Author Archives: Daniel Skinner

Custom sorting order in LINQ (ORDER BY WEIGHTING)

By Daniel Skinner | Published: March 18, 2009

I have developed a C# LINQ extension method to allow very flexible ordering by assigning weightings to the sort keys of the elements to be ordered. I was inspired by the functionality offered by SQL Server’s ORDER BY CASE WHEN: The extension method I have created lets you pass a lambda function which allows the [...]

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String.Capitalize in C# (PHP’s ucwords in C#)

By Daniel Skinner | Published: February 25, 2009

I have been playing around with C# recently and found the need for functionality similar to that provided by PHP’s ucwords() function. I dont think this exists in C# as standard so here is a simple extension method to achieve ucwords in C# using a little bit of LINQ (the extremely useful Aggregate extension method) [...]

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Cloning Zend_Config without side-effects

By Daniel Skinner | Published: August 26, 2008

Cloning in PHP5 PHP5 with its much improved object-oriented style passes objects by reference by default. To create a copy of an object, a new construct ‘clone’ is introduced. Cloning an object in PHP5 creates a shallow copy – any properties that are references to other variables, will remain references. Additionally, PHP5 brings the __clone() [...]

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Install phpUnderControl on CentOS 5

By Daniel Skinner | Published: June 12, 2008

If you follow this guide you should start with a basic CentOS 5 installation with Subversion setup correctly and end up with a working installation of phpUnderControl.

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External CSS won’t load in IE7

By Daniel Skinner | Published: April 5, 2008

I just spent a while wondering why IE7 wouldn’t make use of an external stylesheet when it worked in Firefox no problems. The page is in UTF-8 and the .css file was also encoded in UTF-8 but IE7 simply refused to render the page using the CSS rules. I have no idea  what the problem [...]

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Link Targets in XHTML

By Daniel Skinner | Published: March 15, 2008

I always prefer to build websites in valid XHTML as it allows for a stricter, more maintainable envorinment to build websites than traditional HTML. However, there are a few features of HTML I like to make use of. For example, making links open in new windows using the target attribute is unsupported by XHTML.

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Chaining with MooTools 1.2 – Tutorial

By Daniel Skinner | Published: January 31, 2008

A short tutorial on how to use Chaining in MooTools.

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Zend Certified Engineer!

By Daniel Skinner | Published: January 31, 2008

I finally got round to booking the Zend PHP 5 Exam and successfully passed earlier this week!

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Nofollow on WordPress Comments Still?

By Daniel Skinner | Published: January 15, 2008

I have only just noticed that comments on this WordPress blog have rel=”nofollow” set as default. I believe that if someone is willing to contribute to a blog by commenting then the least they deserve is an inlink to their site. A quick search shows that this is the default for all WordPress installations. The [...]

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Lightview by Nick Stakenburg

By Daniel Skinner | Published: January 12, 2008

Nick has just released Lightview (another neat project) to the public. Lightview allows you to augment your images. It provides an excellent way of creating a slideshow or simply showing a large version of a thumbnail without resorting to popups. Effects are used to create very appealing slideshows and image galleries. From the Lightview project [...]

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