javacoffee.de

Some of you may know the newsletter module simplenews for drupal. If you’ve ever tried it, I am sure you soon realized, it’s a mess. The template functionality is too complicated and poor, emails are send via cron, you have no statistics and only poor ones with other extending modules…
Because of that, I think many people will change the newsletter system and maybe outsource it, so that you have to export your existing simplenews subcribers with username and some more data, than just the email address. Unfortunately there is no …

Day two of getting more into Ruby programming and I must say: Ruby can be fun! Okay, a few people seem to be really mad about it and see the language as an answer to everything, but I think there are some advantages to other languages, especially when it comes to string manipulation, iteration or string masking, but every language has its pros and cons.

I had to get into some ruby programming for my job and so I decided to refresh my memories a bit more. It became more or less a tradition of mine to write some network or internet code to get into a language and so here’s a first result.
It’s just a simple function for making a HTTP request on a given target. On success it returns an HTTP object, on error nil. It’s nothing fancy, but it should be reliable and maybe helps someone for his/her project…

Since April 2009 Google offers some nice feature in web search called Suggest, which is the  list of search queries you see,when you type in some search query into Google. I think everyone knows and uses it…
In addition to this nice helper on the website itself, Google also provides the same results as a feed or javascript code, which made me think of some way to utilize it and it seems to be a perfect helper for keyword research issues. The magical URL  is: http://www.google.com/complete/search with its parameters.
Parameters are:

hl: string value which determines …

Maybe it’s the worst code I have ever written, but it was also my very first project in C++ and lost for years, because of my stupidity. Now, about four years later, rasco found an old copy of the source on some backup DVD and made the code and game alive again…

You need to do a 301 or 302 redirect, but have no access to the server configuration files or the .htaccess file? Unfortunately not all hosters allow you to edit the .htaccess file, where you could easily set a redirect via the line:
Redirect /oldpage.html http://www.example.com/newpage.html [R=301,L]
I recently had exactly that problem, but PHP has some nice function, that helped me out: header(). The function allows you to send a raw HTTP header to the client browser. A 301 or 302 redirect is stored in the header section and so we can …

For my work I had to make several wordpress installations with the same basic plugins and themes over and over again. Maybe you know that pain in the ass, but I got sick of downloading and extracting all the stuff manually, so I decided to write some handy script to do the job for me.
Within the script you can extend the list of plugins and themes to be downloaded, to fit your custom purposes.
Important: If new versions of plugins are available you have to edit the URLs in the array! …

Some days ago I posted an article about fetching the actual hot trends from Google. Today, I wrote the TrendFetcher library, a simple PHP class/library, that gives you a nice jquery flavoured “trend ticker” with the latest hot trends from Google, the actual trends from Twitter and some API access.

For my new job I had to get into Drupal, it’s structure, features, so maybe there could be more Drupal stuff here, in the future…
For my first approach I created some tiny drupal twitter module that displays the timeline in a block element, called iTweet. You can choose whether to show the timeline of a specific user or (if none is given) to show the public timeline.
The module is nothing special and lacks of some features like caching. You should not implement the module into sites with heavy traffic, because every …

Yay! Now, the the first step is done and a computer opponent is added to the game. Next and last step will be the network code.
Stay tuned…
Download & Project page
Windows package: http://threet.googlecode.com/files/3t_winXP_1.0.zip
Source package: http://threet.googlecode.com/files/3t_sources_1.0.zip
Project page: http://code.google.com/p/threet/
Have fun with the game…