Archive for the 'Web Design' Category
I know most hardcore Web designers/developers don’t like the term “Web 2.0“. They get frustrated and state that Web 2.0 isn’t anything more than design and technology put together to provide end users with a rich application experience over the Internet, not a new version of the Web. Well, that’s what Web 2.0 has been defined as, so maybe “Web 2.0″ is “Web 2.0″… Confusing, huh?!
It’s kind of like saying that a non-denominational church isn’t a denomination when in fact, non-denomination is now determined to be a denomination like Baptist, Catholic, or Methodist, to name a few. So, the moral of this story is, if you say something isn’t something for so long, basically it becomes the very thing you don’t intend for it to be. And, only for the simple fact that the topic of interest will fall into a category of some sort because everything has to be categorized, whether you like it or not… Enough! On with the rest of my post…
I have mentioned rateTexarkana on this site a couple of times and am very pleased with what Randy has done with that site. It looks very “Web 2.0″. Randy’s adoption of new fangled design practices has spurred me into the new era of design, layout, and functionality. So, what better place to start than with my own personal business’ Web site?!
The Fruitful Solutions Web site, fruitfulsolutions.com, has been “under construction” for a few months now. I was working with one design but never was completely happy with it. Now, that I am venturing into these new ideas and concepts, I have a new fire for the direction of my Web site. I started the new design by revamping my logo. Below is the comparison:
Yesterday:
Today:
Once I had the logo redesigned with a little modern flair, and gloss, I decided to incorporate some color into the new design. You can check out my ideas, although not the finished design, by visiting www.fruitfulsolutions.com.
I’d love to hear what people think of this new design concept I am working to incorporate into my business’s Web site. Any and all opinions from “It is the greatest!” to “It sucks!” are welcome. Of course, I do retain the right to delete all negative comments… I mean, come on! This is my blog and it is my new design… Which I like very much!
Until next time…
It has been quite sometime since I have blogged on this site. I guess this can be a little overview of what has been going on since my last post.
I have been playing WoW a lot lately. I really enjoy this game. It is extremely fun getting your character leveled up and meeting new people. The “World” in World of Warcraft is very fitting for this game. The game is indeed like a whole different world. There are tons of people playing this game and a lot of people willing to help you battle the opposing faction as well as complete quests and instances. I am extremely glad I have started playing this game. Now, if there were only more time to play…
I have taken my Alliance Dwarf Hunter on Blood Furnace to level 38. I have some nice weapons that some higher level players have helped me acquire. My armor is good as well. Especially since my brother-in-law, Nfinight, has started leatherworking within the game. That is nice to be able to create items that you can actually use on your character as well as sell to other players within the game. I hope to drop engineering and start blacksmithing soon so I can make weapons for us to use. I just wish I would have started doing blacksmithing sooner and Nfinight would have started doing leatherworking sooner… There’s no telling what types of gear we would be wearing these days.
I’d also like to plug a guild I joined last night on the game, We Have Cookies. This seems to be a pretty laid back guild that enjoys gaming and having a good time playing the game as it was meant to be played.
Well, average admins got slammed again this month. The 10GB of transfer bandwidth was used up by the 9th or 10th of the month. Chris has started parsing the logs for the month to see if there is anything exciting going on that is attributing to this and if anything can be blocked. Surely, there isn’t that many visitors coming to the site… Something fishy is going on around here and I hope we can get to the bottom of it so AA can be available for the 13 people that actually visit the site for legitimate reasons.
Web Development
A project I have been working on is set to go live tomorrow. I have been working on this new site for many weeks now. Those of you that know me personally will know where to find the new site. I’d like to leave that project at that.
Also, I have a friend of mine (who wishes to remain anonymous on this project) has launched a really cool site for the Texarkana area called rateTexarkana.com. I highly recommend all of you “Texarkanians” to visit this site, register, and start rating our businesses around the Texarkana and surrounding areas. His design is really good. The functionality is really good. And, I should start working on this project soon. I look forward to it.
I am still loving CakePHP as a development framework for PHP applications and sites. It just works. I have one project that I am trying to complete that I will more than likely move over to this framework and another for the New Boston Chamber of Commerce in New Boston TX that I am about to start and will use this framework from the ground up on their site.
I am also about finished with the Fruitful Solutions web site. Once that is completed, I will be redeveloping an application that I host (and hope to sell more subscriptions too in the near future) called En Route. This is an extremely cool application that allows businesses and organizations with lobby traffic (vendors, customers, visiting employees, etc.) to be tracked throughout their visit. There are a lot of reporting and notification features that assist the organization using the program with helping their “guests” in a timely fashion.
Photography
My cousin Andrew, a.k.a. Dingo, came down a few weekends ago and took some photos of me getting tipsy down and doing some Spider Man poses as the “gangsta” that I am.
There’s a few more of these shots on my Flickr page.
I also had the opportunity to take some photos of an electrical storm we had here in the Texarkana area a few weeks back.
Since you can’t just point and shoot an electrical storm, I set my camera to continuous mode and held down the shutter button to catch these shots. Needless to say, I had a lot of images that were just black or of clouds with no electrical activity going on. Shooting at night is difficult. I also think that shooting an electrical storm is difficult. But, some of these photos turned out pretty good and you can see more in this photo set on my Flick page.
Musical Preferences for Today - July 15th, 2007
I started the morning off listening to DJ Screw. After I woke up (yes, I went to bed at 6AM… I’m having some issues sleeping these days… Maybe it’s the Red Bull I drink to stay awake during the day) I listened to the iTunes Live Sessions of Five for Fighting, a live album from Maroon 5, and then on to the latest studio release of Finger 11. Those of you that know me know that the last 3 bands I listed are not in my “normal” rotation, so, you’ll be glad to know that I finished off the evening with Hatebreed and Mudvayne. Nice little mix, I’d say.
Until next time…
I was digging around this evening and foun d a web site called Thinkature and decided to give it a try. The Thinkature web site describes itself as:
Thinkature brings the richness of in-person, visual communication to the web by placing instant messaging inside a visual workspace. Use it as a collaboration environment, a meeting room, a personal web-based whiteboard, or something entirely new.
Sounds interesting enough. But how does it work?!
I signed up for a free account and started messing around with the application. Basically, it allows you to do flowcharting, drawing, chatting, workflows (flowcharting?), and basically anything you can think of it seems. You can insert images, insert HTML formatted text, freehand drawings in real-time, and more.
I started using it to chart out some ideas I need to get pounded out for a “project” I am working on. This project is pretty big, well, extremely time consuming to say the least. It always seems that I come up with ideas for the project but they always fall through the cracks and never get completed. Now, I have some ideas and some to do list items on my Thinkature workspace that will hopefully keep me on track. If I complete one task, I can either delete it, or modify the text to show it as completed. I can also add additional ideas as they pop into my mind… Pretty cool if you ask me.
As a final note, this whole “Web 2.0″ phenomenon really blows me away. Not necessarily the designs that are defining Web 2.0, but the dynamic applications that are being developed along the way. They are extremely interactive, visually attractive, and do a very good job of mimicking a desktop piece of software. I’m impressed and am looking to “Web-two-dot-oh-ilize” some of my applications and web sites. We’ll see how it goes. If I am not too set in my ways, maybe I can become a part of the “Web 2.0″ generation of developers!
Until next time…
I am doing a Web project using the CakePHP framework for my “day job”. I have said it before, and I’ll say it again, I love the user community and the user contributed code that CakePHP offers at the bakery. I am displaying some images on a particular section of the site and want these images to be uploaded by end users at 640×480 through a Web based interface. I then want these images to be displayed first on the site as thumbnails, however, I didn’t want the end users to have to learn how to resize and upload multiple images. Where did I turn? That’s right, kids! The CakePHP user community!
I found a really nice tutorial with code titled “Thumbnail Generation with phpThumb” at the bakery and dove in. The tutorial uses an open-source thumbnail generation PHP application called phpThumb() (imagine that!). I followed the tutorial line by line and had no issues creating the controllers and implementing user specified this “vendor” application into CakePHP and my web application. However, I did have some issues initially due to a lack of understanding of how phpThumb() works. Here’s what I mean.
The thumbnail generation script that you create with the afore mentioned tutorial and phpThumb() can accept three parameters: height, width, and quality (for JPEGs). When I was calling the script I was taking it back to a thumbnail generator I created a while back. I was only passing the width and quality or the height and quality. I figured the script would automagically determine the other parameter. Well, it will if you specify values for height or width that are less than the default or user defined maximum height and width. If you don’t, it will suppress your image to whatever the maximum height or width values are.
Here’s an example: my script, and probably every default download, has the maximum width and height set to 200px. So, if I were to specify a 600 pixel width for a photo that is 640×480, phpThumb() would try and resize my image to 600×440 (or something, heck I don’t know), but, because 440 is bigger than 200, which is the default for the height, it would make the image whatever it needed to to keep the height at 200 pixels high.
So, the smart thing to do, and probably what I should have been doing all along, is to specify the maximum height and width that you want the given image to be. phpThumb() will resize the image as close to that size as it can while keeping the aspect ratio the same. Pretty swift! I just didn’t know exactly how phpThumb() worked so I did meet some frustration along the way and thought the script was jacked up or something…
Maybe this will save someone out there some frustration. I know it will me in the future. I always need friendly little reminders from myself.
Until next time…
If you’ve never heard of Lightbox or Lightbox 2, it is an extremely sexy way to display images within a web site. And, I should clear this up. You’re not actually displaying images within a web site, but rather on top of the web site.
Lightbox and Lightbox 2, hereafter referred to as simply Lightbox, uses some nifty CSS markup and JavaScriptto display a transparent overlay on top of the current page being viewed within the browser and then displays the image/photo in a nifty little box on top of that. With Lightbox, you don’t have to be worried about images pushing the limits of your sites design, i.e. column widths, when displaying images or photos.
Lightbox is extremely simple to install and implement. However, I was unable to find any documentation on how to get Lightbox incorporated into my CakePHP framework (for more information on CakePHP, read this or visit www.cakephp.org). I have used Lightbox in a project for my day job before but not when using the CakePHP framework and I had to do some messing around before I got this working. Probably only because I don’t fully understand the CakePHP framework and all of its helpers.
In CakePHP, it is extremely easy to link CSS and JavaScript files into your site’s layout. These types of files have to be included within the <head> and </head> tags of the HTML that is sent to the browser. If you follow the CakePHP standards for file locations, you would drop your CSS files into /app/webroot/css/ and your JavaScript files into /app/webroot/js/. Once your files are located in these locations, you add one line of code for each respective file type you want to link, like so:
CSS:
<php echo $html->css ( "myCssFile.css", "stylesheet", NULL, FALSE ); ?>
JavaScript:
<php
if ( isset ( $javascript ) ):
echo $javascript-$gt;link ("myJsFile.js" );
endif;
?>
Easy enough, right?! Well, sure. Just add the following lines of code to your site’s layout in /app/views/layouts/ and you’re good to go… mostly…
<php
echo $html->css ( "lightbox", "stylesheet", NULL, FALSE ); ?>;
if ( isset ( $javascript ) ):
echo $javascript-$gt;link ("prototype.js" );
echo $javascript-$gt;link ("scriptaculous.js" );
echo $javascript-$gt;link ("lightbox.js" );
endif;
?>
The above lines of code assume you’re using Lightbox 2 and you have placed the necessary files into the recommended folders within the CakePHP file system. The newest version of Lightbox has some display effects that are derived from the Prototype and Scriptaculous libraries. Therefore, you have to include those files as well. Please note that if you aren’t going to be using any of the other features available from the Scriptaculous library, append ?load=effects after scriptaculous.js in the above code.
You also need to make sure that any paths to images in the CSS and JavaScript files point to the correct location of the images included in the Lightbox download.
So, everything is great, right?! I should just be able to put rel="lightbox" in my <a> tags and when I click the link to go to an image, Lightbox should take over and help a brother out, right?! No! I had to add the JavaScript helper to my controller within CakePHP and then I was good to go! To do this, add the following line of code to your controller:
var $helpers = array ( "Javascript" );
If you are already specifying $helpers within your controller, just append:
, "Javascript"
…to the end of your helper strings you have defined like so:
var $helpers = array ( "Html", "Ajax", "Javascript" );
Like I said earlier, if I had a better understanding of CakePHP and which helpers were included by default (I know, I know, I should have looked at the pages controller…), I probably wouldn’t have had to mess with this. But, if anyone else out there is a CakePHP newbie like myself and wants to use Lightbox, or any other external JavaScript file, this should get you pointed in the right direction.
Until next time…
Flickr Updates
