Introducing TV Show Tracker

Being an avid TV Show watcher I sometimes lose track of what I'm watching and in particular the episodes I've seen and the episodes I need to watch. I have a PlayOnHD hooked up in my living room which plays pretty much everything I throw at it however the interface is a bit lacking and I'm unable to mark which items I've seen.

Being a web developer I decided to quickly throw something together that will help me keep track of the shows I'm watching and tick off episodes once watched. I wanted it to be accessible from my iPhone & Ipad so I could tick watched episodes from the sofa and overall having it look pretty slick. Within a few weeks I had a working prototype on a personal subdomain which worked well and fufilled the need of tracking my shows.

With the app being useful for me I figured it may be useful for other people, that and plans of world domination in mind I started working on a multi-user version that will allow users to create an account and start to track all their shows from one place. After a few more weeks work I proudly present my TV Show Tracker (TVST) application. Registration is free for a 7 day trial and after that you can support the application and continue using it for a one time only flat fee of £10.

Double Ace Design

I've been doing freelance work along with my full time job to earn a little extra money, the company was setup way back in 2007 however I've recently started working a compressed 4 day week so that I can spend more time doing my own stuff.

One of the big things on my todo list was the company website and I've finally gotten round to launching it so without further ado I present Double Ace Design, read on for more info on how it all came about.

Responsive Images with PHP and jQuery

Responsive Web Design is quite a hot topic at the moment and I'm only just starting to dip my toe in the area. It started gaining popularity with the Responsive Web Design article from A List Apart Article by Ethan Marcotte who has a book pending on the subject by A Book Apart. I'll definitely pick up a copy when it's released on the 7th June as the other books in the publishing series are useful and great to have on the shelf.

The main crux of Responsive Web Design is using CSS media queries to switch the layout depending on the screen size. A site can be optimized and look great on a mobile device, a tablet and on a PC without affecting content or by crazily creating subdomains for mobile only versions of the site. In this article I'm going to go whizz through the topic and concentrate on responsive images and the solutions currently in place and finally go through my own custom solution using PHP and jQuery.

Using Apache to Compress HTML,CSS & Javascript

Just a quick tip that I've come across recently, add this to your .htaccess file and if your server supports gzip compression HTML, CSS and Javascript will be automatically compressed.

# compress types
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript

Not sure if the browser uses a cached version on subsequent requests so this technique may not be suitable for everything.

CakePHP 1.3.3 Admin Section Template Files

I've been getting to grips with the newest release of CakePHP which at the time of writing is 1.3.3. The first thing I usually do on an application is get a simple Admin section underway and here it is.

Everything has been included in a single zip file but you must first go through the motions of creating the database and update the database.php file as well as change a few things in the core.php file.