I’ve actually had a couple of people ask me what tools I use for various tasks so I’m going to compile a list of the various applications I use ‘every day’. That’s in quotes as obviously I don’t use all of these tools EVERY day but I consider them part of the list of tools I couldn’t do without. I don’t use anything particularly special but I’ll make this list for those that’ve asked anyway. Secondly, I keep meaning to make a list of tools I use for my own reference so it’ll double as that, too.

I’m not going to go into a whole load of detail about what the benefits of each one are – I’ll let you work that out for yourself if you want to try them (feel free to contact me if you want to discuss any of these though). I will include a couple of things which aren’t strictly applications too, e.g. hosting services. So, here we go – these details are correct as at June 15th, 2010.

Operating system :: OS X 10.6.4 (Snow Leopard) on 27″ iMac. I made the switch from Windows towards the end of 2009 and am wishing I’d done it years ago (strictly based on what I use my machines for). Please keep comments about Mac vs PC to yourself as I’m not interested in comparing the two – they’re both great for different reasons.
Office Suite :: Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac … unfortunately I have to say that compared to the Window version this really is quite crap.
Email client :: Thunderbird 3
App dev environment :: Xcode 3.2.1 when writing for OS X, Visual Studio Express (C#) when writing for Windows (Parallels Desktop)
Web dev environment :: Coda by Panic
FTP client :: Transmit by Panic
MySQL administrator :: Navicat Lite
Text editor :: TextEdit, built into OS X
Primary browser :: Opera 10.53.8343
Twitter client :: Nambu
Password storage :: KeePassX – *highly* recommended on both OS X and Windows (the Windows version is called KeePass).
iPod manager :: iTunes – on OS X it’s actually really good and seems 100x more stable than the Windows version.
CD/DVD burner :: None, built into OS X
Photo processing :: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 – I used to use Capture One 4.8 from Phase One but it started to fall WAY behind Lightroom in terms of post-processing options … a real shame.
Fitness management :: Rubitrack for Mac (my training device is a Garmin 310xt)
Instant messaging :: Windows Live Messenger
Movie player :: VLC (everyone should use this although it struggles with the TSCC codec unfortunately)
Audio player :: iTunes
Archiving utility :: Built into OS X

One thing you might notice is they’re pretty much all free tools with the exception of Lightroom, Rubitrack, Coda and Transmit, all of which I own licenses for (no they’re not pirated!).

Website host :: ICDSoft – these guys are AMAZING. I wouldn’t use anyone else for Linux hosting.
Email service :: Gmail
Blogging engine :: WordPress 3 RC3 (final version due soon) and ExpressionEngine Core 1.6
Online photo sharing :: Flickr (I own a ‘Pro’ account)
RSS feed management :: FeedBurner
Website statistics :: Google Analytics
Search engine :: Altavista … haha yeah right.
Bookmarks :: Delicious – I stopped using browser-based bookmarks many years ago. Ok, so bookmarks are considered a bit backward now but I’ve got stuff on Delicious that I refer back to all the time.

That’s about it really. As I said earlier I’m happy to discuss any of these if you like – just post a comment or use the Contact Me link at the top of the page.

Thanks!

I choose to create my backup matrix documents so that backup results are colour-coded. That way they’re easily visible and it’s easy to see what happened when and to get an overall idea of how good your backups have been. Green coloured cells are successful backups, red cells are failed backups etc.

The first thing I need to do when I create these documents is to make some ‘reference cells’. These cells are coloured with the various colours that will be used in the matrix, e.g. green for successful etc, as listed above. So they don’t look like reference cells I also use them as the key for the matrix so people know what the various colours mean.

How, then, do you work out how good the backups have been if there’s no text in the cells to look for? You need a VBA function that looks for the cell’s colour instead of its contents – easy. Below is the function I wrote for that purpose – you’ll need to make sure you are using .XLSM documents if you are using Excel 2007 for Windows as .XLS files are, by default, secured so that macros won’t run.

Function countColours(colourReferenceCell As Range, cellRange As Range)
    ' countColours
    ' Chris Rasmussen, April 2010
    '
    ' Count occurences of cells that are a certain background colour
    ' E.g. for use in a backup matrix

    Dim currentCell As Range
    Dim colourReference As Long
    Dim vResult

    colourReference = colourReferenceCell.Interior.ColorIndex

    ' reset the total count back to zero to prevent errors
    vResult = 0

    ' go through all the cells in the specified range and look at the background colour
    For Each currentCell In cellRange
        If currentCell.Interior.ColorIndex = colourReference Then
            vResult = vResult + 1
    End If
    Next currentCell

    countColours = vResult

End Function

Once you’ve got this function in place, all you need to do is choose the cell that will show the total of successful backups (for example) and enter the following formula. We’ll assume that cell A1 is the cell that is coloured green for reference. We’ll also assume that the Excel cell range C1:C5 contains the results.

=countColours(A1,C1:C5)

If you have 5 successful backups in your range and they’re all coloured green, the cell containing that formula with contain the number 5. Easy.

I’ve been asked a number of times if I have this information as a document that can be downloaded so I’ve made it available as a downloaded PDF. You’ll need Adobe Acrobat Reader to read it if your operating system doesn’t know how to open PDF documents natively.

The guide can be downloaded on the Digital Formula Downloads page or by clicking this direct link.

Please feel free to contact me through my contact page if you need clarification on or want to discuss any of the information in this post.

I apologise in advance for the length of this post … I tend to go into a lot of detail when writing posts like this. I hope it all helps someone though.

To begin with, you’ll need a few things before you even get started. Here’s a brief, but not exhaustive, list of things you’ll need.

1. A domain name. The domain registrar you choose is up to you – it would be irresponsible of me to say that any particular registrar is better than any other.
2. A web hosting account. I use ICDSoft – this is one situation where I’m happy to say they’re better than any other Linux host I’ve ever used.
3. A copy of the latest version of WordPress. As of today, January 16th 2010, this is version 2.9.1 and can be downloaded from http://wordpress.org/.
4. A theme. WordPress has possibly the best theme support around so this is quite important. Personally I use theme from Elegant Themes. Pick one, download/purchase it and have the files ready for later steps.
5. FTP credentials. You’ll need to know the DNS address or IP address of the FTP site that supports the final, published URL, as well as the username and password to login there. I use the free FTP client, FileZilla – it’s free and works on OS X (Mac), Linux and Windows.
6. MySQL credentials. You’ll need to know the connection address or IP address of the MySQL server that will support your WordPress installation, as well as the username and password used to connect.
7. An empty database ready for your WordPress installation. You don’t need to put anything in it – the WordPress installation scripts will do that for you.

Once you’ve got these things sorted you can start on the actual installation & configuration. Here goes.

1. Follow ‘The Famous 5-Minute Installation’ written by the WordPress guys. There’s no point reproducing or rewriting this here – these instructions are as good as they come. This will get WordPress running. During this step I highly recommend editing wp-config.php and changing the $table_prefix to something other than wp_ – if you don’t the security scan plugin coming up will say you should’ve changed it … by then it’s too late without causing yourself some pain.
2. Make sure your WordPress site works – all you should see at this point is the default ‘Hello World’ post and a single comment on that post.
3. Delete the single existing comment and the ‘Hello World’ post – you don’t need them.
4. Under Settings > Users setup a user account for yourself. Note that this username, depending on your theme choice, will be the author of any posts you write while logged in (assuming you don’t force the author name to be something else). For this reason you should decide now if you want it to be capitalised or not (mine is as my username is my name).
5. Optional but recommended: If you know how to, use phpMyAdmin to change the login name for the default WordPress ‘admin’ account. This is a recommended action for increased security only. The table you’re looking for in your database is the $table_prefix setting mentioned above plus _users. E.g. if your $table_prefix is the default ‘wp_’ the table would be called ‘wp_users’.
6. Extract the theme you downloaded earlier and upload it to /wp-content/themes/. Alternatively you can use the ‘Add New Themes’ link in the WordPress Dashboard but I’ve had issues once or twice with this. For that reason I always install themes via FTP.
7. If your theme requires additional plugins upload them to /wp-content/plugins/. The Elegant Themes themes, in most cases, requires accompanying plugins. Make sure you upload and enable them before you enable the theme.
8. If you haven’t already you can enable your selected theme now.

The list below is a list of the plugins I currently use on Digital Formula and that I think most blogs should have. It doesn’t contain plugins that I use specifically for this blog. Your list may be different – that part is up to you. Note that I’m not linking to any plugins as plugin authors sometimes change the location of their plugins. To find them you only need to use the ‘Add New’ link under ‘Plugins’ in the WordPress dashboard.

1. Akismet. This plugin comes with WordPress and is basically the world-standard for WordPress comment spam protection. For it to work properly you’ll need to register a user account on WordPress.com and get an API key – choose the ‘Just a username, please.’ radio button near the bottom of the sign-up form otherwise you’ll be creating an entire blog, too. Once you’ve registered you can go to http://dashboard.wordpress.com/wp-admin/profile.php to get your API key – it’s near the top of the profile screen.
2. cforms II by delicious:days. This is the best plugin I’ve found for creating custom contact/feedback/whatever forms I’ve seen yet..
3. FeedBurner. This ties into the RSS feed links for your blog and allows you to manage all your feeds from one place as well as see how many subcribers you’ve got.
4. Google Analyticator. Who doesn’t want to know how many visitors they get? Go to http://analytics.google.com, follow the easy-to-use sign-up instructions and note down the UA code. Install the Google Analyticator plugin and, in the settings page, paste the UA code you noted down a few minutes ago. Simple.
5. Google XML Sitemaps. Again, pretty much the standard for making sure search engines can crawl your site effectively.
6. Platinum SEO Pack. Maximises SEO (Search Engine Optimisation, sorry for my non-US spelling) and makes sure your site is as “find-able” as possible.
7. SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam. Another excellent plugin by Mike Challis. This one adds CAPTCHA functionality, by default, to your comment forms to try and minimise web bots sending you comment spam.
8. WordPress Database Backup. Excellent backup plugin by Austin Matzko that allows you to carry out scheduled database backups and save them to your server or have them emailed to an email address of your choice.
9. WP Security Scan. This one’s for scanning your WordPress installation to make sure it conforms to recommended security settings. If you didn’t change the $table_prefix in wp-config.php and rename the default ‘admin’ account as recommended earlier in this article, the WP Security Scan plugin will let you know in no uncertain terms that you SHOULD HAVE. It will also say that you should have an .htaccess in /wp-admin – go ahead and make one then upload it. There may also be some recommendations about setting file permissions on the various directories within your WordPress installation – I always change these but that sort of change is up to you.
10. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP). Does what it says – displays related posts when you view any post on the site.

1. Add to Any. This small plugin allows you to add links to popular bookmarking/social networking sites. Simple in its simplicity it’s a great way of helping your readers link back to your site (and therefore help your page rank in Google if YOU link to them).
2. Breadcrumb NavXT. Gives the option of adding breadcrumb links to the any point in your pages/posts. Personally I’m a big fan of breadcrumbs as they give readers the option of back-tracking back through the path they came in on, depending on your configuration of course.
3. Lightbox 2. Used properly this widely-known and popular technique can give your image links some power. Instead of linking to a relatively boring image they can be made to popup in a much cooler way – you’ve seen this before but maybe not known it’s called Lightbox.
4. WP-CodeBox. This plugin is aimed exclusively at people with code on their sites. Code snippets can be displayed with syntax-colouring/highlighting to make code reading much more effective.
5. WP-PageNavi. As the plugin’s own description says, “Adds a more advanced paging navigation to your WordPress blog.”

Some of the steps below are recommended, some are completely optional but still things I do on each WordPress site I create. I’ll leave it up to you as to whether or not you do them on your own site. They can, amongst other things, inform social networking sites when you add content and therefore drive more traffic to your site. All these options are under the ‘Settings’ section on the left of the WordPress dashboard.

1. General > Tagline. The appearance and location of this is theme-dependent but will inform readers, at a glance, what your site is about.
2. General > Timezone. For obvious reasons you should set to the appropriate time zone for your site.
3. Writing > Remote Publishing. If you want to use a desktop client to publish your articles (e.g. Microsoft Live Writer) you’ll need to enable these options.
4. Writing > Update Services. My list of update services can be downloaded from the Digital Formula Downloads page.
5. Reading > Front page displays. Change this to be a static page if you don’t want your site’s entry page to be a list of your latest articles. If you’re using a theme from Elegant Themes some of the will override this setting – please take this into account before asking “Hey, why won’t my static page show up?”
6. Discussion > Other comment settings > Enable threaded (nested) comments ‘X’ levels deep. This is disabled by default – I always set it to 5. Discussions look better that way.
7. Discussion > Before a comment appears > An administrator must always approve the comment. If you install the ‘SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam’ plugin mentioned above it’s pretty safe to disable this. Only web bots (and people) clever enough to figure out the CAPTCHA images can submit comments anyway.
8. Permalinks > Common Settings. I always the custom structure ‘/%category%/%postname%/’. It looks far better than the default and is also SEO-friendly.
9. Miscellaneous > Uploading Files. Worth mentioning but I always leave these at the default settings. If you want to organise your uploads a different way you can change the settings here.

I hope this article helps someone. These settings, plugins and recommendations have helped my blog’s traffic, according to Google Analytics, from increasing by 15-20% each week to over 60% each week. They work for me and, provided you add decent content to your blog, they’ll work for you, too.

Both iMac machines at my place are used with Adobe Lightroom for photographic processing. Today I needed to transfer some photos from one machine to the other but Lightroom wouldn’t transfer the develop settings, only the files themselves. Here’s how to transfer the develop settings too.

By default Adobe Lightroom is configured to only store photo development information in the Lightroom catalog. This is fine if you only ever plan to develop photos using Lightroom using a single computer. However, if you want to transfer photos to another computer *and* keep the develop settings you’ve applied, the file will be transferred without the develop information. There are a couple of ways of getting around – here are the main ones.

• Transfer the original file to the other computer with a sidecar XMP file (XMP stands for eXtensible Media Platform). The XMP file is a companion file that can go with the original RAW file to retain develop changes.
• Use the increasingly popular DNG file format (DNG stands for Digital NeGative) and ensure the develop info has been saved into the XMP space within that file.

The XMP sidecar method is simple. If you use Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) to modify your original RAW files (e.g. CR2 for Canon, NEF for Nikon) just make sure the XMP file with the same name as the original image is transferred with the original image. ACR will recognise this file and load it accordingly. The XMP file be automatically created as soon as you make a modification to the original image.

The second method is what I choose to use as it combines the original image and the XMP data into a single file.

If you want to use DNG files within Lightroom, something I think is good practice, you need to do a couple of things. Please note that I’m using Lightroom for Mac on OS X Snow Leopard – the dialog boxes will look slightly different if you’re using Windows.

• When you import your images into Lightroom import them as DNG files immediately, as shown in the screenshot below. To bring up the import files dialog click the File menu and select the option that suits you, e.g. ‘Import Photos from Disk…’)

• Convert your existing images to DNG after they’re in your Lightroom catalog. This can be a time consuming process, depending on the speed of your computer and/or the number of images already in your catalog. To do this select the images you want to convert and click the Library menu then the option labelled ‘Convert Photos to DNG’ (or ‘Convert Photo to DNG’ if you have only 1 selected). The import window looks like the image below (these are the settings I use – be aware of the option that says to delete originals after successful conversion).

Ok so that’s your catalog nicely full of DNG files. Where to next?

The next step is to ensure that the DNG files also contain the XMP develop data – this is NOT the default setting in Lightroom 2. To do this select the Lightroom menu on OS X and select Catalog Settings or press Option+Command+, (on Windows select Edit then select Catalog Settings or press Ctrl+Alt+,). The following dialog will appear (select the Metadata section if it’s not already selected).

As you can see the box labelled ‘Automatically write changes into XMP’ isn’t checked – this is the Lightroom default setting. This means that any changes you make to the DNG file will be saved into the Lightroom catalog *only*; the italic text directly below option confirms this for you. To change Lightroom so that it saves develop information into the XMP space within the DNG file, enable this option and close the catalog settings window (on Windows change the setting and click OK). From now on the DNG files you use will contain the original image and any develop changes you make.

Good question! The answer is no, they won’t contain the develop info yet – luckily the solution is easy. If you want to make it so that your existing images contain the XMP develop data (assuming they’re DNG) firstly make sure you’re in the Lightroom Library module (the first link in the 5 links near the top-right of the Lightroom main window). Then you simply need to select the images you want to modify, click the Metadata menu and choose ‘Save Metadata to Files’ (or ‘Save Metadata to File’ if you’ve only got 1 file selected). On OS X you can also press Command-S or Ctrl-S if you’re using Windows. This will write the changes you’ve made, if any, to the XMP space within the DNG file.

From now on the DNG files are fully portable! You can take them in their current form – the DNG files – and copy them to a new PC or send to someone else without fear that your develop changes won’t go with them.

My disclaimer for this post is that you should be doing regular backups of your important data. If you’re already doing regular backups you have nothing to worry about; in the unlikely event that something does go wrong, you can restore your files from backup (if you’re not backing up your data PLEASE start doing it now, for your own sake). The above steps are non-destructive and safe for your images – I use this option and have never had a single problem with any of my images.

For a long time I’ve been doing a lot of work with WordPress, PHP and generally non-Microsoft things while at home which means that being tied to the Microsoft platform isn’t something that worries me anymore. Initially it’s a pretty steep learning curve as I’ve been using Windows for so long that I’m pretty quick with the keyboard shortcuts and rarely, if ever, use a mouse in Windows (yes there are exceptions, obviously). That learning curve becomes pretty flat very quickly though. For example Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V, 2 of the most commonly used shortcuts in Windows, are now Command-C and Command-V. The mini wireless keyboard that comes with the new iMacs has no arrow keys or number pad but that’s cool because I’ve had an Apple keyboard for a while now and that has all the keys that are missing from the new one. Although the new Apple Magic Mouse seems like a weird idea at first, it’s actually surprisingly usable (although the gestures suck if they’re in any direction other than vertical … and your mouse isn’t glued to the desk). I use a wireless Microsoft Explorer mouse anyway which is 100% compatible with OS X.

I’ve been supporting Windows and related bits for a VERY long time now and making the switch wasn’t something I could have realistically done before. Those Windows-specific days are in the past though and I’m REALLY enjoying the slick feel of OS X and apps that, while they work on Windows, were originally designed for Mac anyway. Especially iTunes, which is a complete pig on Windows … it runs lightning-fast on OS X. With 3 iPods, iTunes is pretty much a necessity, especially with the iPod Touch being unsupported by many other iPod management packages out there (if any).

Literally *all* the apps I use on Windows for the work I’m doing now are available for OS X. Some of them include:

- iTunes (iPod management as mentioned above)
- FileZilla (FTP client – the new tabbed version ROCKS)
- Aptana Studio (PHP development, although I’ve gone back to using version 1.5 – see this post)
- Mozilla Firefox (web browser)
- Mozilla Thunderbird (email client – v3 RC1 seems really good so far)
- Microsoft Office including MSN

The only application I can’t use natively with OS X and that I am praying will be supported one day is Polar Pro Trainer 5, the software that comes with my Polar RS800CX heart rate monitor (I do a lot of cycling). Parallels’ Coherence mode solves this one too though. Sweet!

I was a big fan of Windows Media Center while using Windows 7 but OS X Snow Leopard’s Front Row kicks ass! [Edit: Front Row has a nice interface but from a usability point of view it SUCKS!]

Toni … if you’re reading this, yes I miss Google Chrome but it’s coming soon for OS X.

To be fair, Windows 7, as I mentioned above, is seriously awesome and it’s still my OS of choice at work, even in a strictly-controlled corporate environment.

So that’s that really. Personal preference plays a big part here and I’m not saying OS X Snow Leopard is better than Windows 7 … that’s been covered by people better qualified to comment than me.

P.S. No I don’t have a black high-neck sweater … yet.

Microsoft Excel is ok at importing data from CSV files but can’t handle these files too well as there’s no uniform pattern that it seems to be able to match (it matches to the human eye but I guess not to Excel’s internal algorithms or something).

Anyway, to import these files into Excel I needed to do 2 things which seem pretty simple but that you really don’t want to do when the files are as big as these ones – 40MB+ of text. Yuck. Please note that the first step below works in both Excel for Windows and Excel for Mac but the second part, because it contains VBA script does not work in Excel for Mac (VBA isn’t supported in Excel 2008 for Mac). See the criticism section of this Wikipedia page for information on that.

Job 1: Delete all the empty rows. Thankfully this one’s easy. Select the entire worksheet or range of cells you’re working with, hit F5, select Special, check the box labelled Blanks and hit OK. This will select all the blank cells in the selection. From here select Edit, Delete and when prompted, select Entire Row. Alt-E then D will work in Excel 2007 as it doesn’t have an Edit menu as such. This will do exactly what it says and delete the entire row containing the selected blank cells. Be careful doing this with non-tabular data.

Job 2: Delete all the headers except the top row. Unfortunately I haven’t made this work without deleting the top row too but if you copy the top headers to a new sheet first you can easily paste them back later. In Excel 2007 hit the Developer tab (it can be enabled in Excel options if it’s not showing), click Visual Basic and add a new Module by right-clicking the top pane on the left. Paste the following code into the module that gets created:

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Sub DeleteRows()
    Dim Rg As Range
    On Error Resume Next
    For i = ActiveSheet.UsedRange.Rows.Count To 1 Step -1
        Set Rg = Nothing
        Set Rg = Rows(i).Find("Time")
        If Not Rg Is Nothing Then Rows(i).Delete
    Next
End Sub

Change “Time” to a text pattern that will match the rows you want to delete. In the data I’m working on all the header rows have a “Time” column so this works for me.

From here it’s just a case of hitting the Run button and all the rows containing the word “Time” will be removed. Please note that in Excel 2007 you’ll need to save the file as an Excel Macro-Enabled Workbook once a file contains macros or VBA code.

Handy and much faster than deleting them manually.

They’re now carrying on with PHP support by way of PDT but the features don’t seem to be anywhere near as good. It doesn’t take much looking around on Google to see that there are a lot of *very* disappointed & angry people out there in response to this, including me. As much as I dislike writing posts of a negative nature, I can’t help this one, sorry.

Sounds like a pretty good deal to me. A number of professional software engineer colleagues of mine, all of whom have worked on massive enterprise solutions, use Resharper themselves; Resharper isn’t just for people who can’t figure out errors themselves.

Ok so this sounds like a sales pitch but the main point of this article is that you can get Resharper for free if you’re developing open-source software. I’ve developed a number of open-source libraries that I use in my own applications and I’ve decided to make them available on this website in case any other developers out there find them useful. Because of the way I make them available I don’t tick all the boxes for the Resharper open-source license requirements. I discussed this with the Resharper licensing people and they were happy to grant me an open-source license for the full version of Resharper anyway. That’s pretty cool and means I’m happy to ‘sell’ their product for them.

If you’re interested in this too, please visit the open-source licensing page for Resharper. Cool.

Check out StyleCop for Resharper too!

As with last time I wrote an updated post for the Digital Formula PHP File List System, a small project I’m using to ‘practice’ PHP, this post is basically a re-write of what was posted last time but with a few changes that relate to this specific version. The changes between this version (0.4) and the previous version (0.3) are:

• Option to create missing thumbnails added – can be turned off by setting CREATE_MISSING_THUMBNAILS in constants.php (width/height can be controlled from there too)
• Tidy of CSS i.e. styles moved from header.php to master.css
• Option to calculate and output statistics added – can be turned off by setting SHOW_STATISTICS in constants.php
• Fixed bug where division by zero error during average file size calculations would occur if no files were found
• Numerous code efficiency changes e.g. moving common code into functions
• Corrected a number of comments that were leftover from previous versions

This project started because I’m selling a couple of things on ebay at the moment. Unfortunately I don’t have a lot of choice because there isn’t really an alternative here in Australia that can compete. In NZ I would be using Trade Me, whose interface etc I really like, but here, it’s ebay. Anyway, I sold 1 item recently and was shocked to find that I got charged to LIST the item, got charged when the item SOLD, got charged when the buyer PAID me and then, to add insult to injury, got charged again when I took MY own money from MY PayPal account! You gotta be kidding me …

I’ve got a few more things to sell on ebay and rather than be allowed a single image for free and then pay AUD$0.25 for each subsequent image (Trade Me is the same but I think NZD$0.10 per additional photo is easier to stomach) I decided to throw together a quick PHP script that I’ve been meaning to write for some time. It simply takes a list of the image files (JPG, JPEG, GIF and PNG) in a specified directory and builds a page to display them on. The version I’m referencing in this article (0.4) has all the changes listed above plus a couple more configuration options that can be found in constants.php.

The list is displayed on screen with the thumbnail shown as a link to the main file, if available. If no thumbnail was found and the option to create missing thumbnails is turned *off* in constants.php another image letting you know that no thumbnail was found is shown instead. If the option to create missing thumbnails is turned *on* an appropriate thumbnail image is created in the thumbs directory specified in constants.php.

Hopefully someone finds this script useful. Oh, and the script produces W3C-valid XHTML 1.0 markup and W3C-valid level 2.1 CSS, too …

Usage examples:
“http://digitalformula.net/demos/df_php_file_list_system_0.4/index.php?action=list&id=orbea – Looks for all files that begin with orbea_ in the ./files/ directory relative to the script directory. Looks for thumbnails named tn_orbea_* in the ./files/thumbs/ directory relative to the script directory. Thumbnails exist for all the demo images.

Note: The code that used to be shown in the old article was a fully functional but slightly older version of the current version of this script. If you would like to download the latest version of the Digital Formula PHP File List System v0.4 please go to the Digital Formula Downloads page and grab it from there instead. Thanks!

:: Code Removed 2009/08/28; Please use the Digital Formula Downloads page instead ::