A few blog posts ago, when I wrote about the online version of my regex tester, I mentioned that I was experiencing a few technical troubles on my blog. The reason for this was that the regex tester is kept in the same web space as my blog, and the way I had set it up was causing erroneous functions in WordPress.

After a bit of googling and some .htaccess hackery, I got it all working again. Since it was a bit of an interesting concept and solution, I thought I’d write it up here.

So, I have one main block of web space that I use for all of my websites, which is hosted by the fine people at Ennoverse.com (*plug plug* ). The primary domain for the space is Tim-Oliver.com which directs to the root directory of the space and originally, the directory contained all of my blog WordPress files.

When I went to set up Regex-Tester.com, I decided I didn’t want the files and directories from my blog to mix with those of the regex site. To do this, I placed all of the blog files into a directory called ‘/blog’ and all of the regex files in a directory called ‘/regex’. I then simply set the Regex-Tester.com domain as a subdomain which directed straight to the ‘/regex’ directory after that.

Now, herein lay the dilemma:

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On Sunday, I submitted my first iPhone app to the Apple App Store. Named MicroPoints, it’s a pretty small, quick app that lets you convert various world currencies to Microsoft Points and back.
I posted about this on my Twitter a little bit, and am now thinking my actual process for building this thing would make a nice blog post.

So last year, I decided I was going to learn how to write iPhone apps. I already had a few neato ideas for some apps, but figured I’d better start really small since both Objective-C and Xcode were totally new to me.

At about the same time, I remember checking out Major Nelson’s blog for some new release on the Xbox Live Marketplace. When I saw the price of the release in Microsoft Points, and promptly shuddered at trying to convert the price to Aussie bucks, I started thinking, maybe it’d be cool to have an iPhone app that could do that for me.

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Whew. Sorry about that. I was doing some server maintenance in preparation for this new system and I inadvertently broke the backend of my blog. It’s  still a bit hinky here and there, but thankfully we can now return you to your regular program.

So, I bought the domain (STILL can’t believe it was still free haha), and then spent a good chunk of the weekend getting it all working.
As a follow-up to the regex tester script I wrote and released last week, I’ve now created an online version, free for all to use anytime! 

So, presenting: http://www.regex-tester.com/

If you were wanting to test out the last script but couldn’t set it up locally, you can try it out online now.

In contrast to the last versions, I modified this one quite a bit:

-Broken up the JavaScript, CSS and PHP into separate files for easier reading/editing.
-Rewrote the JavaScript code using jQuery (Soo much cleaner).
-Added AJAX functionality so the page doesn’t have to refresh each time.
-Added a couple of default regex strings to get you started.

So feel free to use it at your leisure! Depending on my situation, I’ll probably wind up using this one more often than the offline version.
If you do have any suggestions on how to improve it, be sure to check out the UserVoice page as well.

Enjoy!

Well I might let you get back to it then hehe.
I just saw you online for the first time and thought I

I think it’s fair to say that since graduating from univeristy, I’ve wound up doing a LOT of web development.

With heaps of small-time client work, building dynamic web apps at a company in Japan as well as pimping out and maintaining WesternAustralia.com for Tourism WA, and now developing for several web apps and web sites at ECU… so far it’s looking pretty diverse hehe. But in any case, I’m totally not complaining here; I love every minute of it!

One thing I’ve found myself doing quite a lot of recently however is content migration. A lot of my work revolves around content management systems, and when it comes to upgrading to a new platform, it usually means having to copy the blocks of text/code out of the old one, re-twiddle any custom tags or syntax inside it, and then paste it into the new one.

But that being said, I quickly discovered a tool which eased the pain significantly: regular expressions! (Or regex, after you get tired of saying regular expressions all the time hehe )

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Whew! After several weeks worth of coding and debugging, it’s finally finished!

So here it is folks! Presenting DesktopTweet v1.0!!

Sorry about the wait there; the last version of DesktopTweet  I released was back in July of last year. With work and other higher priority commitments, it’s taken this long to finally push out a new version.
But I’m hoping it’ll be worth the wait.

I had a lot of great suggestions on how to improve DesktopTweet over last time, and I did my best to try and add as many new features as I could.

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