Part of my intent in making this blog was to be able to talk about ongoing development in my various projects. Unfortunately, a lot of the work I typically do is simple HTML and CSS and it’s not challenging me to learn something new. Today, however, I have something to report.
I received an email from Dreamhost last week informing me that they were throttling connections to my video hosting site because recent traffic spikes from the Sonic Unleashed Let’s Play were causing the Apache server to have problems. Now I’ll be the first to admit that my video hosting solution is not elegant or efficient. I started it small and hacked on features as I went. Yeah, one of those. Everyone makes one eventually, but in this case, mine got popular so I needed to fix it.
(more…)
Read More »
At my place of work, one of my projects is to develop our department website. Because this is a major website at the university, it has to follow all the rules. These include accessibility, cross-browser support, and conservative design sensibilities. But being a non-technical corporate environment, they want to have their cake and eat it too, so I have to reconcile the JavaScript carousel and scrolling news widgets they wanted with the accessibility concerns for people with text readers or what have you.
I was poking around the internet and found the solution on another page at our university. I believe it was created by our competition, Creative Services, who we’re pretty sure take templates and butcher them to be Mason-branded. The implementation on that page was the answer no matter how much I loathe their cookie-cutter techniques. The answer is <body> classes.
(more…)
Read More »
As I posted mere minutes ago, I’m working on an invoicing system. Part of this blog’s function is to be a regurgitation of things I think about when working of various projects, so here we go.
(more…)
Read More »
The Front Page
- XHTML
- CSS
- PHP
- MySQL
- jQuery/AJAX
- PDF Creation
One major project I’ve been working on has been replacing the person who’s job it was to aggregate all our invoices, send them off to accounting, and report our numbers each month. Her system comprised a number of excel spreadsheets between which she would copy all relevant data. Naturally a database is a much better solution and so I set about creating one. The project is not yet complete, I still have to create the administration section. Most of the framework is in place, though, and the front end is what I consider to be beta status.
(more…)
Read More »
Before about a month ago I had never touched JavaScript, I thought it unnecessary. I had been able to do everything I ever wanted in CSS, and if some task could only be done in JavaScript, then it was not a task worth persuing. Well as of a month or so ago, I began a project at work to create an invoicing system. I’ll get into the specifics of the project in some other post, but a large part of it was using jQuery to create a true dynamic web application. Picking up jQuery does not strictly imply that you pick up JavaScript, but they are rather close enough that you begin to see the majesty and wonder of being able to manipulate the DOM so freely.
This is a trap. I fell for the trap. (more…)
Read More »
