Jason Ashdown's Blog of Wonders

I have finally migrated my site over to my VPS. It loads a lot quicker and I have more control over it. I was very disappoint with the service my last host provider was giving me (www.streamline.net). I would strongly advise AGAINST using them as they have no refund policy and are also part of the scummy chain Fasthosts who have a terrible reputation anyway.

I will be cleaning up old posts that I don’t won’t to keep (sorry search engines!) but will be populating the site with new and “read worthy” content soon :)

Thanks for dropping by if you do actually read my blog. I treat my blog just as a general dumping ground for all my interests, thoughts and professional opinion. Sometimes there is stuff worth reading :)

Just to let people know, I will be changing my website soon and will be removing most of my older (useless) posts.

I wish to post quality article about web development on my blog to help others and to show my wide, diverse knowledge.

I’m afraid I have a lot of work to do with changing my webhosts and sorting out my domain host for this year but as soon as it’s sorted I am going to relaunch this site.

I hope you look forward to it ^_^

I am currently investigating the best way to style an options page in the admin area of WordPress.

Anybody know of any good ways to theme, style, layout an options page?

Add a comment with your thoughts and any useful links ;)
I will then post a tutorial based on your findings!

I’ve been playing around with the Zend Framework for the last couple of weeks and I love the MVC methods and it’s very well structured and comes with full documentation (very much like CodeIgniter which I’ve used but CI lacked the sustenance for my projects which I desired.)…

So what’s so annoying you may ask?

What bugs me is the naming conventions of methods and functions… as I mentioned, I’ve been trying to get to grips with the framework over the last few weeks but progress is slow. What’s slowing me down? Remembering the naming conventions.

I understand that Zend are trying to create a framework that can be used by a wide range of developers by using verbose names but sometimes I feel they are clunky, unnecessary and hard to remember. Zend’s great for decoupling and using it in anyway you want but it also seems to be it’s own enemy with making simple tasks hard to comprehend.

I find that I am forever creating new classes each time I want to use a Validator or use my Auth functions… I still have a lot to learn, so many of these problems might be solved with a different approach (like extending the classes more). But I’ve yet to find the hidden tricks.

I am currently in the middle of coding my first plugin for WordPress when I came across my first stumbling block…
Why doesn’t my jQuery code work in the admin area of WordPress??

After some probing on Google, the answer was revealed to me. Basically WordPress doesn’t use “$()” for jQuery, that’s reserved for ProtoType, which is also bundled with WordPress. Instead you have to use “jQuery(‘field’).” in order to get it working.

This article explains it in more detail.

Well I thought I would have a go installing the new Wordpress 2.5 to see how easy it was to setup. It was a quick & smooth installation. Wordpress really does live up to its famous 5 minute install :)

I might actually write something for this site this time. I shall publish screenshots for some of my latest work and also discuss current web development projects that I am involved in.

If you do happen to stumble upon this blog by accident, welcome! But I shall just be treating this as a general dumping ground for my work and thoughts so that I can share them with others.