ph.plumber

so - you say you want to detect which mobile devices hit your site? - in the past, this has been a bit of an issue, but lately - with really nice projects available out there such as WURFL or DeviceAtlas, you are able to concentrate harder on other issues, instead of having to write a complete library of your own.

so for this, i’ve decided on DeviceAtlas.  just head on over to DeviceAtlas and open a developers account - you will get a one year developer’s license to play around to see how cool it is.

after registering - click on the downloads link - then go to the php example and download the source files.  after de-tar-and-un-zipping the file, just extract the contents.  at the moment all we are really interested in, is the Mobi/Mtld/DA directory and its contents - also create a json directory and drop the Sample.json file inside.

dump everything into a web directory somewhere.

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mobile - that damned device that makes our life so easy, yet sometimes so inheritely difficult.

as a developer, we kind of try and convince ourselves that developing for mobile and developing for a desktop browser is kind of the same thing.  but we all know that this is a stalling technique for the inevitable, since invariably it becomes a whole different field of play.

every little feature you add, every little flow created and every branch of navigational hierarchy is a challenge on its own.

enter the game theory pattern

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it’s been a while since my last post - and as interests fade with time, others jump up faster than a beach ball at a nickelback concert.

so i’ve been looking into solr the last couple of days.  solr is relatively new in the arena and probably outshined a bit in popularity by other search engines such as lucene and nutch.  “but why solr?”, you may find yourself asking.

Well solr has a couple of tricks up the sleave - which is likely due to the fact that its a fresher version of the old, dare i call it legacy, search engines.

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