Archive
- [ 4 posts ] May 2010
- [ 4 posts ] April 2010
- [ 3 posts ] January 2010
- [ 2 posts ] September 2009
- [ 3 posts ] June 2009
- [ 3 posts ] May 2009
- [ 3 posts ] April 2009
- [ 6 posts ] March 2009
- [ 1 post ] February 2009
- [ 1 post ] January 2009
- [ 8 posts ] November 2008
- [ 7 posts ] October 2008
Recent Comments
- Charles » 28 Jul
Using jQuery to highlight required fields - Graham Weldon » 30 Jun
iPhone 3.0 tethering with Optus - Update - Eric » 18 Jun
iPhone 3.0 tethering with Optus - Update - Graham Weldon » 24 May
iPhone tethering success with optus - Jacob » 24 May
iPhone tethering success with optus
Blog Posts
Tag Cloud Quickie
Wednesday, 5 November 2008
Tagged: Website, General
Are tag clouds really useful? Do people actually use them? Are we ditching the traditional search and find mechanisms for this messy block of varying font sizes and word lengths? Personally I don't like them, and I rarely if ever find myself using one.
It has made me consider whether I really want to include one on this new site. They are so widespread now that I had kinda included it in my development plans without really giving it the planning required to determine if such a feature was required, or even desired. Are they used by the common user? Or are they just the "Web 2.x" way of spamming keywords to get better search engine ranking?
CakePHP Syntax Shot Down
Saturday, 1 November 2008
Tagged: Website, General
It lasted almost 24 hours. You have to give it credit, thats a record breaking short lifespan for a generic helper. The CakePHP Syntax Highlighting helper that I created last night has been deemed somewhat less than useful. While its operation is clean, conforming to standards and working well, its not practical for the situation I had in mind. That being the inclusion of code blocks in blog posts.
Blog posts can be done in a number of ways. The method I prefer is the plain xhtml textarea using markdown, or a very slim CMS that allows bullet points, and maybe bold. One thing is certain for any blog entry that needs to utilise code blocks: The majority of the time the blog post content will contain code blocks and non-code blocked content. Thus, parsing becomes an issue, as we really want to parse the complete page on render, or onload, to look for markdown tags, and apply styling as necessary.
CakePHP Syntax Highlighting Helper
Saturday, 1 November 2008
Tagged: Website, General
Well, goals rock. You can't get anything really productive done without setting attainable goals. They help structure your thought processes, and give you direction. They keep you on track, and they pay off in the end.
I've had on my list of things to complete for this site 'Syntax Highlighter', for a while... I didn't really know what I was going to do. There are a whole bunch of Javascript solutions out there that can do it, but I don't like that they take a while to render, and you are handing the visual presentation of part of your site off to the clients browser to render, if its got the power to.
Breaking personal promises
Friday, 31 October 2008
Tagged: Website, General
I'd vowed to post once a day, even though the site sint live, it would provide a great deal of content for launch, and would assist in indexing the new version of the site with new relevant content. Yesterday I failed to post an entry.
Its not all bad though. The reason that I failed to post was due to two main factors. The first being how crazy and busy it is at work right now, we are dealing with a client thats submitting change requests on and around launch day. The second being related to the first, in that I haven't actually made any progress since the last post.
CakePHP routing issues, perhaps.
Wednesday, 29 October 2008
Tagged: Website, General
Zero producivity, anyone? Tonight saw me knee deep in the CakePHP core trying to track down why the bloody hell my passed parameters were not being correctly passed as inputs to the action on a controller. Frustrating to say the least. PhpNut took some time out to explain routing changes, and point me in the right direction. He's extremely helpful, despite his busy schedule.
While I am on the right track, as it stands, the URL parsing of the core isnt passing my args around. If I had a nice codeblock syntaxhighlighting helper, I would be able to show you some cool code, and the different methods I have been attempting to get this corrected... Alas, its just another item on my todo list thats getting done at a frustratingly slow rate.
