I was surprised, pleased, and honored to receive an email from Bill Kelter last month. His book, Veeps: Profiles In Insignificance is now the movie of the same name, and they needed some help with their
Read more →A coworker’s leading me through the process of creating a new site in Drupal 7. We’re creating new modules as well as a new theme. Last night, we managed to pretty thoroughly break the development site. Making the problem harder to diagnose was that we hadn’t committed our changes (several hundred lines of code)...
Read more →I’ve had the pleasure of working with Stacy on a couple of projects. She has a great eye for color and layout. She’s a good designer, comfortable in many genres, from kind of hippie-arthouse to a more austere clean-cut design. My favorite images in her portfolio may be the ones for “Steampunk Shakespeare” that...
Read more →Aw yeah! syntax on filetype on au BufNewFile,BufRead *.lmx set filetype=xml
Read more →I just finished up a great new site for Paloma Clothing. They had someone do the design and start the HTML process, I updated images and made requested changes, and the clients are thrilled with their new site! Congratuations to Lee Anne and her crew at Paloma Clothing!
Read more →Generally, I promote virtual hosting. However, for one reason or another, you may want to buy a server and do a colocation option. Or rent a dedicated server. I spent last night helping a friend move some servers into a new unit. These servers are about eight years old, built in the mid 2000s....
Read more →At DevelopmentNow, we’ve had people ask for “gamification” to help build site engagement. My favorite example of this is Fitocracy, where people earn points for exercise and complete quests and challenges. We built the beginnings of a game for Portland Fit. The problem with “building a game” and “gamification” (aside from the terrible word)...
Read more →One of my problems is that sitemap files sometimes get out of sync with the actual site, even with sites driven from a database. One thing I’m working on is testing those files; you could put this into the sitemap building script if you wanted to make sure the files existed even when you...
Read more →That was exciting. Like worrying away at the skin around a sliver in your thumb until the sliver finally pops free. I was given some legacy code that was supposed to email a salesperson and a customer on completion of an order. The code used ActionMailer, and it was not working. Of course, I...
Read more →I put parent classes to work for me in what I thought was an interesting way. Most of the time when I’m writing a PHP class out, I include a db property (which is actually a reference to a preinstantiated $db object) and a _log method, which appends to a file some debug output....
Read more →By “Social Verbs,” I mean how users of your social website “approve” of each other’s posts. Obviously, Facebook has the Like button (and they’re adding more). Two sites I’ve been using lately have switched to “give props” (Fitocracy) and “Healthy” as in “I find this healthy” (Runkeeper). I can see why they chose different...
Read more →I am the first to admit that when I’m building a website for someone, the last thing I do is work out the design. Which is strange, because I usually consider myself to be pretty evenly balanced, left-brain, right-brain. But when you’re building something for someone, the functionality; what they want to happen, that’s...
Read more →