Last year I wrote a short post titled The Beauty Of Open Source, where I talked about a jQuery, a Javascript project I've been involved with. The vast majority of developer in the jQuery community are friendly, helpful, and just good people. And then there's these guys. I've worked exclusively in PHP for the last two years, although my experience goes back farther than that. And about a year ago, I investigated several "frameworks" that had the potential to speed up my development process. I settled upon CakePHP because it was the most stable and active framework available at the time. Since then, I've really thrown myself into it, and it's been a productive period. Over the last ...
I've finally had it with MovableType. Last night, I backed up my database and did a fresh install of Wordpress.
I posted a few "small" changes to the old weblog today. I had really planned on rolling this out back on May 1 for the "reboot", but didn't have time to complete it. Color scheme is generally the same, and the layout is similar. Most of the changes happened "behind the scenes". Rather than letting MT output everything, I dug through the source code, and am accessing some of the functionality directly via PHP. For instance, under the static publishing model of MT, an entry I wrote 3 months ago wouldn't receive any updates to "related links" unless I were to go back and output the page again. By letting PHP hit the database directly for certain features, everything (should) ...
I made mention recently about the frustration of being primarily a web developer. The bulk of the work I do goes into building CMS tools for my clients to manage their sites - the kind of thing that has a password on it and I can't exactly post a link to it. Screenshots are nice, but don't do the work justice. I've also worked on some top-secret market research projects recently - I can't even post screenshots of that work. But, every now and then, I get to actually do some design work. My good friend Chris Carter hired me to redesign his consulting firm's website. It took much longer ...
For those of you who don't regularly check in on my other site, I've added 3 sites to my Projects page in the last week or so. (I wasn't kidding when I said I've been busy lately.) Oddly enough, I didn't do the design on any of these sites. One -- Ellington's -- was an existing site that needed a little help. I touched a few things up, and created a content management system in PHP/MySQL. The other 2 -- Simon Group and Infinity Builders -- are for the same company. I worked with a marketing firm to ...
So this whole website thing is a work in progress. As I have the time, I try to add features or tweak things. The latest update I'm trying to make is the addition of sortable archive list pages. I'd like to have my category list pages be sorted by a user-defined variable. Put simply, a table that you can sort by clicking a column header - title, date, number of comments, etc. The problem MovableType generates static HTML code. There's no interaction with the database as the page is written. Solutions? My first attempt was to use a plugin that allowed me to pass a SQL query to the database - MTSql. I quickly realized that, although I was able to define ...
I've had this new design idea kicking around for several weeks. I've been trying to find the time here and there to work it out, but time is pretty scarce these days. So, last week, I decided to just throw it out there, and keep working on it as I get the chance. So, the whole site has a new look to it. In the next few days/weeks, I'll add some new features. In the meantime, pardon the dust. If you see anything glaringly wrong, let me know.
I've just finished up adding a few new features to the site. First is a style switcher, something I've seen on other sites. There's a great article over at A List Apart detailing how to get it done - the implementation is incredibly simple. The hard part is in the details - coming up with different style sheets. There are many methods that can be used to get it done, but this one uses a cookie to store a user's choice of style. For visitors that have cookies disabled, the default style is applied. For now, I have two finished styles available - blue and grey. You can choose between them by clicking on the icons in the ...
I've just added a new feature to the site. In the sidebar to the right, there are now updated news feeds from various sites. I was toying aroud with writing something to grab, parse, and display RSS feeds from other sites, but I found a nice little tool called zFeeder. It took me about 45 minutes to download, install, figure it out, and customize it to fit the layout. It's a pretty slick tool, once you figure it out. I'm pulling in feeds from Slate, Fool, and Slashdot right now. I've got to work on a script that will auto-update the feeds every so often, but all in all, it's a nice little addition.
I spent a few hours this weekend installing and configuring Gallery, a "web based software product that lets you manage your photos on your own website". I need to spend some time adjusting the layout to conform to my site, but the application itself is really nice. Probably the biggest factor in switching from the MT functions to Gallery is that there's a desktop application available - Gallery Remote. It allows me to create and modify the photo albums via a Java app, and without having to log into the web site. Basically, it saves a lot of time - I can drop a whole folder of images onto the app, and then upload them all in bulk. Anyways, ...