Thingy Ma Jig is the blog of Nicholas Thompson and contains any useful tips, sites and general blog-stuff which are considered interesting or handy!
22 September 2014
OS X
Homebrew
For anyone that uses Homebrew a lot, its very easy to amasse many casks (installed packages) and never quite know which ones are still needed. I did some googling and found a really interesting blog post by Mark H. Nichols about listing all brew dependencies.
The Date Picker widget, when using webforms, defaultly appears in American form (Month, Day, Year). For UK sites this isn't often desirable. Doing a quick google and I stumbled upon James Davidson's blog post on how to re-theme the element from earlier this year. I thought it was certainly one approach, but felt there must have been a neater alternative. So here is my approach:
15 October 2012
git
How to
tips
I recently needed to be able to run a regular git task on a folder and I didn't want to have to CD into that folder first. Annoyingly, there didn't seem to be an optional "path" parameter to git remote update, until I looked at the help file for Git.
23 August 2012
tips
I am a huge fan of the X Notifier extension for Chrome, however recently the developer has added an advertising component called Setaga. I don't recall agreeing or opt-ing into this, but its possible I did without thinking. In any case, I hate this and wanted to remove it.
It's usually considered best practice to run Drush under the same user account that the webserver runs on. Some modules, such as XML Sitemap, Advanced Aggregator and cTools, often try to alter or generate files. If you run Drush under your own account then these files may get generated as you (and therefore become unwritable by the webserver) or, if the files were generated by the webserver, are usually unwritable by your user which can mean you get errors and being unable to delete/unlink files.
09 March 2012
Drupal
New Relic
GreaseMonkey
New Relic is a great bit of kit - nobody can deny that. I recently needed to configure it on a standalone box so it could be open on a large screen so my colleagues and I could see the current status of our sites. New Relic has a Kiosk Mode which strips out some of the navigation from the page an optimises it for "viewing only". Very handy.
15 December 2011
Drupal
git
webdev
Have you ever needed or wanted to pull a remote Git Repository on Drupal.org down as a zip or tarball? You know, the way Github does? Most project releases have fairly recently built tarballs which is awesome - but Sandboxes do not (so it seems - please correct me if I'm wrong!).
The following snippet lets you "archive" a remote repository, pull it down as a tarball, and extract it in-place:
git archive --format=tar --prefix=PROJECT/ --remote=USERNAME@git.drupal.org:sandbox/USERNAME/123456789.git BRANCH | tar -xf -
14 November 2011
vim
Drupal
programming
According to the Drupal Coding Standards for Documenting Hook Implementations, its considered a good practice to quickly chuck a comment before any function which implements a Drupal hook (eg, hook_menu). This helps someone reading your code quickly see that the function is actually linked with a hook in Drupal and isn't just a function in your module to be called directly.
But… Well… The thing is… Does anyone else get bored of writing the following over and over again? I know do…
25 October 2011
javascript
programming
webdev
jquery
Christian Bach has made an awesome JQuery plugin to turn any HTML Table into a real-time sortable table using Jquery. I recently needed to turn this into a Bookmarklet so that I could embed it onto a page to sort a large table (I did not have access to the server-side code for this table).
14 September 2011
mysql
tips
Drupal
Ever needed to build a list which "sub-selects", say, 5 items from a given list of categories? This snippet should help.