Thank You

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

I have been very busy lately working on several sites and working into new areas. It has been challenging, but a lot of fun too.

I really enjoy a good challenge and find it one of the fastest ways to learn. But one cannot learn in a vacuum. There are online tutorials and there are loads of books, but there is one source that is completely irreplaceable: people. In my quest for answers on a variety of topics from Flash MP3 players to jQuery and Javascript code, I have frequented numerous forums and websites dedicated to helping others - with not promise of remuneration.

This has been quite heartening. A few of the stars from the last little while: Jared Yeo of Simplistika has been particularly kind. ActionScript.org and goToAndLearn forums have all been very thoughtful, but the best of all have been the extra-mile folks at Expression Engine. They are bar-none the most helpful and considerate bunch on the block.

There are plenty of obnoxious jerks out there; people that take some kind of pleasure out of making life miserable for other people, but it has really been a great experience to be able to compare notes with the best in the business. Thank you.

Bill Gates and Technology

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

I have been considering the topic of this entry for some time and today I finally found what I was looking for.

This week Steve Jobs of Apple was in the limelight for his health and with announcements about a new lineup of iPod products. Then I read a short blurb on CNBC about an interview with Steve Jobs wherein he reacts to an ad with Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld.

There is a handy little technology element that provides in-text links. This feature is provided by Kontera. I have seen it on occasion and thought it was handy but potentially annoying. This time though it provided an added piece of comic relief, equal to one of the Mac ads.

On closer inspection, the window is not about Bill Gates at all, but about wrought iron fences and gates. This is either a smart piece of marketing or a slip with the technology.

Wireless Connectivity with the iPod Touch

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

With a recent upgrade to a MacBook Pro, I also got an iPod Touch. I don’t do enough out of my home office to justify an iPhone, so I thought the iPod Touch was a very handy tool - not to mention that it was free. The next obvious question was how to get the wireless connectivity.

On a recent trip through eight southern states the iPod was handy in the hotel to catch up on email, check the weather and get directions for the next day’s drive.

Then after I got home I the time came to resolve this issue of wireless connectivity. I thought if my MacBook Pro has a wireless card in it there must be some way to use that to connect to the Internet. I didn’t want to buy a wireless router, so I finally took my dilemma to the Apple Discussion boards and got a very kind replay from a gentleman in the U.K.

Here is the solution as given by mrtotes

Any Mac with and Airport card can be set to act as a very basic router.  This assumes that you use the Ethernet port to connect the MBP to the Internet:

Silence Broken

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Once again, development time takes precedence over blogging.

I have spent the last several weeks designing and building yet another Expression Engine website. This one is for The Real State of the Union, LLC, a Raleigh, NC-based company that is focused on the economy and what we are doing to ourselves with an ever-increasing deficit. Graphically there wasn’t much to work with since this is a words and graphs organization, so we worked the colors to tell the story and carry the design.

I used two basic weblogs for the content of the site. One weblog for the blog portion and a “miscellaneous” blog for the page and sidebar content. This gave the client maximum flexibility for modifying and adding content. 

A Perfect Time to Panic

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

In the Pixar animated classic Toy Story, Woody and Buzz Lightyear find themselves in a particularly dreadful situation and while Buzz keeps his cool, Woody loudly proclaims, “It’s a perfect time to PANIC!”

We all have those moments, and I have mine of course, but I have a very different reason to PANIC.

In my particular case, I am referring to the cool tools from Panic. Integrating Coda and Transmit with Expression Engine makes coding EE sites so much easier.

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Top Ten Expression Engine Methods

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

There are things that we do over and over and over again. These things are patterns and they are basically the bread and butter of the trade. As I have been using Expression Engine for a while now and feeling pretty comfortable with them, I know pretty well what my top ten tasks that I do in Expression Engine:

1. Embedding code through the use of includes
2. Active navigation indication - current active page
3. Including weblogs in pages
4. Including weblog by title
5. Displaying selective sections of weblogs
6. Use of Permalinks for “Read More” options
7. User Registration and Login
8. Limiting access to specific content
9. Saving template files and linking with Coda
10. Reusing code

The next installment: show how it is done.

Learning from History

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

There is a very wise saying that “those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” And this isn’t just about elections and what America learned about the Clinton’s the first time around. Seriously, I am not interested in learning that lesson again. This lesson of history though is not limited to events that are worthy of history books. I am thinking more specifically about web design, development and workflow.

How many times do we finally figure something out and promise to remember it forever, only to forget it because we don’t use it again immediately? Probably way too often. However, the smart ones, remember because they take the time to write it down. The accumulation of writing things down soon becomes a library and that library becomes a repository of good solutions and an effective workflow. This leads to expanded skills and increased efficiency, which then translate into better results for the client.

There are simply too many things to learn and to remember to waste time learning things twice. Make a note of that.

Integration and Simplification

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Do you every find yourself doing too much and then feeling spread a little (or a lot) too thin? I can relate. Ever since launching out on our own, we have been defining and refining our style. As such, projects and experiments seemed to grow way beyond proportion and there were just too many sites and too many blogs. So we did what any good gardener would do: began pruning.

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Getting Help with Expression Engine

Monday, April 14, 2008

I have been busy working on a couple of Expression Engine based projects and in the process have been directed to Solspace. Solspace has a couple of very handy plugins and extension that enhance the functionality of Expression Engine, but the thing that I found most helpful was their forum. I found the forum timely, responsive and extremely helpful and that is something that is nice to have. 

EE Site Launched

Tuesday, April 01, 2008

The results are in and as a developer, my vote goes for Expression Engine. Why do you ask would I be willing to pay a license fee for something that can be had for “free” in some other content management system? The only way to truly appreciate the power, flexibility and usefulness of any content management system is to use it. I have worked with a number of CMS in the past. I have worked with home-grown corporate versions that worked, but I always felt boxed in. 

I tried Mambo (now Joomla) and while there was a degree of flexibility, it too was heavily linked to the architecture of the system. I have tried Plone, and while I really liked the styling on the finished product and many of the aspects of the system, I never could wrap my head around Zope. Next I worked through Drupal, both version 5 and some on version 6. After a lot of around and around I was able to understand the basic system, but the interface was so painfully difficult to modify and the themes didn’t always work with the content, so I moved on to WordPress.

WordPress is so handy. It is like one of those tents that you unfold and it just pops up, a fully standing tent. Just unfold the sleeping bag and you’re ready to blog. But then came along an opportunity to build a website for a local church. There was a lot of enthusiasm from the community, not to mention the financial incentive, to have a site they could maintain themselves. Was WordPress up to the task?

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