April 30th, 2008
- Rickrolling is funny when its unexpected. If every freakin' link you send me is a link to youtube
I'm going to stop thinking its funny I stopped thinking it was funny after the second time you did it.
- "It doesn't work" is not a valid request for help.
- Having the solution in front of you, and then rebuilding it is much easier then building something from scratch. When you see a new feature or change in your favourite software, try not to look at the result and think to yourself "that was easy". Definitely don't contact the author of said change and tell him it was easy. That's just "bad form"©.
- Would somebody from Rogers please come clean and admit that the real reason they want me to switch to e-billing has absolutely nothing to do with the environment? Over the years I've requested (in writing) they stop sending me so much crap many times. How many companies tell us to "consume more because its good for the environment"? Blah.
- In the vein of real environmentally conscious companies, let me just say that I've been thrilled with Bullfrog Power since the first day I contacted them. If you're in Ontario or Alberta, switch now - you'll be glad you did.
- Telling someone who's trying to help you with something that they are "selfish" because they won't log into your server and do your work for you is dumb.
- Webhosts who tell their customers that they've been "hacked" but offer no explanation, evidence, or logs are irresponsible bordering on criminal. Get yourself a real webhost if you've heard this before.
:: deep sigh of relief ::
I feel better now... ;)
Continue reading “Mr. Grumpy Pants”. Posted in
Personal with 6 comments 
April 24th, 2008
I’ve been saying for a little while now that I’ve fallen in love with jQuery, and I mean, who hasn’t? I’m so impressed with it, and so are the other smart people at EllisLab, that we’re integrating it into CodeIgniter, and into ExpressionEngine. But this blog still doesn’t use it. If you poke into the source code, you’ll see Mootools.
<script type="text/javascript" src="/js/mootools.js"></script>
So I’ve been wanting to migrate my own code to recently out of Moo, and into jQuery. This will let me do a few things, not the least of which is apply the CI jQuery library in another real-world test case. So why haven’t I moved it yet? Well, a quick audit of my code, and the only thing I’m using Moo for is the fancy lightbox effect on my about page, and several posts. It actually is Slimbox, a clone of Lokesh Dhakar’s excellent (and popular) Lightbox. So the short answer, is that I didn’t want to migrate the legacy code.
Then it dawned on me, my code is all semantic and clean, there’s no javascript hooks, the only markup used to implement lightbox is
<a rel="lightbox" href="something">...</a>
so it should be an easy replacement. Then yesterday, (via Ed Finkler’s Funkatron), I found the jQuery Lightbox plugin. How is it that I only just yesterday found this?
A quick look, and it seems to be solidly written, the semantics are the same, and it should be (apologies to Ron Popeil) the “set it and forget it” solution I’ve been looking for.
So in the next few days, the plan is to migrate DerekAllard.com to jQuery, and start adding a bit more sexiness into the robot.
Next post: my favourite jQuery plugins ;)
Continue reading “jQuery on DerekAllard.com”. Posted in
Javascript, Noteworthy with 14 comments
April 16th, 2008
I’ve wrote about my 2008 South by Southwest experiences earlier, but try as I might, one of the things I just couldn’t capture was the fun and excitement I felt when we gave our presentation. For my part, I got to chat for 10 minutes about CodeIgniter and ExpressionEngine, and the communities, and future plans. It was a blast. Kind of like being secret agent revealing stolen plans ;)
After SxSW, I wrote up a blog entry for EllisLab called ExpressionEngine 2.0, fully CodeIgnited, where I tried to outline (on a professional level) all the cool s**t we had in store, and (on a personal level) how excited I was. That excitement part… yeah, didn’t come through. So today I leared that Andru (Dru) Edwards posted the video that he made during one of the presentations. Pure Awesome.
If you want to learn a bit about the future of ExpressionEngine, CodeIgniter, and our plans as a company for opensource, ecommerce, and all points in between, then take the time to watch it at http://video.gearlive.com/video/article/q208-bleeding-edge-tv-expressionengine-20-sneak-preview/.
I hope it captures a little bit of the excitement I get to feel every day.
Continue reading “Video of the ExpressionEngine talk at South by Southwest”. Posted in
ExpressionEngine with 8 comments
April 13th, 2008
So, I just spent the last hour getting a screencast built to show how you can start using ExpressionEngine on your site now, even if you don’t “know” ExpressinEngine yet. Good times. Used Screenflow, had a sexy little video thing going… and then realized that I recorded the blasted thing nearly fullscreen on my computer (it’s a 24inch iMac). I tried to scale it down so that it would fit onto 1 screen for most people, but then so much detail got lost that it looked like crap.
How frustrating.
So I’ll re-build it at some point in the near future, and for now, you can admire all my hard work in static, useless, image form ;)
Continue reading “failed screencast”. Posted in
ExpressionEngine, How-To with 11 comments
April 09th, 2008
Just like the title says, BambooInvoice 0.8.4 is “out the door”. I’ve upgraded all the application queries to take advantage of the new CodeIgniter Active Record improvements, and squashed a lot of bugs on the way. The changelog is pretty small, but a lot of work went into it.
As I wrote a few days ago about the future of BambooInvoice I think this reduces any lingering bugs down to about none. I’ve also introduced a few additional error catches, and I’ve tried to make a few error messages more helpful. The next version of Bamboo will focus on finishing off features that I want to see, and will probably be a full point update (0.9) and then the real work starts, with what will amount to a code overhaul. That stuff won’t happen until at least summer, but if you are an “end user” you probably wouldn’t ever notice it anyhow. It’ll be “under the hood” type stuff that programmers obsess with ;)
If you have any specific features you want to see, by all means please comment!
Continue reading “BambooInvoice 0.84 released”. Posted in
BambooInvoice with 8 comments
April 07th, 2008
This weekend I gave some serious consideration to BambooInvoice. I made a few hours to fix some known bugs (including I think the dreaded no demo_flag property on line 19 bug), and add a few features. After working with the code, I know what I need to do. This post lays out my plans for the future of BambooInvoice, including a “roadmap” (if you can call it that) and my thoughts towards keeping BambooInvoice free and opensource, coding standards, and library integration. Read the full post for more details, but here’s a telling quote.
This also represents an opportunity to revisit code that is starting to show its age. Many people are referring to Bamboo as a model for how to build an application in CodeIgniter. This delights me, and is the entire reason I released Bamboo originally, but, Bamboo was released while CodeIgniter was still very immature. There were no models; fewer helpers; limited Active Record; fewer libraries. It was also a bit of a proving grounds for what could be done. In short, Bamboo blazed the trail that all my CodeIgniter programming would be based on, but as CI has advanced, there are many (many) things in BambooInvoice that I would choose to do another way if I was building it today. I want to take the opportunity to do them right. I want Bamboo to be as finely coded as CodeIgniter itself. This as you can imagine, will be a pretty big task. In essence, I’ll be writing (re-writing) the entire application. I’m tired just thinking about it, but its something I really want to do.
So if you’re a Bamboo user, get ready for a large bump in what you current can do, and take your invoicing to the next level. Is there a feature that you really want to see make it into Bamboo? Is there one little thing that bugs you? Have your say, please feel free to leave a comment.
Continue reading “The future of BambooInvoice”. Posted in
BambooInvoice with 10 comments
April 04th, 2008
I haven’t written here in a while, and I’m feeling pretty guilty about it. I’ve been focusing all my time on programming, and just haven’t been exploring “interesting” things as much as I usually do, so therefore not much to write about. Anyhow, that’s going to change. In the next little while I’ll be producing a few more video casts focused on CodeIgniter and ExpressionEngine. I’m going to start from the perspective of how I set things up, and then expand from there, hopefully spanning a few videos to finish everything off as I need to.
I’m also about a week away from getting to re-visit some of the core functionality of CodeIgniter. We want to reconsider paging, validation, and a few little things here and there. But that doesn’t mean we’ve been sitting still! Since the release of CodeIgniter 1.6.1, there have been 56 updates to the svn. 18 of them were documentation fixes - I often hear criticism along the lines of “I checked the CodeIgniter svn, but its mostly documentation fixes”; and while I know where this is coming from (as developers we want shiny new features), the documentation is among the biggest “features” of the framework. But there were also many important security fixes, enhancements and other nice-ities in there. Check it out (what a clever play on words).
Also, as of right now this second, nobody has been hired into the 2 positions available at EllisLab, and if you’ve been sitting on the fence, get your name in there.
Continue reading “Video-casts coming”. Posted in
CodeIgniter, Noteworthy with 2 comments
April 01st, 2008
You know… I thought and thought about this one… and I just can’t think of anything even remotely funny that isn’t either (a) predictable and unoriginal; (b) seething with contempt.
ExpressionEngine 2.0 to be build in .NET
Um… nope, dumb.
DerekAllard.com bought by Google
Gee… I’m probably the first person to think of that idea!
I won’t be posting for the next 3 days because I’m hopped up on goof-balls
A little close to home now isn’t it?
So, I guess there won’t be any clever April Fools post here. Are these still funny? If you see a clever one, please post it in the comments!
Continue reading “April Fools post?”. Posted in
Noteworthy with 4 comments
