Oct 16, 2005 · 1 minute read
All of a sudden it’s all about the real world. In fact that’s my prediction for 2006 – geeks moving out into real social activities (often involving beer) around blogs and mailing lists what not. Anyway…
After the Northern Geekender yesterday, which was a really good do for all those that couldn’t make it, I found out about another meet up even closer to home – in Newcastle no less.
So people over at the Accessify forum are organising a get together on the 27th of this month. Things are coming fast and furious at the moment. I’ll hopefully be going along, although it starts at 5:30 and I finish work at 6:00 so might be a bit late.
I’ll post more details about that as I get anything, and I’ll post any half decent photos (and link to the inevitable flickr group) as stuff happens.
Oct 11, 2005 · 3 minute read
In something of a shock I’ve just ported the site (well some of it so far) to Textpattern. I’d alluded that I was looking to do something similar (I mentioned a crazy Ruby fueled idea, but strayed away after having a run in with fastcgi) a little time ago but have finally gotten around to it.
The reasons where many fold, but mainly came down to wanting to do other things that write content management applications. I know I can do it, and it’s certainly not a solved problem, but it’s not as much a part of my job any more – every few months I was wanting to go back and rewrite something fundamental (or everything) and it was getting in the way of me doing other, hopefully more interesting and useful things – like Newcastle New Media , Fluid Flash or playing with whatever buzz word is in this week (definately Web 2.0).
So after what was quite a brief look around I settled on Textpattern mainly for it’s positioning. It is a blogging ap, but has lots of other features that allow content management of other elements – hopefully useful for side projects and the like. It’s PHP and MySQL so I can rip it to pieces if I want. It’s mature, stable, feature rich and does, with plugins, everything I probably need – the big question will be if it does them in a way I like, so far it’s thumbs up. Oh and John Hick’s has written a number of really good articles on textpattern, including a migration piece which gave me some pointers.
I’ve ported recent posts and comments, I’ll move the rest on an as time permits basis but, after some mod\_rewriting mad skills I’ve kept the old site fully functional (no link rot – yeah).
All in all it probably took me 4 hours, in a couple of sessions, to get all the styles into textpattern, set up a few plug-ins (del.icio.us links, live previews – whoo), port the latest content and move from my development box to here. A pretty good testament to the ease of use of textpattern. If I had not had the original design or content I would have been up and running in minutes – the installation process is smooth as a new cuddly toy.
Their are a couple of changes that hopefully only the anal will even see. I’ll try and resurect some of them, probably in a more satisfying manner that before.
For the moment I’ll keep the existing rss feed up to date but only for a little while, the new textpattern feeds can be accessed from the navigation menu, and now include an atom feed as well (basically because I can).
In conclusion, anyone looking to move, or start, a blog style site with other ambitions then textpattern could be what your looking for – although some PHP skills wouldn’t go a miss.
Anyway, here’s to a more organised life. Anything fundamentally wrong let me know!
Oct 6, 2005 · 1 minute read
Peter J Lambert of Pixelicious fame has had a great idea. At least the best idea I heard today. Pretty short notice but if anyone fancies a trip down (or up?) to York for something of a geek get together let me know.
I can’t say I’m definately going as I just found out but decided to spread the word anyway – and with any luck will definately try and make the trip. I had been feeling (and I think I even complained once) about the lack of a sense of Northerness (not that southerners, or Scots for that matter, aren’t nice people or anything but…) amongst web design. Real Ale, Grit, Coal, that sort of thing – you just dont see that much web design that looks like it was inspired by that.
Anyway, the 15th (Saturday) looks to be the date of choice. Head over to pixelicious.co.uk to express an interest or complain or find out more information.
If anyone from around Newcastle does fancy it let me know as well – I’d probably be even more inclined to go and meet strangers if other strangers (or Chris) who live and work near me where going.
Oct 4, 2005 · 1 minute read
After complains of the lack of a decent magazine, and after the passing and resurection of Design in Flight another one raised it’s head. Yeh. Have a look at treehouse.
Another great, low cost ($15), well designed publication that you can print out and read in the moments away from the computer.
OK, so I haven’t read that much yet but what I have was both interesting, informative and hey, pretty well edited.
Thumbs up to any and all involved.
Sep 27, 2005 · 2 minute read
Disclaimer: I went to uni but not to study anything even remotely to do with the web. I basically make everything up as I go along. Bear that in mind when reading my commentry.
Phil (xlab.co.uk) just made an observation regarding webstandards and education that I thought particularly interesting. Are kids being taught web standards?
Based on my experience, limited as it may be, I’d have to vote no. I’d maybe even go further – are kids (sorry to any young readers, I’m just going with the flow) being taught web design?
Web design, at least to my mind, involves a wide range of disciplines – Human Computer Interaction, Information design and theory, Graphic design, Application design and development and so on and so forth. Without a general appreciation of all of these you are not, again to my thinking, a web designer. That isn’t to say you aren’t a fantastic Graphic Designer or what not, but a web designer is simply a broader disciple.
Back to education. And teaching. Now to teach such a rapidly changing medium? A course, I would imagine, needs planning over three years. The problem their is that in web design and development three years is an awful long time in terms of best practice and up to date thinking. I want to work with people who know AJAX, real world CSS, semantic thinking XHTML and unobtrusive Javascript. That sort of course simply could not have been written 4 years ago. And writing it now will leave it dramatically out of date in 4 years time – when all we’ll be wanting is more Python Programmers (or something)
In a sort of unlikely to get picked up on sticking neck out statement, I’d say I’d love to help out. I see the only option is getting the local web industry involved in education. Seminars, chats, meet-ups, anything that get’s those in education nearer to the reality (yes – you do have to consider users other than your mates, tutors and design magazines) the better.
Anyone else out their think the same? Willing to get involved? Maybe the time is now?
Leave a comment here or on phil’s post or post something on your site and lets discuss the issue. Does anyone else feel strongly about this? Even as someone not involved in the recruitment side of things directly at the moment I still want to work with the best – and in my mind so should everyone else.
Sep 20, 2005 · 1 minute read
Ok. I just came to a realisation. I think somewhere along the line I got addicted. First I tried one. It seemed pretty good. Not really having any effect on my and generally just being good to feel part of something.
But I couldn’t stop at one. I thought I could handle more and more. So I went in for some of the hard stuff. And lots of it.
And look at me now. Typing this while waiting for more email that is reasonable for a small company in a week to download because I didn’t check my email for a day or so. Time for rehab I think.
I dont want to chuck the habit completely, just pair back my addiction, get some control. So who stays and who goes?
DiH (designersinhouse.com) is certainly leading at the moment as a keeper. It’s proved useful, interesting and informative so far – plus I met Matt at @media.
I think maybe their’s room for one more. CSS-d, WSG, thelist, webdesign-L your time is coming.
Aug 30, 2005 · 1 minute read
I’ve been a (distant) admirer of flickr since I had a brief play a while back. Nice interface, good idea and all that. Well I finally got round to setting up a proper account.
I’d recently got myself a reasonable digital camera. Nothing expensive or fancy – in the past whenever I’ve thought about taking photo’s I’ve always got bored and given up. This time is going to be different. Hopefully.
I’ve only really got round to one proper shoot and in non ideal conditions (well, in terms of photography – basically in a room under a pub) but I’m pretty happy with a couple of the photo’s. But maybe that’s because I like somewhat abstract orange/red shots?
Anyway, hopefully I’ll get round to taking and uploading some more shots. And maybe using some of them on this site.
Aug 29, 2005 · 2 minute read
Well, their are no doubt lots of typo’s on this site but I’m referring to the Ruby on Rails blogging application Typo (currently version 2.5.5)
So far I have to say it’s quite nice. I’m only playing at the moment – the site you are currently reading (for those of you actually on the site, and not reading the feed) is a product of my PHP skills. Some of it I like (ie. the bits I wanted to write), others I’m not too sure about and well, it doesn’t do anything I cant be bothered to write. Which up until not hasn’t been a problem. But I’d still quite like live searching, categories and tags and all that malarkey.
Browsing the usual supect sites the choice between using a bespoke system and an existing solution seems fairly split. John Hicks is always raving about TextPattern and saying nice things. You see lots of MovableType fans and WordPress fans but non to be fair I never really liked them. Maybe that was just me?
It might be that all, especially WordPress and MovableType are pretty mature solutions and that I like something to hack on? So a custom self built solution seems the way to go? Or does it? With everything providing very similar featuresets – and differing only in a few important areas building something bespoke means 95% redesigning and rebuilding the wheel and maybe 5% innovation. Which is cool as a learning experience but I’m now in more of a get stuff done mood of late.
I haven’t decided as yet one way or the other but Typo might just be the anwser. Small enough to hack, an excuse to learn Rails and featureful to boot.
Aug 29, 2005 · 2 minute read
I all one for nice url’s, that is removing all the gumf involving question marks and ampersands and the like for something that is both shorter, more human readable and more search engine friendly.
Doing it in PHP is actually pretty straightforward once you get the hang of it and can be pretty powerful – so here goes with a short tutorial of sorts. It’s will probably be brief and make too many assumptions of the reader – any questions just let me know and I may even try and write it up properly.
The basic principle is to stop using the GET array (accessible from $\_SERVER\[‘GET’\]) to make descisions with. The question then becomes what to replace it with. A simple class borrowed from the Sitepoint PHP Anthology book written by Harry Fuecks is at least my answer. The PathVars class does pretty much what is says in the name, specifically providing access to the path contents in the form of an array. I’ll provide a link to a code archive for this article rather than just copy and paste whole classes – download it now if you are interested in the behind the scenes bits.
So we now create a new PathVars instance like so:
/* Pathvars object */
$pathvars = new PathVars($_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME']);
And we can now magically get access to each element of the path (separated by a /) from the instance variable pathvars:
$params = $pathvars->pathVars;
Or more correctly by using the method provided:
$pathvars->fetchByIndex(0)
Where the fetchByIndex parameter is the element you want from the array.
Ok, so so far I’m really just repeating the work of others, if you like this sort of thing I’d really recommend the book. The next step on top of this is however is to decide what to do with the information when you have it. The following shows a very simple example – potentially for use in a simple blog or news site:
switch ($pathvars->fetchByIndex(0)) {
case "article":
include(views/article.view.php);
case "page":
include(views/page.view.php);
default:
include('views/home.view.php');
}
In this example where we have www.example.com/article or www.example.com/article/a\_sample\_article\_name the article view include file is used.
What these include files then do is up to you, in my case each of them passes different parameters to a simple templating system which then outputs the page. Again, have a look at the code samples to see that in action.
Let me know if anyone found this interesting, useful or informative and I might post other titbits, otherwise it’s probably back to inane ramblings and misplaced conjecture.
Aug 25, 2005 · 2 minute read
A somewhat grandiouse title but hey, dont you just love it when things just work? A slow evening lead to following two tutorials at once, the outcome I now have andy budd’s fab iTunes playlists set up and I have rails running on my host. Woo Hoo.
I love working things out and generally dont mind things ending up not working even but sometimes it’s nice when everything takes only a small amount of time and effort and then works. A sense of acomplishment, and admiration, if you will.
Oh, proof of the rails pudding: morethanseven.net:3000/
WEBrick at the moment, FastCGI is for another day, hopefully soon. And before you ask, I didn’t just copy the source from a local install. Really.
The tutorial I followed for that I grabbed from xmlareas.com/ruby-rails-howto.html which might be of use on a range of reasonable shared hosting environments – though remember to remomve the temp directory as it will contain LOTS of files that may flag some hosting file limits.
Makes me want to write some sort of how to articles on some subject or other. Question on a post card is what?
So a big thanks for Andy’s rather geeky approach to cataloging music (my librarian housemate is going to love that) and to goldenratio (probably not a real name?) for the Rails article. Long live the Internet and all that.