DerekAllard.com has completed the transformation into ExpressionEngine, but it’s not live yet (want to migrate the data first).  It took all of about 2 hours after I finally forced myself to sit down in front of my computer and turn off my email.  Funny how your own “personal” stuff always seems to take a back seat to “important” work, but I’ve just finally grown frustrated with the roll-my-own solution.

I’m really, really, happy with the codebase I built for this site in Code Igniter, but the problem is that every time I want a new feature I need to go fix it up.  And also, in honesty, it pains me to see all the kick ass features in EE that I haven’t built into my blog yet… and well, I want to be one of the cool kids.

So now the really painful part - data migration.  Anyone who’s ever worked with legacy system and/or code can tell you want a pain that can be.  The good news, moving the posts over is a pretty straight-forward process.  The bad news, moving the comments over won’t be.

Sigh… no rest for the wicked I suppose!

I posted earlier about an article that James Nicol had up on this blog.  The long awaited (well, long awaited for 6 days) article is now up, Real world apps with CodeIgniter: part II.  Clever title!

He delves deeper into the black art of Code Ingiter, and discussing integrating with third party systems, validation, and my favourite understatement of the week.

Before we even went live the clients came back asking for more features...

<sarcasm>What!?!  That hardly ever happens!</sarcasm>

At any rate, its a great read, and I hope James keeps writing!

Inspired by Matthew Inman's "How to Make Square Corners with CSS", I hereby set out on a journey to reveal the one true technique to create coloured, non-gradient backgrounds for divs, paragraphs and other XHTML elements.  After literally seconds of painful research, I'll show you how to do this technique yourself.  Here's a sample of what you can expect to see.

Code Igniter programmer, and good friend, James Nicol has written up a wonderful summary of his experience using Code Igniter in a production environment that he's called "Real world apps with CodeIgniter: part 1". His company developed a scheduling and logisitics management application for one of the candidates for the next US federal election (he isn't saying whom yet). His solution included building in table relationships, dynamic PDF generation, AJAX and javascript effects and CI used in a real-world app.

In the last ten days I've gotten three separate emails from people about something that, I have to admit, really surprised me.  They were concerned about my use of the words "colour" (two emails on this one) and "favourite" (this one appeared in my post on Code Igniter Wiki resources).  And honestly, "concerned" is probably a good choice of words.  I've written back to 2 of them with a brief explanation - but since 1 of the notes came from my contact form with an obviously fake email, I couldn't respond directly to the writer.  I also don't mind quoting a few lines here.

...if you're trying to show people professional resources, maybe you should use the accepted international spelling don't you think?...

Go ahead, read that again, I needed to read it three time before it made sense.  Look, I have absolutely NO problem with how you choose to spell colour, or favourite, or centre, but please, please, please don't think that the rest of the planet should spell it like that simply because you want to.

Finally, maybe there was a time when people didn't recognize that some words are spelled differently in other countries (I'm Canadian), but I don't think its been in my lifetime, so lighten up - there are SO many other things you could criticize me for anyways.

Come March 9^th I’ll be on my way to Austin to partake in a few days of nerd revelry at South By Southwest.  The main reason I’m going to to hang out with the guys from pMachine, (I’m a card-carrying member of Team Festering Carbuncle), but I’d love to meet as many people as I can.

If you’ll be heading down (I know Matt’s going to be there) then drop me a note so I can keep an eye out for you.

Well, its out in the open now!  I'm moonlighting at pMachine.  I'm like a real-life Bruce Willis... er... wait.  My title is Senior Technical Support Specialist, which is really just a long way of saying that I'm going to work my butt off to keep ExpressionEngine as awesome as it already is.  I join an amazing team of dedicated, smart, and hardworking people.  Its an honour to count myself among them.

ExpressionEngine is the content management system that CodeIgniter is abstracted from.  Its flat out awesome (but now I'm paid to say that ;))

Hmm... It seems some [censored!!!] thoughtless individual has decided to send their email entitled "placid dissident" to several hundred thousand of my closest friends.  This is the second time I've been joe jobbed in a year.  Lucky me.

Anyone who knows me knows that I'd be much more creative though.  For example, the email said xvhehqjetpi yhmsc ombrnyw nypeki ijysf qwdyeq.  C'mon really?  Honestly?!?  At least steal a quote from today's headlines or a passage out of some Gutenberg text or something like most of the "cool" spammers today.  Goodness.  And also, what's with the attachment?  "traffic light.png".  There's a space in that name!  Years of linux and web development have scared all the spaces out of my filenames long ago.  And the piece de resistance?... they forged an Outlook Express sender header.

X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2900.3028
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2900.3028

I think the funniest thing so far (even funnier then 2 dozen bounce messages) has been the 1 person who kindly took the time to write me back.

Victor, thanks. Your single sentence (take me off your list as***le) is like poetry to me.  You're good people - and I'll be sure to take you off my list right away.

I’ve been thinking a lot about comment spam lately (I’m only getting 4 or 5 a day, and of those I only need to manually reject 1 or 2). Google, (way back in 2005) pioneered the use of the rel=“nofollow” attribute in hyperlinks; links with this attribute would not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. Seems like a nice way to discourage people from putting comments into a blog if their only goal is to have a link to their site. Thus, one of the very first things I did when I built this blog was to make sure the nofollow rule was implemented in the links to commenters websites.

But nofollow is not without controvsery, and entire sites have sprung up with the goal of explaining why nofollow isn’t so great. But to me it boils down to one thing… if people are putting useful, interesting material on my blog (which you have been… thanks!) then why shouldn’t I share some of my meager pagerank?

So from now on, if you’re taking the time to write, then you darn well deserve a non-crippled link back to your site. Thanks for commenting!

Edit: With I moved this site to ExpressionEngine the information in this post is obsolete.

This blog now features notification of follow-up comments (if you want it).  I wanted to detail how it works.

1. When you make a post, your email is saved in a cookie so that you don’t need to keep re-entering it on my site (this becomes important in a minute).
2. When the comment is sent, I check if you’ve selected follow-up notification.  If you do, it is saved in the database as “true”.  Another field is used to track the status of notification.  It starts off as “false”, meaning no notification has been sent.
3. When a new post is made, the blog combs through all other comments in that post checking to see if anyone should be notified (it only allows 1 notification per post in the event that someone has commented twice).  If you’ve selected to be notified, it sends you an email, and changes your notification status to “true” (you’ve been notified).
4. At this point, you’ve been notified once, and I won’t continue to annoy you.  However, if you visit the post again, it uses the cookie set above to recognize you, and sets the status back to “false”, meaning it will notify you again if another new comment is made after your visit.

It’s the best system I could think of that doesn’t require user sign-ups, but I’m sure there’s room for improvement.  I welcome any additional feedback as comments below, or feel free to contact me personally.