hello, my name is
nathan pitman.

Blu-ray is Dead Feb 16. 11

I was foolish enough to buy a Blu-ray player a few years back, how many times have I used it? Probably 3 or 4 times in the space of more than a year. It’s not that I don’t like watching movies, but the user experience with Blu-ray is nothing short of terrible. Khoi Vinh sums my thoughts up perfectly in his post Blu-ray Blues, the comments are well worth a read also – especially if you were ever an advocate of HD-DVD.

HSBC Internet Banking Fail Jan 14. 11

The fact that just over a month after switching from Santander to HSBC I’m already compiling a list of annoyances with their ‘online’ banking system says something I guess. Maybe I’m a bit of a moaner or maybe I just expected more from someone that claims their online banking system is ‘award winning’.

• Standing Orders: Don’t be fooled in to thinking that you are actually adding, editing and deleting your standing orders ‘online’. The reality is that changes are not live despite what the online banking interface might lead you to believe. The reality is that an email request is sent to some chap somewhere is HSBC and he manually processes these requests as and when he’s at his desk. Heaven forbid you might want to change a standing order on a weekend or any other time when ‘stand order man’ is away from his desk… you’ll just have to wait an unknown amount of time for the change to happen, meanwhile you’re in standing order limbo unaware of if the change you requested is actually going to happen or not.

• Beneficiaries: Want to use the HSBC online banking system to maintain a beneficiary list where two beneficiaries might have the same sort code and account number, forget it. You can’t do that. As much as I hate to say it – even Santander could manage this one. The problem here isn’t so much that the ‘legacy system’ behind the front end can’t handle multiple beneficiaries with the same account number and sort code, the problem is the user interface… rather that spouting a useless error code (HE7) at me why not just tell me what the problem is and advise as to how I can work around it.

This is an ongoing list which I’ll no doubt be adding to!

Update: I had a rather lovely letter back from HSBC advising me that they are currently working on a development to improve the beneficiaries system but that there was no planned further development of the currently ‘manual’ standing orders facility. If these issues bug you too why not send them an email to let them know...

Search stop words Aug 10. 10

While writing a simple search plug-in for ExpressionEngine I went looking for a nicely formatted array or CSV file of ‘stop words’ which I could diff my search string against. Didn’t find anything which was an easy copy/paste so I thought I’d post the content that I adapted from the MySQL docs here for others to use. :)

Download: search_stop_words.csv

Have fun! :)

Dribbble Jun 02. 10

I’ve got a Dribbble invite going spare. Leave a comment and a link to something awesome you’ve designed if you fancy an in. I’ll pick a lucky recipient at the end of the week. Oh and you can find me on Dribbble at http://dribbble.com/players/nathanpitman. :)

ExpressionEngine Extension: Push to FoxyCart Mar 04. 10

While working on a project recently with the FoxEE E-commerce module for ExpressionEngine we discovered that it doesn’t integrate at all well with the Solspace User Module. This is understandable because the Solspace User Module circumvents the standard process for user registration and profile updates in ExpressionEngine. The upshot of this is that you simply ‘cannot’ make single sign on with FoxyCart work with FoxEE if your users are registering or updating their profile using the Solspace User Module. Now this is a bit of a problem since pretty much any E-commerce site built on ExpressionEngine will be using the Solspace User Module to allow users to easily manage their account details etc.

After much hacking and messing about I suggested to Ed who was working with us at Nine Four at the time that we could perhaps build an extension that used the User Module Hooks and the FoxyCart API to do the job. Ed went away and came back a very short time thereafter with a working solution. We like to call this little extension ‘Push to FoxyCart’ and we’d love to share it with anyone else that’s come up against the same problem that we did.

To clarify, you only need this extension if you are using the Solspace User Module, FoxEE and FoxyCart and you want to enable SSO for your ExpressionEngine site members. The extension is very simply but it requires some basic configuration.

Download: ext.push_to_foxycart.php.zip

At line 13 you will have to enter your ‘FoxyCart Domain’ (mysite.foxycart.com for example) and at line 14 your FoxyCart API token. Finally you’ll need to change the mapping of the FoxyCart fields to the ExpressionEngine custom member profile fields on lines 100 through to 119. This should be pretty obvious… if not then perhaps you already bit off more than you can chew! :)

Make sure you’re running PHP5 and have access to CURL on your server, upload the extension, enable it and you should be good to go. For support I’ve created a topic on the ExpressionEngine forums, hopefully if I’m not able to help with any problems you encounter then someone else might be able to chime in. :)