This is the third year of CSS Naked Day, and the first time I joint it. So today my stylesheets are turned off.

Here is a simple way of exporting data to excel documents. With utf-8 encoding you can use special nordic letters like ø, æ and å.

<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; line-height: 14px; white-space: normal;"><div>&lt;?php</div><div>header("Expires: 0");</div><div>header("Last-Modified: " . gmdate("D, d M Y H:i:s") . " GMT");</div><div>header("Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate");</div><div>header("Cache-Control: post-check=0, pre-check=0", false);</div><div>header("Pragma: no-cache");</div><div>header("Content-type: application/vnd.ms-excel;charset:UTF-8");</div><div>header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=filename.xls"); </div><div>print "\n"; // Add a line, unless excel error..</div><div>?&gt;</div><div>&lt;table border="1"&gt;</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre">	</span>&lt;tr&gt;</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre">		</span>&lt;th&gt;header 1&lt;/th&gt;</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre">		</span>&lt;th&gt;header 2&lt;/th&gt;</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre">	</span>&lt;/tr&gt;</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre">	</span>&lt;tr&gt;</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre">		</span>&lt;td&gt;data 1&lt;/td&gt;</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre">		</span>&lt;td&gt;data 2 - nordic letters æ, æ, å&lt;/td&gt;</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre">	</span>&lt;/tr&gt;</div><div>&lt;/table&gt;</div></span>

Its really all about the headers. For the body of the document, Excel is not very choosy, we just hand it a regular HTML table, and thats it. 

We all got these lists that we keep. Maybe its in a Excel sheet or in a database. Myself I have two: one for my workouts and one for novels I have read. The first is in a database, and the latter is in a Google spreadsheet. Until now it has been a hassle updating them.

But now I have found the perfect tool for these small personal lists: Zoho Creator!

Zoho is a suite of online applications (they compete with Google Docs), and of their tools is Creator, a online web-app “web-app” maker. You create Forms where you input data and Views where you view and filter data. It also supports relationship (they call it Lookup fields) that lets you link between different databases.

Zoho Creator has also its own scripting language named Delugescript that you can use, is support exporting in a variety of formats, and embedding of forms in extern sites. Go check it of on creator.zoho.com

Want to use Subversion with your CakePHP project. This is how you do it:

For developing I got a local copy of my project. Unless you got Subversion installed on your webserver, you have to start importing the local one. Mine in located here:

/Users/gersh/Sites/cakephp/APPS/gersh

1. First you have to move your config file outside of your project tree since your project will have public access on Google Code. To do this you simply copy database.php out and rather include it by putting these lines inside your app/config/database.php file:
   

   (?php<br>include dirname(__FILE__) . '/../../database.php.inc';

2. Google Code has already created a regualar Subversion structure:
   /branches (empty)
   /tags (empty)
   /trunk (content of cakephp app folder goes here)
3. To import your project, open Terminal.app, and from inside of your /app folder run this command:
   

   svn import  https://gersh-no.googlecode.com/svn/trunk <br>  --username username -m "Initial import"

4. Now that your project is hosted at Google Code, you can use SvnX – a mac SVN client to checkout your project. Note that it is a bug in SvnX with importing from https protocol, so you have to do a svn list command. Just accept it permantly

   svn list https://projectname.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/

5. You might need to reset the permissions for your app/tmp directory in order to make the cache to work:
   

   chmod -R 777 tmp

The great blog platform Wordpress does more than serve blogs. Lately I used it, and it’s build in classes for a new norwegian sports site: Ironman.no – hosting all norwegian triathlon results throughout history. Among the things we did there, was serving data from custom databases and ability to search and browse this data.

Recently we had a customer at the office who wanted a news feed from a related site displayed on their homepage. As a design element we wanted to extract the first image in the description part of each news item in the feed and display it in a separate container inside the flash file.

Last weekend I got a mail from a Worktimer user, concerning a possible bug running Worktimer in the new Mac OS X Leopard. It happens when you open a document, and save it without making any changes. When you reopen the document all your data is lost.

Have been working day and night the last days trying to find the cause, unfortunately without any success. Now it turns out its in Leopard the bug is located, and it has to do with their Core Data framework (that Worktimer use).

Lets stay tune for Software Update from Apple, and meanwhile don’t double-save your document.

Read more about the bug here. 

Just had my mac at home upgraded to the last version of Mac OS X: Leopard. After the 1,5 hour long install session, I was pretty excited when the apple logo reappeared after the last restart. It was way past my go-to-bed time (11 pm), but knowing that I would never get any sleep before I at least had the chance to stroke the new kitten.

This week I finally had the change to release my new redesigned blog. Have been been working with a enhanged backend for some time, but at the end I decided to redesign the frontend to. I was looking for something more simple, and at last to move away from my old Wordpress template.

On of the latest things on my to-do list has been implementing a ping function in my CakePHP blog. I was hoping to find some code to copy and paste directly from CakePHP Google Group, but it seems that none has done it yet, and I ended up doing it myself.