Some of the more popular screen capture tools for Windows are: Snagit ($50), FastStone Capture ($20), Jing (free), and Greenshot (free).  Snagit and Jing also work on a Mac.  All these tools will take an image of your screen, or piece of your screen, and then give you an editor with the captured image so you can add features to the screenshot.  The image then can be saved in a file, placed in an email, attached to the email, or used in your blog article or tutorial.

I have personally used Snagit, FastStone, and Greenshot.  I've been using Greenshot for this blog for a number of years.  Each of these tools have there feature set and there ease of use.  Snagit was the most feature rich, but it also was the hardest to use.  I found FastStone and Greenshot easy to use, press the Print Screen button, outline your image, and the image editor appears with the image in the editor.  FastStone has more features than Greenshot.  Greenshot is a light weight simple screen capture with limited features, which is all I need most of the time, since I usually bring up Gimp to edit the image.

A friend of mine at work has been dropping screen shots into his email, so I asked him what he used.  He said the Microsoft Snipping Tool.  Microsoft has included this tool with their operating system since Vista, but you can also download it for XP SP2.  I'm amazed that I just found out about the Snipping Tool after all these years, and I thought my readers may not know about it either.

To start off, from using the other screen capture tools, I can say that the Microsoft Snipping Tool is lightweight with limited features.  For example, if you wanted to type some text, or a title, directly on your image before saving it, you couldn't do that with the Snipping Tool.  You'd have to use one of the above tools.  If you want to freehand write or use a yellow transparent marker, you can do that, but that's the extent of the Snipping Tool's extra editor functionality.

Why use the Windows Snippet Tool?  Well, like the other tools it brings up an editor window, and at the same time it drops your selection into the clipboard, which means you can directly paste your images into your email.  Greenshot does this also.  Probably the reason you most want to use it is it comes with Windows, so you don't have to download and install screen capture software.

Bringing up the Snipping Tool from the Menu Search

You can bring up the snipping tool by going to your start menu and typing "sn" and clicking on Snipping Tool.  The entire screen will gray out.  If you just want to use a rectangular snip, the most common snip, you can just click the mouse down and outline the screen image area you want to capture.  The area of the screen you outline will un-grey, which will be the image you capture.  Let go of the mouse button and presto the image is in your clipboard.  You can also save it to file.  In addition to the Rectangular capture, you can capture a free-form snip, which means you draw around the image you want saved, just your application Window, or a Full-screen capture which would include your menus with the main window.

Different Types of Captures You Can Do

Once you have your image captured in your Clipboard, open up your email and paste it in to your message. Wahlah, you now have images included with your emails.  You can easily try this out by doing a test email to yourself to see how it works.  If your email does not take the image, make sure you set your emails to be formatted in HTML in your email program.  That's about it.  Enjoy.

Well, it finally happen!  Chrome is now the most popular browser surpassing Firefox.  This happen in March.   This is the first month that Chrome passed Firefox.   Of course, I'm not surprised since every time you do a Google search you see the Chrome download button.

I remember a developer friend of mine that fell in love with Chrome when it first came out, and couldn't stop gushing about it, yes, I'm referring to you, imperialWicket.  He claimed Chrome's development tools matched Firefox.  I'm not so sure.

The March Statistics for Browser Usage as reported by W3Schools in percentage of users was:

Chrome  37.3%,
Firefox  36.3%,
Internet Explorer  18.9%
Safari  4.4%
Opera  2.3%

There is a perception that Firefox is slower.  Let's take a look at some performance specs.  These specs were generated by lifehacker.com.    The numbers are approximate, as I interpreted them from lifehacker's graphs.

Which browser loads from scratch the fastest

Chrome  17                 2.0 seconds
Internet Explorer     3.5 seconds
Opera 11.61               4.0 seconds
Firefox 10                  4.25 seconds

Which browser loads tab pages the fastest?  In a test of loading 9 tab pages linked to different URLs.

Opera                        6 seconds
Internet Explorer   16 seconds
Firefox                     17 seconds
Chrome                   21 seconds

In loading a new URL from scratch when you hit the enter button.

Chrome                      0.25 seconds
Internet Explorer     0.65 seconds
Firefox                       1.35 seconds
Opera                         1.35 seconds

JavaScript performance in number of runs per second with the higher being better

Chrome                      1200
Firefox                         800
Internet Explorer      650
Opera                           610

In DOM/CSS performance, i.e. how fast can the browser format the page in runs per second and load the DOM, the higher the better.

Opera                         7200
Firefox                       2700
Chrome                      2500
Internet Explorer    1900

Finally, let's look at memory usage with 9 tabs open, the smaller number at the top is better

Firefox                       220,000
Opera                        260,000
Chrome                     330,000
Internet Explorer    350 000

Base Memory Usage

Chrome                      42 MB of RAM
Opera                         48 MB
Firefox                       63 MB
Internet Explorer    63 MB

Memory Usage with extensions added with 9 tabs and 5 extensions

Firefox                300,000
Opera                  500,000
Chrome               650,000

Let's put this all in English.  Chrome is the faster when first starting up and loading the first page or a new URL, but if there are many tabs pages to load Chrome is slower than other browsers.  As a developer, you usually have many tab pages open at any time.  Opera is fastest in reloading tabs, or previous content.

All these specs are well and good, and one would think that its time to make the switch to Chrome from  Firefox.  But hold on here, what prompted this article is a little problem, I've run into at work with Chrome.

We have a fairly complex web app that loads four drop downs using Ajax.  The first drop down is a very long list of company data, about 2000 records, for the user to select from, and then after the selection, the information is processed to populate the next drop down, and so fourth until all the drop downs are populated without reloading the page.  The application runs perfectly in Firefox, but when I select the drop down button in Chrome, only half of the first list loads.  Firefox loads the entire list.

No biggee, right, it works in Firefox, so it must be a memory or cache issue.  I'll just configure the Chrome browser and give it some more memory.  Wrong.  And here's we start to see some real differences between Firefox and Chrome.

To configure almost everything in Firefox, all you do is type about:config in the URL space and you can change memory size and cache size, or most any browser parameter there is in Firefox.

Chrome has no way to configure memory or anything under the hood.  It has a very limited settings menu, and I mean limited, by clicking on the wrench and going to settings, that's it.  In looking at the above specs, Chrome uses the most memory especially with many tabs in use.

Now, look at the memory set aside by each browser on initial download .

Private Memory: Chrome: 40,820K    Firefox: 337,012K
Shared Memory:  Chrome: 10,728K    Firefox:  62,880K
Total Memory:    Chrome: 51,548K       Firefox: 399,892K

Virtual Memory
Private Memory:  Chrome: 32,704K    Firefox: 327,760K
Mapped Memory:   Chrome: 59,998K    Firefox: 184,412K

OK, who cares Chrome loads fast, right.  But one would think that there may be some applications where it might be helpful to give Chrome a little more memory, like the one above.   Chrome has the smallest amount of memory, that is not configurable, yet uses the most memory.   C'mon Google.

What do you say to your boss who tells you to fix Chrome, when everything works in Firefox.  It's not like IE, where you need to just change some CSS.  Google won't let configure Chrome.  Big hint Google!  Allow us to configure your browser, and like with Firefox, we'll promise, to be careful.

And one more gripe.  Despite the protestations of my colleague, imperialWicket, I don't find the development tools in Chrome near as easy to use as the tools in Firefox.  If you load the Web Development toolbar in Firefox, everything is one click away.  I'm not saying Chrome doesn't have these tools, but to me, Firefox's tools are easier to work with and are laid out much better.

To me, Firefox is suffering from old man on the block syndrome, which is unjustified, and quite frankly has very little advertising compared to Chrome.  Google has pushed Chrome onto the masses on every search they do.  With that type of advertising, you knew eventually Google would get Chrome to number one.

Fast loading, is not everything in a browser, there are other features that weigh heavier in my mind, so sorry, Goggle, but I'm staying with Firefox for web development.

I've been on both sides, in my current job I maintain legacy code, fixing bugs, and adding small features.  In my previous job I was a contractor writing a completely new sofware Intranet application.  Just so you know up front, my preference is to develop something new.  It's the difference of getting a brand new car, or riding in a used car, of course, the pays better with the legacy code.

When you work for a company on legacy code you don't have a lot of choices.  The system exists and by George, that's the system you learn.  For example, my current company uses Drupal, Zencart, Moodle and a home grown licensing system all interlinked together on one web site.  Naturally, I will be working with Drupal, Zencart, and Moodle in my work.

On the other hand, when you freelance you could run into a multitude of different systems, and if you develop something new from scratch you get to select from a multitude of open source applications.  That can be a thorny problem.  It adds to the dilemma of a freelancer.  Which package to use?

I know when I first started out I jumped around to many CMS systems trying to find the perfect one.  I've developed sites using Drupal, TextPattern, Simple CMS, WordPress, and Joomla.  I'm, at this stage, very flexible.  What it did is train me in what to look for in a CMS system, and generally how they are put together.  You pay attention to forums, and other developers opinions as you jump around.  You do a lot of Internet research.  When you run into snags using an application, if you can't solve a problem easily, or it takes too long to figure something out, or there's a lack of documentation, you tend to drop one application and move to another.  I think this is a natural part of the learning curve in becoming a better developer.

You reach a point in time, when you grow tired of the research, the research of which is the best system to use, and start to like an application, you grow accustomed to its quirks and understand them.  You start to gravitate toward using a certain CMS, for example, for a particular application.  You use the same shopping cart, or the same CMS, or the same PHP framework.  Why, because you don't have time for the research, you want to get paid, and its the fastest way to get the job done.  You don't want to constantly be learning new systems.

One of the problems in the open source community is the multitude of choices you have to get a job done.  Too many, in my mind, everyone wants to build a better mousetrap. It adds considerably to a developers learning curve.

What I have noticed in the last year or so is the start of a consolidation.  Developers don't want that many choices.  They would love to have a reduced selection to one or two in each application category, and I believe, the community is moving in that direction.  It's getting tougher to come out with a new application category that is not out there, and entrenched.  For example, if you developed a new CMS system it would be tough to get past the current top three CMS systems: Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress, unless you had some radically new idea or feature, and even then, in a short time, developers in one of the entrenched CMS systems would have a plug-in for the new feature.  It is a sign that the PHP community is maturing.  Why waste time on a new system, we'll just add to the defacto standard system, less time and trouble.

This maturing has its pluses and minuses.  On the plus side, it lowers the cost of entry into becoming a developer, you don't have to experiment with a lot of systems, just learn one or two.  The minus and the sad part is creativity suffers.  PHP developers are not as well rounded.  PHP development is less fun, and becomes more work, 9-5, and go home.  No more late night, round the clock, marathons, which is an experience, that is worth experiencing at least once, especially if your working with a team of developers.

It becomes more difficult to do something new without using a standard application helper.  I'm reminded of Hamburger Helper, its still code, but its different.  Who wants to develop all that code when I can plug an application or snippet of code into the program, and work around it.  If you need a new feature, let's see which open-source application we can include that does that feature.

Are we as programmers saying the age of the Internet is maturing, that everything that is worth doing on web sites has been done?  It seems that way.  Where is the next breakthrough?  Ajax has come and been adopted.

It used to be faster and faster chips.  Do we need more blazing speed from our computers, unless your doing a lot of intense calculations, probably not.  Then it was disk space.  Disk space is now cheap and the computers support the bigger disks.  Do we need more disk space from our laptop drives, probably not.  Then it was graphic cards to support virtual reality.  Are graphic cards there now, probably.  And so computers become a commodity.  Where do the new things come from?

Well, someone took an idea that others had previously tried without success, and made it new and refreshing, the iPad, which is just another tablet computer repackaged.  What made it was apps.  Certainly, eReaders hit the market big, old technology repackaged.  There will always be room for different types of products.

The latest craze is the smartphone with apps.  It now behooves programmers to become app familiar, which means learning another language, Objective C, at least for Apple.  Smartphones are the new toy, yes, they use the Internet, but more than that, they have changed the way we behave socially.  How many of you have gone out to a restaurant and have not seen someone at another table, fiddling with their smartphone, very few.  It's awful.  What happen to talking with one another?  I digress.

The days of Internet glory seems to me to be wrapping up.  We're on the right side of the bell curve.  The computer has moved from its beginning where it was housed in huge cabinets, in a huge air conditioned and filtered rooms, to the Digital mini-computers for small work groups, to the personal computer, to laptops, to tablets, to the Smartphone, quite a journey.

Software too has progressed from assembly code to operating systems, to multiple programming languages, to application utilities, to object oriented, to design patterns, to apps.  It's kept pace with the computer's history, after all, they are linked.

What does the future have to offer?  As the world becomes over populated, and an Indian programmer can do the same work as a Chinese programmer, or an American programmer.

Not counting the wars that will result from a country not being able to feed its growing population, or provide oil to its people.  We will become more aware of our planet, as the planet starts to consolidate.  Perhaps one world government, an interesting concept.  Does everyone in the world get one vote.  They could with universal communications.  We now have universal Internet.

What's left in a united world? Oh, there's still some technology improvements needed here on earth like better use of wind and solar energy, and the development of ocean technologies to recover what will be our only source of non-depleted resources.  Remember the fish are supposed to be gone by 2050, fish farming could be big.  In the end, individually, we end up paying attention to more and more minute details in our work, there will be individual creativity in small corners and niches, and the entertainment industry will always thrive to occupy our time, otherwise we become Orwell's "1984," a sad thought.   Some would say we're already there.

Consolidation into one world government, with the world's technologies becoming commodities, can only lead to one thing, exploration of outer space, the last great, endless  frontier.  And to end on this thought, what a glorious pursuit of the unknown it will be.  If space travel can be made safe, and technology can gradually invent warp speed, what a fun time it would be to be alive.  Beam me up, Scotty.

The argument most heard is PHP is already a template language, why do I need another language?  And thus the debate begins.

The debate, I find, is one-sided.  Every comment I see of this nature is from PHP developers, and I suspect,  good PHP developers that develop entire web sites for their clients.  What I mean is they develop the entire site themselves.  If this is the case, why do you want a template language.  I agree.  The PHP developer develops the views, and everything behind it.  They understand PHP, so to put PHP in a view is a no-brainer.  They don't need a template language.

The problem with all the comments against template languages is that the only people reading articles on template languages are PHP developers.  And they're the one's making the comments.  Graphic designers don't read these articles or comments.  They read articles like how to resize a background image in an elastic web layout.

But, and here's where we start the other side, but if a graphic designer, or a team of graphic designers, is involved in developing a web site, then a template language makes some sense.

The company I'm working at has a team of graphic designers.  My impressions of graphic designers is they are interested in aestheic design, not PHP code.  Their personalities, are for the line of the art work, not a line of code. They like CSS.  They like moving an image 10 pixels to the right to line the image up with another image.  It gives them satisfaction.

That's why they're graphic designers.  They have an aversion for wanting to learn code.  You mention a line of code and their eyes glaze.

They like neat things, and neat looking HTML in their views.  Putting PHP in their views messes up their neatness.  PHP code in a view looks messy.  They stumble when trying to figure out what the line of code is doing, and how to test that in their design.

It seems to me that here is where a template language is desired, and why template languages for PHP are useful.

What makes for a good template language?

Let's start with the graphic designer's side.  It has to be easy to understand by graphic designers.  Simple concise  commands with very little template coding is needed.  PHP is not that.

It has to make their page look neat and orderly.  It should have HTML like tags with short concise syntax.  PHP is much more verbose, and sometimes takes many lines which messes up neatness.

The ability to test the design, without the real data using lorem ipsum blocks of text, for example. It should have a test mode to test designs before going live on the web site without necessarily having to have the PHP code in place.

It should support the creation of reusable templates.  It should allow a base template with small blocks of text templates throughout the site.

For the PHP developer side, a little more is needed from their template language.

It must be secure.  For PHP programmers to know a template language by default compiles secure code gives them peace of mind and saves time.  A web designer may know nothing about security when designing a page.

It must separate the developer from the designer.  The designer wants to change the page design without worrying about the code. The developer wants to change the code without worrying about messing up the designer's page.

It should support modern PHP programming, that is PHP 5 and  object oriented code.

It should be fast.  Your putting another layer on with a template language.  If the template language slows the site down, developers will want to go direct.

Finally, it should by easy to understand and learn.  The problem with template languages is they use another syntax, which has to be learned by both developers and graphic designers.  Interestingly, PHP developers balk at this.  I'm not sure why?  If the template is easy to learn both developers and designers won't mind using it.

What PHP template languages come closest to the above criteria?

The template engines that come closest to the above criteria, at this point in time, are: Smarty3,  Dwoo,  PHPTAL, and  Twig.

I will close with one other consideration.  Many developers use PHP frameworks when they develop.  Frameworks like: Symfony2, Kohana3 and Yii support reusable templates and reusable sub templates within views.  This speeds up the development of views and view files.  That doesn't mean that this precludes the use of a separate template language with the PHP framework.

It does sort of bring the debate to full circle though.  If I have the ability to have templates with a PHP framework, do I still want to use a template language for my graphic designers?   I think yes for the graphic designers in the crowd, but hey, if I'm a PHP developer, I might answer no.  What do you think?

1. Will they be able to read the document they wrote years from now with today's application, for example, one version of MS Word to another?

2. Will they be able to read the document they wrote in one program with a different vendor's program, if they want to switch vendors, for example, read an MS Word document in LibreOffice, or Word Perfect?

3. Will they be able to read the document used for one purpose in another program used for another purpose, for example, read a HTML web page in MS Word?

4. Will they be able to reformat a document easily if needed for another project, for example, HTML formatting to make it visible in a browser window?

5. Will a document written with an application in one operating system,  Windows, be able to move to another operating system, Linux?

All of these concerns deal with formatting text.  You want the finished document to have a special font and bold highlighting, for example.  Companies, like  Microsoft and Adobe, know this, and have used proprietary formatting for years to keep their customers buying new versions of their products, instead of switching to another vendor's product.

There have been many bridge programs written to go from one formatted document to another, and many application programs have added the ability to read multiple formats to make it easier, mostly to get MS Word documents into their program.

There is one common element in all of these specially formatted programs, the bare text itself.  The only changes to the text from one application to another is the way the text is formatted.  If this is the case, it seems logical to create a program that will format any text to any format you want, independent of any particular vendor's program, or what the program does.

This may sound logical, but it's harder than you think.  How do you tell a document to underline a word, or make a title bold.  There has to be some formatting, enter Markdown.  Say What?

Markdown is a text formatting conversion program invented by John Gruber.  John got tired of writing HTML formatting tags when writing web page content, and wrote Markdown, a Perl based program that takes specially marked text files, and changes them into W3C compliant HTML.

What makes Markdown different than any of these other programs?

John had two goals in mind.  Since he had to add some formatting to be able convert the text to HTML, he wanted Markdown text to be easy to write, and easy to read.  HTML documents are neither easy to write, nor easy to read.  Markdown is both.

Markdown is a free open-source program that first came out in 2004.   The open-source community picked up on the program, and has improved the program.  Michael Fortin added some additional formatting in PHP Markdown.  A WordPress plugin that reads Markdown was created.  John MacFarlane rewrote the program in C making it faster.  Fletcher Penney wrote MultiMarkdown, a superset of Markdown, that included the above variations, and much more formatting.  The constant in these efforts is John Gruber's original Markdown syntax.

I became aware of the program when I was contemplating writing some Kohana 3 documentation, and the Kohana 3 team moved to, and requested, contributors to use Markdown for writing documentation.

The general flow in using the Markdown program is to write your text with Markdown formatting, then run the Markdown program inputting the text file, and out comes a W3C compliant HTML document.

Don't groan when I talk about adding Markdown formatting to your text, we're not talking HTML tags here.

For example, to make a paragraph with Markdown, or MultiMarkdown, you leave a blank line between your paragraphs.  How's that for formatting, easy to read and easy to write.

Let's take a look at some more examples of other Markdown formatting.

_make italic_
__make bold__

#This is an <h1> header in HTML
##This is an <h2> header in HTML
###This is an <h3> header

Here's an ordered list
1. Cat
2. Dog
3. Parrot

Here's an unordered list
* Cat
* Dog
* Cow

> a block quote
>

These examples show you the simplicity of the formatting.  When you run the above text through the MultiMarkdown program it outputs perfect HTML with opening and closing tags, easy to use and easy to read.   As you can see, the syntax is not hard to learn, start with the Markdown syntax,  and then move up to MultiMarkdown syntax.

So what is the difference between Markdown and MultiMarkdown?  The basic syntax is the same, since MultiMarkdown is a superset of Markdown.  Learning the syntax is easy, start with the Markdown syntax,  and then move up to MultiMarkdown syntax.

Multimarkdown allows you to output in more formats: XHTML, LaTeX, OpenDocument, OPML, and from these formats you can go to Microsoft Word, and many other word processing formats.  MultiMarkdown has additional formatting for footnotes, tables, math support, citations and bibliography, smart typography, table and image captions, and definition lists, which weren't in the original Markdown.  Like Markdown it runs on all operating systems.

Converting MultiMarkdown, MMD, formatted text

Why spend the time to load the program on your computer, and learn the basic syntax of MultiMarkdown?

The MultiMarkdown formatting is simplistic compared to the opening and closing tags of HTML, and formatting text using MultiMarkdown is easier to type.   Using MultiMarkdown makes formatting text easy, its fast, and makes reading the text after your finished like your reading an unformatted document, plus you can change the finished text to any format you want at a later date.  MultiMarkdown makes writing HTML web content a breeze.  What's not to like.

Back ups are not one of my favorite things to do. They always take time, if you do back ups manually, like I do, you end up sitting, watching the screen, as the status bar indicator slowly creeps across the landscape, that is if you have a status bar. Then comes the download of a rather large file. It's not my favorite thing to do, because it takes time, dead time.

The other concern I always have with backups is you always wonder if, the worse thing possible happens, and your site gets corrupted, or gets a virus, or crashes, will the backup really work, and restore the site to its last backup pristineness.

So while I was sitting there in that dead time backing up my site, I realized what a pleasure EZPZ Backup has made backups.

EZPZ Backup is a WordPress plugin. Yes, it only works with WordPress, but lets stop a second. There are now over 18,000 WordPress plugins, that's right 18,000. You can do pretty much anything you want with a WordPress installation.

On the WordPress plugin site, I searched on the word "backup" and got some 60 pages listed, and I stopped counting at 30 back up programs, most of them in one way, or another, claimed they were easy, or simple, or instant. You get the idea.

How would any one know which program was better than another?  You're certainly not going to test 30 back up programs. Each of these programs, or plugins, take a developer's time and effort to write, test, and keep up to date. Forgive me if I miscounted, but since I've been using EZPZ backup, the plugin has been updated four or five times, all on the author's time and energy. Kudos to all the WordPress plugin authors. Here, Here!

EZPZ One Click Backup Status Screen

I used another backup program before EZPZ. Why do you look for another back up program? We'll, the back up takes to long, or it doesn't tell you what it's backing up, or your not sure if there's a way to restore the back up, or there's no status bar. It's either it takes to long, or there's a lack of information about what is going on, or what is in the back up. In short, you lose trust in the program.

And that's the bottom line on backup programs. Why am I spending all this dead time backing up my web site, if I don't trust that my site is 100% protected. It's about trust.

I went looking for another back up program and luckily, pure luckily, came up with EZPZ. I've been using it for about two years now, and I'm still thoroughly happy with the program, and trust the program. Why?

Because it is a one click backup, you can schedule backups if you prefer, it has a status screen that tells you exactly what it is doing every step of the way, it has a status bar showing you how far it's gotten with each part of the back up process. The information screen walks you through the program as it is working, and most important, it's fast. It backs up the growing GeekGumbo site faster than I can download the compressed backup file to my computer. That's fast.

EZPZ Backup Options Menu

Considering it is open-source and free software, that I've been using for a couple of years now, I thought EZPZ deserved a plug. If you have a WordPress web site, and there are over 71 million WordPress web sites out there, and you want to back up your site with some peace of mind that you're protected if all your hard work goes up in an instance of chaos, I highly recommend EZPZ One Click Backup.

Custom search results require two steps. The first step is to copy the file "default_results.php" from the search component to our template. By positioning it appropriately in the template directory, Joomla will use the template override instead of the component view. Using this technique assures us that a Joomla core update will never replace the updated file. To spell this out, if we make the update to the default_results.php file in the core search component, and Joomla releases an update that affects that very file, the update will overwrite our changes. Since Joomla does not update your custom template directories, you can be certain that your changes will never be overwritten by a Joomla core update. An administrator could still change templates, or remove your file, but that is a whole other issue.

Override the default_results in your template

Specifically, we need to copy the original /components/com_search/views/search/tmpl/default_results.php file to the active template directory /templates/myTemplate/html/com_search/search/default_results.php. For reference, I am using Joomla 1.7.3 (this also works in 2.5) with Phoca Gallery 3.1.5 and Phoca Gallery Search Plugin 3.0.1; the line numbers may be different in 2.5.

I am going to use this Gist at github for these updates. The original revision is the default_results.php file that comes with Joomla. That link is the final, and if you have search results that return with a $result->catid value (like some Phoca components do...), it will display a custom output for those results.

Edit the default_results in your template

In order to test that our template view override is working, try adding a simple header to the top of the results. Update line 13 of default_results.php to include some custom header text (like so). Now execute another search and notice your custom header immediately before the search results display.

Technically, we have a custom search results display. However, that is a pretty worthless customization. I want to make a couple of other updates. First, I want to address what I consider to be a bug. If you keep the Search - Categories plugin enabled, you will notice that category search results feature a nice bottom line that reads, "Created on" with no date. This may be user error, or configuration issues with access control; I have not investigated thoroughly. Either way, it is possible to get this behavior, and I think it is safer to check that a value is available before displaying a string in front of it. To that end, I want to add a couple checks to validate that the '$result->created' value is both set, and not equal to '' (line 36 here).

Running a new search with Category results should display a category result with no "Created on" text. And in fact, any search result without an available created on date, will avoid displaying said text.

Customize results output based on the type of result

Another update I want to make is to customize one type of search result. To do this, I first want to explain that you can achieve this in two different ways. The first technique is to change the plugin, which you achieve by knowing that the view file we are editing outputs specific values ($result->title, $result->section, $result->text, etc.); you simply change those values in the plugin. This is accomplished in a /plugins/search/COMPONENT/COMPONENT.php file - where 'COMPONENT' is something like 'content', 'newsfeeds', or some custom search plugin. A second technique is to add checks in the default_results.php file to determine what kind of search result you have, and disply it uniquely. Each of these techniques has merits depending on the situation. Generally speaking, I would encourage the first technique (changing the plugin.php file) if you only want to achieve changes for a particular type of search result, and if you want more global changes (like removing category, or placing category on the same line as the search result) you should make the change in the template.

For now, we are going to stick with the default_restults.php file, and make an update there. To find a good way to distinguish a type of search result, let us use a good old print_r in our results loop (like this). Now execute a search with multiple types of results (contacts, content, categories, etc.). It gets a little tricky here, you will need to determine an appropriate check for your content. It could be that your content always has the same $result->section value, that the $result->section value always starts/ends with some string, or that your 3rd party component result always has a value $result->someOtherValue - and when that is present you want to do something else.

No matter what your conditional check requires, the code update will be similar. Our code needs to add a conditional to the results loop, that outputs one bit of code for one condition, and another bit of code for all other conditions. I added a conditional check for a $result->catid value here, with a simple placeholder heading. The h2 value in the Gist is really just to confirm that your conditional is working properly. For your actual change, I would start by copying the original result code, and editing it to meet the needs of your update. The actual PHP and html edits are beyond the scope of what I wanted to achieve here, but some ideas would be changing the class for a particular type, so that you can alter the background color, or perhaps removing the section output for some results.

Related to this update, if you simply decide that you want to heavily restyle the search results, you can simply make edits to the default_results.php file in your template, and not worry about any conditionals. For reference, the final version of the custom search results Gist has the print_r removed, and displays only the title and a hardcoded string for search results that meet the condition.

For those of you who do not like to click on links, here is the final revision:

In my next article, we will update search results using the alternate technique, changing the PLUGIN.php file so that it provides alternative data to your view.

Apple's IPad2

Last summer, I wrote an article on the coming color E-Ink eReaders, and I predicted that they would be here in the first quarter of this year.  It's time to take another look at the market, because it doesn't look like color E-Ink eReaders is going to make my forecast.  What's wrong with those folks anyway?

What's wrong was the coming of the Apple IPad.  The market has changed.  No one ever thought that yet another tablet, the IPad, would have the revolutionary effect it has had on the market.  The rise of the IPad, and the gradual increase in size of some eReader's has the two markets overlapping with each other.  The difference between the tablet computer and the eReader is starting to merge into one market in the consumer's mind.

The tablet computer has started to replace both the laptop and the eReader.  In a November survey, Price Grabber, as reported in USA Today,  found that 79% of consumers would rather have a tablet then a laptop, and 72% said they thought that tablets would replace eReaders.  Wow, all this in less than a year.

Nook tablet

What factors are in play here.  Certainly the size of the display is a small factor, but it's not the real reason.  The real reason is that consumers want, and are use to, having color movies and video on their devices.  Entertainment sites offering video over the Internet like Hula, Netflix, and You Tube have made video over the Internet a want in the consumer's mind.  It's starting to be normal for Internet sites to have a video window showing some sort of entertainment, or advertising.

The eReader market between Barnes and Noble, and Amazon fighting the good fight, was under a lot of pressure to provide color eReaders, because of the IPad color tablet.  Since color E-Ink technology was not quite ready yet, both companies came out with color LCD displays.  Amazon with the Kindle Fire for $199 and Barnes and Noble with the Nook Color for $199, and the Nook Tablet for $249.  The lead feature for these devices is access to movies.  Amazon claims over 19 Million movies and TV shows available, and Barnes and Nobles claims movies and TV shows with access to Netflix.

Kindle Fire

Forgive me for my digression, but let's say you live 80 years, or 700,800 hours.  Your average movie runs 2 hours, I know that's high, but let's be conservative.  That means the most movies you could possibly watch in a lifetime given your watching 24 hours a day is 350,400 movies.  OK, let's say you only watch 6 hours a day, or 87,600 movies.  Who cares if I can have access to 19 Million movies?  Let's get real folks, the most you could possible see in a lifetime is a mere 0.4% of all the media out there.  Pretty unbelievable that there are that many movies in the world.

The eReader market is drying up.  Why? Because who wants black and white, if you can get color, and who wants to just have a color eReader, when they can get a color eReader with movies.  So now the choice is to buy a larger IPad2 for $499, a smaller Nook Tablet that fits into your pocket for $249, or a smaller color eReader for $199.  The capabilities of the tablet and eReader are gradually merging to become the tablet computer, which also is an eReader.

But wait a minute folks, what happen to those features that made the eReader take off, that made people want an eReader over a computer?   Certainly size and weight were in the eReader's favor, but the big feature was the ability to read your eReader at the beach in direct sunlight, and the fact that reading a book on the eReader was easier on the eyes than that bright backlit LCD display.

Qualcomm's Mirasol display

Are these valid?  I reckon I'm on a computer about 16 hours a day.  That means I'm staring at an LCD display 16 hours a day.  I don't often think about eye strain.  It's like I don't have a choice, I want to look at the computer display.  Now I admit I do take measures to ease the bright white, glaring, background.  For example, the editor I'm writing this article with, and all my editors, have a blue-black background with lime font color.  That stops that bright white background glaring at me all day.  Is eye strain now a non-factor?  I think so.  I can adjust my color displays for my desired colors and brightness level.

What's wrong with color E-Ink?  Simple, no video, and until video is available color E-Ink will never be bigger than the LCD display.  Yes, color E-Ink will be easier on the eyes, and yes, you'll be able to read color E-Ink in direct sunlight, which is a problem for LCD displays, but without the video, it will not be the consumer's favorite display.

Samsung's Liquavista

The question is when will color E-Ink be able to show movies?  At this time, the color E-Ink displays are not quite ready to refresh their screens fast enough to show video.

There are three main competitors trying to become the first with Color E-Ink that can show movies.  E Ink the company which makes the current Kindle black and white display makes a Triton color display.  Qualcomm's Mirasol technology all ready is in some eReaders, and Samsung's Liquavista technology is in some mobile devices.  These companies are working hard at overcoming the video problem along with a slew of lesser companies working on related technology.

Triton E Ink Display

There is a huge market for color E-Ink displays, and if color E-Ink with movies happens, some company is going to make a lot of money.  The company that's first to market, or the company with significant better image quality, that can view movies with a color E-Ink display will replace all of the LCD displays on the market.  Why?  Two reasons, back to the origin of the eReader market, the display will be easily viewed in sunlight, something that is not available with  LCD  technology, but more important, color E-Ink displays will use considerably less power than the LCD displays.  Instead of 10 hours on your tablet's battery, you'll get a month with color E-Ink displays, a big plus.  That alone will make people switch to the devices with the newer displays.

We're not quite in a Beta versus VHS battle, because both of those formats matured at the same time and released a lot of product before the battle was won, nor are we in a Blu-ray vs HD DVD battle, which was solved by the HD DVD supporters giving up.  I think this is different, this is new technology trying to unseat entrenched technology.  Not quite a battle yet, but the stage is set, it's certainly going to be entertaining.  Any one for some popcorn?

Github is a collection of private and public repositories.  As a matter of fact, it is the largest code repository in the world with over four million repositories at present count.  You pay for private repositories, but all public repositories are free, which is another reason Github has become popular.

A repository is a collection, or database, of the versions of a project that you have been saved over the projects history.  Each version is a snapshot of your file contents and file structure at that instance in time.  Git keeps track of each snapshot in the repository.  When you do a git clone, you copy the entire repository to your local machine from the time that the repository was created, and thus, you get the entire project history with the clone.  Another reason people like to clone software from Github.

If you'd like to have a search box on Github to find projects, or you wanted to copy a private repository , you'll have to sign up for a free Github account on their web site, which I highly recommend.

What can you an do on Github?  You can contribute code and project documentation to an open source project, this is done by getting a "fork" of the project.  If you want to contribute some unofficial documentation, you can do this with Github Wikis.  If you like a particular developer's work, you can follow his work on Github.  And you can socialize and leave messages and comments with your favorite developers.  If you just want to get a copy of an application's software  and the project's repository, you do a git clone, which is the subject of this article.

Let's get started.  Before you can use any git commands, you need to install Git on your local machine.  Git runs on all platforms.  If you've never used Git, this blog is a good place to get started.  If your using Windows, I've written several articles here at GeekGumbo that will get Git installed, and ready to use on your local computer.

Once you have Git installed, you can check to see if it is running properly by running "git version" in the git command window.  OK, I'll assume you've got Git all set up on your computer.

You can copy code from Github with any number of growing tools and graphical interfaces, for example, a dedicated bridge tool like hg-Git, an IDE utility like eGit, or a dedicated graphical application like SmartGit, or to me, the easiest and simplest way, by using the Git command line, which is what we'll use.

Zend Framework 2 on Github

Let's pick a project to clone.  For this example, I'm going to use the Zend Framework 2 project which is currently under development and in beta format.  Go to the zf2 project page on Github here.  There is a different URL for different ways to copy a project.  Click on the "Git Read Only" menu button about 1/4 of the way down the page.  Git clones are read only.  The URL in the window will change to: git://github.com/zendframework/zf2.git.  This is the URL we want to use with the git clone command.

Let's do the clone.  Back on your local machine, in your git window go to the directory one above where you want your Zend Framework software directory to reside.  Since I'm using WAMP, for me, that is the "/c/wamp/www" directory.  The clone process automatically creates a sub-directory for the project, in this case, zf2, and pulates the sub-directory with the project files.  We'll end up with files in "/c/wamp/www/zf2."  Let's do it. Type, no quotes needed:

git clone git://github.com/zendframework/zf2.git

This project is fairly large, let it work all the way through until the command prompt returns.  Here's what it looks like:

Git Clone

That's it.  Now that was tough, NOT!  Remember, we didn't even log into the Github site to do the clone.  Let's go to our new directory, zf2.

The zf2 directory content

You end up with the project and its git repository installed in one fell swoop, nice.  If we do a git branch, we see we have a master branch.  When you do a git clone, it appears that only the master branch comes down when there may be other branches.

To see what other branches are available we type:

git branch -a

Here we see that there is one other branch available, release/3.0.0. To see this branch we'll have to create the branch in our local repository and then check it out, like so:

git branch release/3.0.0
git checkout release/3.0.0

We can also looks at the project history. Type:

gitk --all

We get this:

We have several previous branches that were merged back into master.  That doesn't mean you can't go back to the old branches.  You have your entire project history when you do a git clone.  We're in Git, we can go back to any version of the project, but we probably don't want to do that in this case, since we're not developing the project, and just want to stay current.  Let's go back to the master branch, and then do a git status. followed by a look at the .git/config file.

git status
cat .git/config

It looks like this:

.git/config file remote url set up

Our "origin" URL has been entered in our config file, and our "master" branch is directed to origin. This was done for us when we ran our original "git clone." These configuration settings also encompasses any other branches, like the "release/3.0.0" branch, as we'll see in a moment.  The settings gives you a direct connection to the remote repository on Github, so you don't need to type git clone again to get an update of the project, all you need to do is type "git pull origin" for each branch. Let's do it.

git pull origin master
git pull origin release/3.0.0

What's happened with "git pull origin" is that Git went up to the origin repository at the URL specified in our .git/config file, checked to see if any files have changed at "origin," our remote repository. If there were any new files, or any changes at all, it would have copied them down to your local machine, and then merged them into your master branch, and then your release/3.0.0 branch, bringing your project instantly up-to-date.

Since we now have two branches in our project, we need to specify in our git pull which branch we want to update. We did pull both branches, so the project is brought up-to-date. In this case, since we just cloned the files, git tells us the project is "Already up-to-date"

Pretty impressive.  With one simple git pull command any time in the future, we keep up to date with a project under development.  Now you can see why so many people like cloning projects from Github as opposed to downloading, unzipping, and coping files.   The next time you want to copy some application to your computer, considering cloning it from Github instead.

Drupal front page with Admin panel at the top

The Drupal 7 installation was relatively painless.  It mimics most of the other CMSs and Frameworks out there on the way they load.  You create a directory in your home directory for the site.  You create a database for the Drupal 7 installation to populate.  Download and unzip Drupal 7.  I like to unzip it in a separate directory, and then copy the files to the server directory I created, just me.  Then you go to your browser and bring up the site.  Drupal 7 takes care of installing files to the directory and populating the database.

Once the install was finished the site came up in the new admin panel.   The above picture shows the site after a couple of modifications on my part.  Notice the new admin panel at the top of the screen, very nice.  Under the hood I found it to be the same old Drupal in the way the files are laid out.

The first thing you want to do when you install a CMS is start to put together a couple of pages and a menu to start to get acquainted.  If you go to "Content -> Add content -> Basic page".  You get a text box where you can enter HTML or text but that's it.

Initial Drupal7 Text Box Editor

Unfortunately, I want an editor when I create my pages, where I can change text size, highlight text, add links, and add pictures.  It simplifies, not having to hand code everything.  Drupal doesn't come with one, if I remember correctly, neither did Joomla.  Why is that?

Well, it turns out there are several good web editors that can easily be incorporated into your CMS.  The two that come to mind instantly are "TinyMCE" and "CKEditor".  I like both editors.  I can see why Drupal makes you install your own.  Why make a pick?  Isn't the market served better by having the two editors compete with one another.

Well, I'll pick.  I've used both editors in putting together web sites.  Both companies charge for their deluxe editor, and if you want to access images with a file server.  However, both companies have a free basic version, which is more than adequate.    The CKEditor used to be the FCKeditor.   I used the FCKeditor in the past and found it buggy.  During the time of the FCKeditor, I preferred, and installed mostly the TinyMCE editor.  Times change.  The old FCKeditor was rewritten to be object-oriented and renamed the CKEditor, which has been bug free since I've been using it.  I find the newer CKEditor easier to install and configure.  Right now, I prefer the CKEditor.

Let's get stared.  If you go to the CKEditor download page, you'll find that the CKEditor folks have taken the pain out of the Drupal and Joomla install by creating a version just for those CMS's.  Scan down the page, and download the CKEditor for Drupal, no brainer.  That's a 4Mb zip file that expands to 12Mb.  Copy the expanded directory and files to your Drupal installation's "sites/all/modules" directory.  You should end up with a "yoursite/sites/all/modules/ckeditor" directory full of files.

Now we need to turn it on.  In your new Drupal 7 admin panel at the top of the page, click on "Modules", scan down the page all the way at the bottom, and click the check box next to the CKEditor to enable it.  Save the configuration at the bottom.  Now go to the top menu and click on "Configuration," then scan down a bit and click on the "CKEditor".  Here, you'll find the User Guide, and Documentation, and a warning that this is an unlicensed version.  Ignore the warning, and create a profile by clicking the edit button under Profiles->Full->Basic Setup.  Give your profile a name and save it.  Here you can configure various editor settings.  The configuration is broken into various segments that you access by clicking on the segment title, like Basic Setup, Security, etc.  Configure later, let's move on and see if we're set up properly.

The CKEditor

Click on "Content->Add content->Basic Page" and wahlah, we have an editor.  That was pretty simple.  In the editor click on the little icon that looks like a picture, your image icon.  It's on top row next to the red flash icon.  You get an image loader, but where's the browse button?  There's no button to scan your files for your image file.  If you want to add pictures to your page, this is not useful.   You can spring for the CKFinder for $59, which is, of course, nicely integrated into the CKEditor, then your all set, not me.  There is an alternative.

No Browse Button

That alternative is a module called IMCE, found here.  Scan to the bottom of the page and download the file.  Unzip it into a directory, and then copy that directory and files to a nice snug spot next to your CKEditor directory at "yoursite/sites/all/modules/imce"  Same procedure, go to modules, and enable the IMCE module, save the configuration.

We need to link the CKEditor's picture icon to the IMCE file finder.  Go to "Configuration->CKEditor->edit the profile you just created.  Open the section "File Browser Settings."  Open each of the first three drop  downs and select "IMCE".  Yes, it was rather nice of the CKEditor folks to include this selection in their drop down. Click Save, and your done.

Let's see if anything changed.  Go to "Content->Add content->Basic Page" and click on the editor picture icon.  Wow, a browse button, click it.  Sometimes all the directories don't open.  You can click on "root" and other directories to open them.  But this is really not what we want.  What happen to our beloved directories?  How do we set the path?

The Browse Button

Initial Screen after clicking the Browse Button

First things first.  In case your wondering where "root" is, it's at "sites/default/files".  There's a picture directory where you can upload your pictures "sites/default/files/pictures", but again we want to see and browse our directories.  To get those, you're two clicks away.  Click on "Upload File" in the top menu, then browse and we're there, and your all set. Enjoy.

Finally the File Browser