we need to make sure that the password sent from the user to us is encrypted, so that prying eyes cant get [...]

Optimizing and Scaling your CodeIgniter Application – with Benchmarks!

Elliot Haughin — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 04:48:18 +0000

There’s been a few discussions recently about optimizing CodeIgniter applications to make them faster, more reliable, and scalable. So, let’s look at some methods of doing this, with ‘real’ numbers and benchmarks. ‘Baseline’ – The Bog Standard First of all, we need to build a little controller that does ’stuff’. It’s not extremely intensive, but [...]

Amazon S3 – The future of all our storage needs?

Elliot Haughin — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 04:00:53 +0000

Since I discovered Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service) I’ve been curious about it. Firstly, it has a very unusual business model; offering unlimited amounts of storage and bandwidth, charging you for what you use. Their rates are also suprising low: United States Storage $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used Data Transfer $0.10 per GB – all data [...]

CodeIgniter 1.6.0 Released

Elliot Haughin — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 01:19:52 +0000

As previously posted, CodeIgniter 1.6.0 has now been released to the public! Here’s a quick overview of the update: A Database Forge class: database agnostic table and field manipulation An enhanced Active Record library A revised Session Class with “flash variables” and additional security An extendable Model Class with auto-loadable Models Extendable Helpers, and additions and enhancements [...]

Progressing your career as a developer

Elliot Haughin — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 01:10:36 +0000

Most of my subscribers are probably web developers, or have a similar profession. And, for that reason, I thought I’d share with you a theory I have about our careers. A great deal of talent exists within our industry, and the kind of people who work in web development generally have the following qualities: Very [...]

CodeIgniter 1.6.0 Release Approaches, But PHP4 Will Remain Supported

Elliot Haughin — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 01:06:13 +0000

For almost 9 months now CodeIgniter has remained fairly static, seeing only a minor revision or two, but after an news comes from Derek Allard that version 1.6.0 is approaching completion! Despite this new milestone release, the wise folks over at EllisLabs have decided to continue support for PHP4. There’s been many great debates on this decision, [...]

MySQL: DELETE across multiple tables using JOIN.

Elliot Haughin — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 01:02:53 +0000

Ever had a situation where you’ve wanted to say delete rows from lots of tables in your database that can all be associated with some form of join? Well, after a few minutes of playing around, I’ve found a nice way to do this in just 1 query: [sql]DELETE u, up, upc, ut, utp FROM [...]

PHP Upload Progress with PHP 5.2 & APC

Elliot Haughin — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 00:28:05 +0000

I decided it would be a good idea to update PHP to allow me to use the new Alternative PHP Cache hook to get access to current upload file progress. Sounds good right? = well, it’s much simpler than you would think. First you’ve got to have PHP 5.2 installed on your system. For me [...]