15th December, 2011 - Posted by David - No Comments
This post is a follow on from my previous post about the oAuth protocol in general in Ruby. Here I detail how to let a user authenticate themselves via Twitter to your web app, request a list of people they’re following (a GET operation) and how to follow a specific user (a POST operation). As » Read More
10th December, 2011 - Posted by David - No Comments
Recently I decided to figure out what the oAuth 1.0 protocol was all about and try to implement it in Ruby, as part of a way a) to practice by Ruby on Rails, b) have a look at the Twitter API and c) use both to get an understanding of how websites let you log » Read More
16th September, 2011 - Posted by David - No Comments
Last month I resigned my post from daft.ie and am about to take up a development position with dotMobi, a leading mobile Internet services company. I had done interviews with several places, while reading plenty of articles on various other companies’ hiring practices. At the end of these couple of months, I came to the » Read More
23rd August, 2011 - Posted by David - No Comments
Whenever anything generates a MySQL error at work, the whole technical team gets an email about it, with full debug info. We recently got one for an area that I look after, so it was up to me to investigate. The title of the error was a slightly cryptic Error: Duplicate entry ’0′ for key » Read More
23rd May, 2011 - Posted by David - 6 Comments
UPDATE: I’ve recently been asked by entertainment.ie to stop scraping thier licensed data, to which I’ve duly agreed. Thus, the app is no longer live. However, the lessons learned below are still valid. END Haven’t posted for a while, mainly because I’ve been busy trying to teach myself Ruby on Rails, so haven’t created anything » Read More
30th March, 2011 - Posted by David - No Comments
When you have users copying and pasting in data to forms on your website, which then gets stored in your database, you invariably end up with all sorts of ways of encoding and storing special characters. Ideally, these will end up in your database as the correct characters (such as € for the euro symbol), » Read More
23rd February, 2011 - Posted by David - No Comments
When I was working on rebuilding daft.ie’s mapping system for the modern web, it involved writing alot of Javascript (JS) code and loading this via a couple of JS source files, one external one from Google (i.e. the core Google Maps JS) and another from our own web-servers. It all worked fine in most browsers, » Read More
25th January, 2011 - Posted by David - No Comments
Today I read an interesting article on Google’s Webmaster Central blog about planned down time, for maintenance or whatever. Basically, you need to communicate to users and potential site-crawlers/indexers that the site is down, but it’s ok, it’ll be back up soon! My suggestion would be to do a mod-rewrite (if using Apache, but other » Read More
16th December, 2010 - Posted by David - No Comments
While working on Daft‘s Map Search facility, we naturally decided to integrate Google’s Street View (SV) as a feature, especially since we were one of the launch partners for the product in Ireland. We decided to do this as follows: For each property icon on the map, when you click on it, bring up a » Read More
2nd November, 2010 - Posted by David - 2 Comments
Quick Introduction I’ve written the front page and an ajax handler for a web application using Python and web.py. Here I give my thoughts on using a niche product (web.py) and some of the coding issues I had to figure out on my own, in case some one has similar problems. Read More
