Two lines of PHP code which will save your sessions

So you develop PHP applications and use sessions to move data from page to page. You may then also have the problem that session data is not retained, especially if you use a line of code like this:
header('Location:nextpage.php');
Or indeed if the session is not saved on a page refresh.
Enter these 2 lines:

session_regenerate_id(true);
session_write_close();
Put these at the end of your page to save the session data. Also if you use the header function above do something like this.

session_regenerate_id(true);
header('Location:nextpage.php');
session_write_close();

How to configure your Ubuntu localhost for PHP MVC URL routing

Step 1. Open a terminal and type
sudo gedit /etc/apache2/sites-available/default
or whatever text editor you like using to open up your apache configuration file for editing.
Step 2. Under the sections headed  <Directory /> and <Directory /var/www/>:
Change the line 'AllowOverride none' to 'AllowOverride All'.

Step 3.  Open up a terminal and type
hostname
This will display your hostname.

Step 4. Open up a terminal and type
sudo gedit /etc/hosts
or whatever text editor you like using to open up your hosts file for editing.
Step 5. Modify the first line so it reads
127.0.0.1    localhost localhost.localdomain yourhostname
Step 6. Open up a terminal and type
sudo a2enmod rewrite

Restart your computer.
It will now work.

How to set up sendmail on your Ubuntu LAMP localhost

This is beautifully simple:
Step 1. Open up a terminal and type

sudo apt-get install sendmail
This will install the complete sendmail application. It will take a minute or so to complete.

Step 2.  Open up a terminal and type

hostname

This will display your hostname.

Step 3.  Open up a terminal and type

sudo gedit /etc/hosts

or whatever text editor you like using to open up your hosts file for editing.

Step 4. Modify the first line so it reads

127.0.0.1    localhost localhost.localdomain yourhostname

Restart your computer.

It will now work.

Create unordered lists from lines of text using Emmet in Sublime text 2

Designers and developers of web sites often find they're having to convert text into HTML at the micro level despite all the tools we have available. Here is just one example of how Sublime Text 2 with the Emmet plugin can help. You may have to use alternative keys for macs.
Let's say we have 10 lines of text that we want turning into a HTML unordered list. OK, with Emmet we can select all the lines and wrap them with <ul></ul> using ctrl+alt+enter and typing ul, then enter again.
What we don't want to do from here is have to select each line individually, then press ctrl+alt+enter and typing li, then enter again.
What we can do is select all the lines, then ctrl+shift+l to split the selection into lines, then press ctrl+alt+enter and typing li, then enter again.
As you can imagine, this technique is useful across other circumstances where we have the text, but need to turn it into HTML.

Yet more fun with IE

I've been working with a good designer recently. To be fair to him, I've made more of an effort to accurately represent his work in IE 7 and 8. My layout has used twitter bootstrap and I discovered 2 things about CSS in IE along the way:
1. To style the <legend> tag, you need to encase your form elements in a <fieldset> tag.
2. To specifically target IE 7 and 8 in your styles, you need to add /9 to the end of styles. These will not affect your styles targeting good browsers. I put these specific styles at the bottom of my stylesheet so that I don't have to hunt round for them at a later date. Here are some examples below. Very quirky.

/*All IE 7 and 8 stuff*/

hr.bluehr
{
width:104.3%\9;
}

#formholder legend
{
margin-left:-6px\9;
}

input[type='text'], input[type='password']
{
width:94%\9;
}

.btn
{
border:1px dotted #EEEEEE\9;
margin-left:-0px\9;
}

Combining Twitter Bootstrap with Moodle

Moodle is an excellent LMS and Twitter Bootstrap an excellent page design framework so why not put them both together. Here's how.


Create a new theme location on your moodle installation by following these instructions. http://docs.moodle.org/24/en/Themes_FAQ#Why_is_the_new_theme_I_uploaded_not_showing_up_in_Theme_Selector.3F
You may suffer your new theme appearing with the name [[pluginname]]. If so, follow these instructions http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Themes#Getting_Your_Theme_to_Appear_Correctly_in_Theme_Selector
Download the Twitter Bootstrap theme from http://theming.sonsbeekmedia.nl/
Copy the contents of your downloaded theme into this directory.
Finally, you want to be in a situation where you can make your own small tweaks.
Open /theme/bootstrap/config.php
Add 'user_styles' to the end of the '$THEME->sheets' array.
Now create a file called /theme/bootstrap/style/user_styles.css. You can now put your tweaks in there such as:

p
{
font-family:Georgia,Serif;
}

Install and use LESSCSS on your ubuntu server

LESSCSS is an excellent progression in the development of stylesheets, but how do you install and use it on your ubuntu server?
The first thing we do is to install node-less. To do this through the terminal, use the command:
sudo apt-get install node-less
Right, that's the installation done. Yes, that easy.
Now let's create our LESSCSS stylesheet. Here is my simple example, which we'll put into a file named styles.less:

@blue:#00c;
@white:#FFFFFF;
body
{
background:@blue;
color:@white;
}

There are two ways of using LESSCSS.
The first way is to download, the less.js library from http://lesscss.org/, then simply refer to a LESSCSS stylesheet we created and subsequently call the library thus:.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<title>less test</title>
<link rel="stylesheet/less" type="text/css" href="styles.less">
<script src="less.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
</head>
<body>
<p>Hello World!</p>
</body>
</html>
The second way is to compile our LESSCSS stylesheet into a normal CSS. To do this, again go to the terminal, change to the directory containing your page e.g.
cd /var/www/test/less
Then compile the LESSCSS stylesheet into a normal CSS like this:
lessc styles.less > mystyle.css
Now you can just call your newly created CSS in your page, but this time without the need for the less.js library thus:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<title>less test</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="mystyle.css">
</head>
<body>
<p>Hello World!</p>
</body>
</html>