by on June 2, 2011 Leave a Comment

HTML5 and stuff…

HTML5I’ve been thinking a lot about HTML5 and how I can get started with it early on and hopefully stay ahead of the curb. I found a site/book that does a great job of laying things out - diveintohtml5.org.

I haven’t gotten too deep into it, but just scraping the surface of a few chapters has already taught me some interesting facts about HTML5.

I also found a couple of other tools that would come in handy for web development (and design):

http://html-ipsum.com/ - Provides quick access to lorem ipsum text for quickly filling in templates.

http://jsfiddle.net/ - An interactive web design and development playground.

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by on May 27, 2011 Leave a Comment

Yes Chrome, I’m a fan (even without great commercials like this)

 

If that doesn’t make your eyes water (even a little), you have no heart.

Also, if that doesn’t make you want to download Chrome, sign-up for Gmail, YouTube, etc., then you are hopeless. :)

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by on May 26, 2011 1 Comment

Custom WordPress Options Utility

I’ve been thinking (shocker.) Whenever I do custom WordPress development, there are always things like “I want to show the top 2 posts, but in the future I may want to show the top 3.” Or, there are designers wanting to put content in places that aren’t widget areas.

A settings page that controls any custom development is ideal so that less configuration-type settings are hard-coded. For example, if you use Kevin Sylvestre’s Google Analytics plugin, you don’t ever have to modify code. He could have deployed the code and under the installation instructions wrote “open up the googleanalytics.php file, look for the UA placeholder, and then put yours in its place.” Instead, he made it a setting, and then you just fill in that setting. No messing with code. And that’s exactly how it should have been done.

Those settings pages are all pretty similar, so why can’t it be done even easier than writing the code for it? That’s where my idea comes in. I’m going to make a web application that will create a plugin that will build you a custom settings page. Then you can reference those settings anywhere you want as you normally would a default WordPress setting. Whether you’re a designer or developer, you’ll be able to quickly and easily create custom settings page. I’m still mapping out how it’s all going to work, but I plan to start development this week.

If you have any suggestions, leave a comment below or let me know.

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by on May 21, 2011 Leave a Comment

Oreo’s!

oreo's

8 minutes worth of Oreo's

Well, we had an issue at work this week. FHA Connection, the interface that we use to interact with HUD for FHA loans, became useless as the government deployed some shotgun changes to their XML (requirements of course) that we weren’t expecting – an additional node and attribute with a value of “Yes”. I won’t go into the reasoning behind it, but trust me, it’s a pointless change.

When we brought up the issue to our software vendor, they mentioned that the change was deployed in a release that we hadn’t migrated to yet. Not that we’re far behind, though. We rather be on the cutting-edge than the bleeding edge. :) To avoid them having to work an emergency patch into our current release, I made the change to the interface class that we had already overloaded (which made it so much easier) to add the additional node to the outbound XML. Once we deployed that, FHA Connection was back up and running smoothly.

To thank me for my efforts (and eliminating the need for them to patch our current version), our account manager sent me a package (the image on the right.) This guy is THE MAN! Thanks Gary (and Kevin, for telling him my weakness)!

p.s. This was a bad day to use up the last of the milk on my cereal this morning. Off to the store!

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by on May 14, 2011 Leave a Comment

New site, and other notes…

Well, after spending all that time creating benjamin-t.com using the Zend Framework, I have given in to WordPress. I have worked on two websites recently which both featured WordPress as the backend, and I was pleasantly surprised at how well it performs, and how easy it is to develop. The Zend Framework was great, but heavily overkill for this site. When I need to make a web application (not a web site), I’ll definitely employ ZF.

The first website I worked on (and continue to work on) is RhodeIslandComedy.com. It’s a one-stop shop for all things comedy in Rhode Island, brought to you by RI comedian Frank O’Donnell. It features an event calendar, comedian and group bio’s, as well as frequent specials giving away free tickets to comedy shows and even tables (for up to 8!) at Catch a Rising Star Comedy Club inside Twin River (Lincoln, RI.) It just launched this past Monday (May 9th), and is constantly having new things added. Check back frequently for new stuff!

The second website I worked on was for a local public library here in Massachusetts. A designer approached me needing some custom development and theme work, and I was happy to help. I won’t name the library or the designer (at least not until I get permission), but I have to say that the project came out great, and I’m very pleased with the outcome.

I do realize that WordPress isn’t always capable for every project, so I’m splitting up my projects into groups of functionality. First group will be the simplest, and will employ WordPress as the architecture. For websites that aren’t simple enough to use WordPress, but aren’t intricate enough to warrant full custom development, Drupal will be used. For everything else, Zend Framework will be the champion.

Now that blogging is super easy on my site, I’ll definitely be doing it more often.

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