Ernie Leseberg

Site Rebuild

Ernie — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 14:00:37 +0000

For a while I have had 2 blogs, but both have been very quiet. Time to rectify this, so I am merging the personal site into the business / software development one, here at ernieleseberg.com. Things will be a bit messy for the time being, but that is better than nothing at all. No related read more » No related posts.

Is it a startup business or hobby?

Ernie — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 19:37:52 +0000

Read a great quote over at ReadWriteWeb Start in the comments of the article on Startup Rules of the Road.

Learn early that business is about *money* and *time*. If you aren’t making people money, saving them money or saving them time, you don’t have a business, you have a hobby.

The only modification I would make is that, you may not need to save the time or money, at least have them think they are.

Jigoshop v1.0 beware

Ernie — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 12:15:27 +0000

Jigoshop recently released v1.0 of their WordPress e-commerce plugin. Beware the upgrade from the existing version is far from smooth. This was found out the hard way when a client updated their site. Tax calculations, featured products shortcode and products out of stock are just some of the errors encountered.

There are fixes in the support forum, but I would suggest waiting for v1.01 at a minimum.

New Free Stock Photo Site

Drupal Redirects Deletion

Ernie — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 02:00:07 +0000

As part of a system data migration to Drupal 7, we have been using the Redirect module to handle redirects from old urls to the new.
This works fine, but as part of our fine tuning of the import process we clean out some of the content and then reimport. A node_delete does not remove the redirect so later when the redirect is added, the system returns a PDO Exception.

SQLSTATE[23000]: Integrity constraint violation: 1062 Duplicate entry ‘bqE28udxgWSfKTpH2U8SDvptZ7T_dRP6dEpCPPDGJuU’ for key ‘hash’

Unfortunately there is no documentation for the redirect module, but after looking through the code, I was able to come up with a modification to the import script that deletes out the relevant redirects.

Below is a generic version of the relevant code. It does depend on knowing either the old or new url. In this from alias we know the new.

$deletedCount = 0;
$nodeTypes = array('type1', 'type2');

$nodeList = "'" . implode("','", $nodeTypes) . "'";
//fetch the nodes we want to delete
$query = "SELECT nid, type FROM {node} WHERE type IN($nodeList)";

$result = db_query($query);
foreach ($result as $row) {
	// Need to delete any redirects attached to a node otherwise duplicate key issues when try and save later
	$node = node_load($row->nid);
	// We need either redirect from or to for delete. We can get the to based on alias.
	$alias = drupal_lookup_path('alias', 'node/' . $node->nid);
	if ($alias) {
		redirect_delete_by_path($alias);
	}
	// Now we can delete the actual content
	node_delete($row->nid);
	$deletedCount += 1;
}

Google and duplicate content

15 Years of KDE

Ernie — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 10:02:26 +0000

It is coming on 15 years since the original announcement for KDE. For most of my time using Linux KDE has been my preferred desktop environment and still is today.
The first time I saw KDE was in about 1998/9 when I installed Mandrake on my aging Windows PC. It took a few years before KDE/Linux became my default environment and then I did head to Gnome land around KDE4/4.1. But that is history.
Today I run Kubuntu not only for personal use but also business and software development. By the weekend it will be Kubuntu 11.10 with KDE 4.7.2.
And should I go down the tablet route, KDE might have me covered with Plasma Active.

Flowerella – New Site

Ernie — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 13:13:51 +0000

The website for Flowerella is now live. Flowerella services the area around Gordon in the north of Sydney. It is part an online flower shop, and also information about the great work they do for functions and weddings.

The site is built on WordPress, and uses a modified version of Jigoshop to handle the online shop. The site design was done by Matt and I turned it into a WordPress theme. Not the most complicated WP site, with pretty standard plugins and a custom type to handle the testimonials.

Best of luck Flowerella.

No related posts.

WooCommerce – No Thanks

Ernie — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 12:17:13 +0000

So WooThemes have released v1 of WooCommerce an ecommerce plugin for WordPress. This is a fork of the Jigowatt ecommerce plugin Jigoshop. Given the GPL licensing of the code the fork was legally fine, but I found the whole process ethically dubious. The reason for the fork seemed to be purely for financial gain given their own attempts to create an ecommerce plugin had failed and they could not come to a commercial agreement with Jigowatt or at least 1 other similar plugin development group.
I have 1 site about to go live using Jigoshop, but another in early stages of development. It would be derelict of me not to at least check out WooCommerce for the sake of my client.

Features

Having a core WP developer like Mark Jaquith give WooCommerce a security audit is a good move, especially given the relative immaturity of the plugin code.
The feature list of the 2 plugins are still pretty similar and this is to be expected given the short time of the split. An interesting difference is that WooCommerce has built in HTML emails & up-sells / cross-sells functionality. These are premium paid extras in Jigoshop. But is it based on the same code? If so, an interesting way to undercut the competitors financial model. There are other paid extensions for both systems with some cross over.

Download

Ok, I still have serious reservations, but lets download and compare if there is a compelling reason to switch to WooCommerce. Hit the download button and up pops a window, “REGISTER TO DOWNLOAD THIS PRODUCT”. You have to be kidding me, and at that point I shut down the tab for that site. No thanks WooCommerce.

And Another Door Opens

Ernie — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 11:09:47 +0000

So as previously posted I am leaving McCann, leads to the search for a new developer position.
Luckily I have found a new Senior Web Developer position with Australasian Medical Publishing and I am really looking forward to it. It is a 12 month contract where I will be working on a project that is consolidating a number of sites from a variety of platforms to running on Drupal. My experience with Drupal is limited and not recent (around v 4.x), but data conversions are something I have plenty of experience with and at least 1 system is WordPress which I know very well these days.
There will be a steep learning curve around Drupal, but I have always liked a challenge. And I have heard plenty of good about Drupal in terms of flexibility and power that it will be interesting to compare to WordPress and Joomla which I have worked with in more recent times.

A door closes

A door closes

Ernie — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 13:09:25 +0000

Back in April I accepted a full time position as the Tech Lead at McCann Sydney, but just the other day myself and the development side of the digital team have been told our positions are to be made redundant and dev work outsourced. This was not totally unexpected, but still an obvious personal disappointment. I enjoyed my time at McCann and was proud of the work we had achieved.

So that door closes but I am not sure which door will be next for me. I like the combination of being part developer, part system admin. The one area I would like to pursue is around improved dev processes. Its the area I wanted to improve at McCann but there never seemed to be the time.

And Another Door Opens

Domains for sale

Ernie — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 12:17:59 +0000

As part of my focus on freelance software development, I am selling off many of the domain names I have collected over the years. Some have had real sites on them, while others were just ideas.
All are for sale through sedo and the ~~deveview~~ domain is up for auction which ends on February 24, 2011 04:34 AM CET.