Nothing stops a good productive day faster then Friday afternoon.

Ever been working along and say to yourself “whoa, where’d the time go”?  Then you look back and can’t believe how much you’ve got done?  Sometimes it just magically happens to be sure, but I think the tools I’m using must play a big role in it (and turning off my email and cell).  These are the tools I find myself using in those spontaneous moments.

CodeIgniter, ExpressionEngine, Firefox and plugins, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Coda and the interweb.

Notice how the operating system is not there?  I haven’t found any noticeable difference between operating systems, as long as my macbook is plugged into a nice big monitor.  I do notice a decline as my screenspace goes down.  That said, there is something psychological going on there, since I want to use the Mac more then I ever wanted to use a pc.  I must be influenced by all those ipod and “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” commercials.  I’m such a slave to media…

I’ve always liked Dreamweaver (yes its expensive, but feature for feature as good as any editor I’ve ever seen including Textmate), but I absolutely hate it on my Mac - and truthfully, its only 1 thing… I hate all those dopey floating panels.  I’ve been spending a bit of time with Coda.  Yeah there’s a lot of hype, but it isn’t undeserved.  I like the integrated environment, I have absolutely no need for a CSS editor (its nice that its included, but I don’t use it anyhow), and I find the terminal completely adequate.  I might just buy it since the trial runs out in a few days.

CodeIgniter and ExpressionEngine have completely revolutionized the way I build sites in the last year.  Fireworks has been my “go to” image editor for a long time now.  Its combination of vector and bitmap tools have been ideal for me, although a switch to Illustrator might happen if I find the right project. 

What tools do you find yourself using when the magic moment strikes?

Some of you who know me, know that I roughly split my professional time between development and training.  I’ve been lucky to have some success over the years, and I’ve managed to build up a pretty good rapport with local universities and colleges.  Like any relationship, after a while, your input starts to be highly trusted, and I’m fortunate to find myself in this situation.  It has put me in a position recently to get a new course on the books at area schools, I’ve called it “Building a Web Application: Concept to Completion Workshop”.  Why do you care?  It’s a course on how to build a web application using CodeIgniter and other “web 2.0” technologies.

My vision was to create a course for working web professionals who want to explore the ins and outs of CodeIgniter, professional web 2.0 application development, and/or have a vision for a web application, but don’t know how to make it a reality.  This is not a course to teach you PHP, and javascript - I expect that you already have intermediate knowledge of that - and preferably you’ve built a few things with PHP/JS before, and now want to get ambitious.  I will assume though that you’ve never used CodeIgniter before, and on that front we’ll start at “ground zero”, and quickly build our way up.

We’re going to plan, wireframe, mockup and build a full-on, functional web-application.  I’m not sure what exactly yet, but it’ll be something practical, and not a complex example of “hello world”.  It’ll be data-intensive, and I’ll probably release the final product under the GPL, just like BambooInvoice. 

The first run is going to be in North Toronto at Seneca College’s Markham Campus.  If I get any interest from around Hamilton, I also have permission to start up a course at McMaster University.

Today CodeIgniter 1.5.3 was released.  It features a few more bug fixes, and one of my more public typos…

Sigh… I guess it could have been worse… (admire my shame)

A little while ago I switched my blogs RSS feeds to Feedburner.  It has not gone well.  The feeds are up and down, the interface is clunky, and as Derek Jones pointed out, it wasn’t really giving me anything I didn’t already have.

I’m not interested in an unreliable service, and it turned out to only be an exercise in frustration.  I’ve switched back the feeds to http://www.derekallard.com/feed/ and intend to leave it like that.  If you subscribed to feedburner, feel free to change back, although I’ll continue to maintain both.

Pardon the interruption… but Feedburner crashed and burned…

Tonight I quietly released BambooInvoice 0.76.  On the front, it isn’t much to get excited about, but it does feature an upgrade to CodeIgniter 1.5.3.  What is noteworthy about that is that 1.5.3 isn’t out yet - readers of this blog and Bamboo users are front of the line on this one ;)

It is mostly a series of bug squashes, but I did enhance the reporting functionality (pretty minor). 

What will be neat if I can find the time to build it is the graphing and charting functions that I’ve started.  There are a couple of new model functions in invoices_model to allow for those now.

If you are a Bamboo user, then take it for a test drive and let me know what you think!

Ugh... that just might be the worst title I've ever written...

For a "ultra-top secret"™ web application I've been working on, I need to take all focus away from the browser screen, and allow/force the user to interact with a window before being able to continue. Commonly, these are called modal windows, and gained some credibility for having practical uses with Lokesh Dhakar's wonderful Lightbox script (incidently, I use a variation of it on this script on DerekAllard.com).

There are many variations of modal windows running around, but I wanted a simple, unanimated "overlay" would would require a user's interaction, so I set about to build my own. The first thing I needed, was an alpha transparent div to sit on top of the whole screen. I stole was inspired by Matthew Pennel's great article on Easy Cross Browser Transparency, and began building from there. The ultimate alpha transparent solution I chose was a pure CSS base.

This entry is guest-posted by CodeIgniter programmer Alexander "Iksander" Springmeyer, who contacted me about a unique use of my "Most Useless CodeIgniter Helper Ever". I've asked him to write up a few words, that I present here for all. My sincerest thanks to go Alexander for looking for new ways to implement old ideas, and for teaching an the old image2text() dog a new trick!
-Derek

Some time ago I happened across Derek's blog post on the 'useless' image2text helper he had created. Despite all the "it is useless" comments in the entry, I felt it had powerful possibilities offered by its application in my Sentinel re-write and upgrade of the Freak Auth light authentication system (by Daniel "danfreak" Vecchiato). [editors note: if you want to, you can read a very long and detailed account of its evolution.]

I was inspired to use it for a CATPCHA. Here's how did I do it?

I’ve decided to go with FeedBurner to distribute my RSS feed.  If you’re subscribed to the DerekAllard.com feed (thanks if you are!) could you please update your RSS feed to point to http://feeds.feedburner.com/derekallardcom.

I’m going to make efforts to keep the old feed alive for a little while, but please make the update now.

Thanks for reading!

One of my very favourite-est Firefox extensions, Firebug, has a security update

About an hour ago I received word of a 0-day security exploit that has been discovered and reported. I have just released a new Firebug (version 1.03) with a fix for this bug, and I recommend that everyone install it as soon as possible.