Month: August 2008

Secure/nonsecure messages in MovableType 4.2

I have been lately working with a Movable Type install on an SSL-enabled server. In IE, I keep getting pesky warning messages:

This page contains both secure and nonsecure items. Do you want to display the nonsecure items?

I disabled Javascript and the error messages are gone, so I figured the culprit must lie somewhere in the Javascript. One particular file, JavaScriptFlashGateway.js, contained
flashTag += 'codebase="http://download.macromedia.com ... ';

I’m going to see if updating that will address the issue, but I have a feeling there may be other issues. Has anyone else run into this? My Google searches have been coming up empty.

Weird Issue between Smarty and Google Maps

I’m doing some work on a site that uses the google maps API (which is clean, simple and absolutely fabulous, by the way) and I have bumped into a strange problem. When I draw the page that uses the google maps api with smarty everything works fine, generally. However if I put the {debug} tag into the template (which causes smarty to give you a nice little pop-up window of all of the variables it’s working with, and some other great info) google maps stops working.

This isn’t really that shocking, since there is a bunch of javascript that gets pushed into the page by debug, what is weird, and a pretty large problem is that once I do this, google maps continues not to load, even after the {debug} tag has been removed. I haven’t really dug into what is going on to carefully yet, but its an interesting issue.

Really lame solution found after the jump

Continue reading Weird Issue between Smarty and Google Maps

The __ function in PHP

Recently I bumped into a function I wasn’t familiar with in PHP, It looked like the app I was working in was wrapping just about every constant that they used in the __ function. (Yes, that is two underscores.)

It turns out that this is actually an abbreviation for the gettext function, which is for allowing your application to support multiple languages. I think that this is a very clean way to support multiple languages (though admittedly, I haven’t read it very carefully yet), but I really do think that a better function abriviation could have been chosen. Oh, well, I suppose you learn something new every day.