Despite mad work going into ExpressionEngine 2 development, we’ve still be heavily focused on keeping our current products the best we can.  To that end, today we managed to eek both a new version of CI and EE out the door.  While relatively light on new features (there are some nifty ones in there though) the main thrust was a significant improvement to the Input library for both security and performance.  To this end, I’d like to publicly express my gratitude to Pascal Kriete (Inparo), whose tireless efforts helped us immensely.

Time for a little self imposed isolation. For the next 2 weeks, I’m living, breathing, and dreaming ExpressionEngine as me and Derek Jones have left the comfy confines of our homes to drop into the quiet little town of Portland for some serious “think time”.  Over the next 14 days I’ll be considerably less active then usual, as I try to put all my energy into developing.  Most of the crew live in and around Portland, so I’ll get the opportunity to finally meet our new Code Mechanic Jesse Hurlburt face to face, bring Lisa a big plaque picture of all of us as our superhero selves, and get beaten up by Rick (that’s what you get for working for a bjj expert).  Good times.

I’ll try to post images and updates as I go, but I didn’t bring a camera, so I’ll be relying on the charity of strangers, and my macbook’s built in camera.

I've been kind of in isolation the last week or so, (more on that in another post) and I've not even taken the time to read my RSS feeds latesy, only skimming a few things here and there, or marking things for reading later. So today, I had a bit of time, and boy am I glad I took the time to re-visit those! Here are a few wonderful things worth your time to read.

• How To Make An IP-To-Country Tool With PHP and MySQL. Mathew Pennel, web monster and editor of Digital Web Magazine has written up a wonderful article here. I find myself linking to one article every month or two that this guy writes and nodding my head knowingly. This guy is great.
• Doctor Jones has completely made me re-examine Apple's Spaces with his article My Day With the New Spaces.
• jQuery for Designers has written up Coda Slider Effect. Its sexy as all get out. GREAT work there Remy. This is super well done. I will be stealing inspired by you soon!
• Continuing on the jQuery train of thought here is the always excellent jQuery blog. Recently they wrote jQuery UI v1.5 Released, Focus on Consistent API and Effects which contained a few big tidbits in there. Biggest? API standardization. Unless you're a nerd of pretty high-order, that's probably not as cool to you as it is to me, but something that everyone can enjoy - Enchant (the effects library) is being rolled into jQuery proper. I think this is an immensely smart choice if only for marketing jQuery to new users. New users tend to compare feature by feature and make decisions, well now there's a big checkbox in that column. Nice work guys!
• And finally, Block Quotes and Pull Quotes: Examples and Good Practices from Smashing Magazine.

Man, there was some good stuff on tap! Something from each of those will be making their way into my work in the very near future.

I've released a preview copy of 0.8.6 here.

If you've got an adventurous spirit, give it a whirl, if no bugs are found, it will form the basis of the next release.

Keep reading to see the changelog.

I’ve been pursuing my Master’s of Education part-time since 2003.  I took a year and a bit off in the middle of there somewhere, but other then that, I’ve been pretty steadily marching towards it for 5 years.  In April I finally finished off the last of my course requirements, and last week I got the official paperwork; I’ve finally finished off the degree.  Huzzah! I’m now legally allowed to call myself a “Master”, um… not that I ever would.  Oh no wait, I would.

I’ve considered sharing my final thesis with the world but I’ve decided against it.  Frankly, its been under enough scrutiny and the truth is that I just don’t want to think about it anymore.  It’s basically a theory on how to teach highly technical concepts to a largely untechnical audience.  Sort of a theoretical backdrop to the teaching I do.  It may undergo a few changes and get resurrected yet.  We’ll see.

So would I recommend the process to anyone else? In a word, “maybe”.

I finally made the long discussed flip over to jQuery.  It took me about 4 and a half minutes.  It should have been a 30 second process, but I had a few lightbox images relationships named incompatibly.  Anyhow, all fixed up.  I also decided to implement the much talked about Google hosted Javascript library.  In a nutshell, Google is hosting some popular Javascript libraries.  The idea is that if enough people are using the hosted libraries, then there’s a good chance that your visitor has already locally cached the files, and your page will (give the illusion of) load faster.

As a handy extra, they take care of compressing and minifying for you, and are committed to keeping a library online permanently after it is hosted.

That said, I’m not sure how long I’ll keep it.  There are a few things that I think every responsible webmaster has to think about first.  Personally, I would only use it as part of an informed company strategy (I could see a savings on a big site like ExpressionEngine.com in terms of bandwidth and perceived load time).  But there are still some downsides I just haven’t fully reconciled yet.  Let me address the three most relevant ones that I see.

This weekend I took some time and built a quick "here's how to install and use BambooInvoice" video. It lasts about 7 minutes, and covers installing, settings, creating your first client, and creating an invoice. If you just want to see how Bamboo works, skip to about 3:10 of the video. I intend on doing a small series of these over time as a way of helping people get familiar with the software, and showing how I use it.

CodeIgniter Directory is aims to become a centralized point to find resources for CodeIgniter, an Open Source PHP framework . You will find here CodeIgniter related blog links, websites, tutorials, applications and libraries or helpers that will help you in your everyday programmer’s life - description stolen blatantly and unapologetically from their about page ;)

As proof that my eyes are going bleary and that I'm working really hard on ExpressionEngine 2, I present this little gem. Sometime near the end of yesterday, I started to lose my mind. I had been coding for nearly 2 days straight, and had hit setback after setback (I have very little to show for those 2 days unfortunately). An interesting thing happens to me when I'm stressed and tired and frustrated... my mind wanders. It wanders far. In this case, back to 90s rap (keep reading, I swear I'm going somewhere with this). So I did the only logical thing, I decided to drag Derek Jones into the gutter with me and hit him up over IM. He was having a frustrating moment of his own. I was eager to offer a solution:

Me - I have a solution. extend the magic class...
Jones - ::slaps head:: I forgot about it, as per usual.
Me - here's some code

Jones - you didn't...

And it goes downhill from here...

Earlier this week I put a Google Adsense banner above the first entry on the page.  Most of my traffic is RSS, and you may have never noticed, but if you came to the site to read an article… or you know… visit the old fashioned way, then you were probably greeted by it.  After looking at it for a few days, I’ve decided that those ads are just not something I want there right now.  I mean gah, look at this… how fugly does it get?

Want to see how fugly?  Keep reading.