The Magic of Last Minute Panic

Last minute panic is something most people should be accustomed too in the age of now. Which basically means, people want everything right away. I think fast food has given us this mentality and Red Bull, i believe is meant to be the cure. But I do find it amazing at the ideas that can race through your head when you’re in last minute panic mode. My current website design was completely last minute. I had several other designs that I thought looked good, but when actually built them and played with them I found them either dreary or boring. It wasn’t until I just told myself I wasn’t getting any rest until I had a worthwhile design that things really started developing.

The main concept with the design was to make something expandable and welcoming. I’m still building and adding content and functionality as I am exploring this new design. It probably won’t be for another week till all the content is complete, but I can do that later.

For the techies out there, I built the site with MODx Revolution 1.0 and Scriptaculous.

michaelbreuer.com

Back blogging again.

After disappearing for some time in office politics and the 9 to 5 routine, I have decided to get freelancing again. I’ve setup shop in Victoria, BC and have some wicked clients to support my exit of corporate culture.

I’m hoping this blog becomes more of place where I can chat about web technologies I’ve been using and my experiences with them.

My Flash/MODx Hybrid

I updated my website, michaelbreuer.com using the MODx content management system and Flash for presentation. When I decided to try out another CMS, I was looking for something that was flexible, lightweight, and worked well with Flash.

The hurdles I wanted to get over were the ability to present content with Flash, be able to update it on the fly, and the text is selectable. I hate it when I go to site where the email address or text is in Flash and I can’t just copy and paste it. I was able to do this very easily with MODx.

I found one of MODx’s big advantages is the ability to save files in almost any format. I think this is a feature overlooked by some of the other content management systems and I do hope it catches on.

.htaccess

The .htaccess file is probably not you’re most updated file on your website, but it is crucial to making your website faster.

I found this article on it and its delivers some valuable info. The link is: http://www.javascriptkit.com/howto/htaccess.shtml.

It includes tips on configuring Expires tags, blocking the bad bots out there, changing your site’s index page, etc.

These small configurations will speed up your site and give it a better grade on Yslow(a Firefox plugin that examines the speed of your site – worth checking out).

The Knights of Drupal

Whenever I need advice or to read up on something concerning web stuff, forums are typically the best places to find answers and get results. Everything from javascript, web standards, web frameworks, languages, etc.

One of the things I noticed while looking up php frameworks, on many of the forums, the Knights of Drupal always show up to defend their framework. I find it so bizarre how they can be so loyal to a single framework. I have several friends who call themselves ‘Drupalists’ that act in the same manner.

The reason I call them the Knights is because they remind me of Monty Python’s Quest for the Holy Grail in the way they roam the forums and defend their most Holy Grail (but do beware of the Knights who say ASP).

I think it should be more about defending Open Source. PHP, Python, Ruby are great languages and should be defended, but not a single framework. The bottom line should always be – does this meet my goals. All a framework does is take info and spit it out as HTML. Thats it. There’s gonna be new methods of making this happen that we should embrace.

Hopefully. I haven’t seen too many people fighting in the name PageMill.

ActionScript Y!

Yahoo makes me think of an impressive forward thinking genius that can’t seem to make ends meet. They make great stuff like Yahoo Mail, Yahoo APIs, and the YUI Library and do such good things to benefit and educate the development community, but its so hard to watch them struggle to keep going.

This entry is about improving your Flash/ActionScript 3 by using Yahoo APIs. Its one thing to sit down and read about arrays, strings, methods, and all that other programming stuff but take time to have fun playing with some of the Yahoo stuff.

The community is full of downloadable demos to play with and you’ll definitely get better at parsing data and manipulating code. The Yahoo Maps API is a good start because the basic code is given to you. I’m sure we’ve all had clients that have asked for a Google map on their contact page, but with the Yahoo Maps API, you can customize your own markers, display multiple addresses, and improve at ActionScript 3.

Here’s the link:

http://developer.yahoo.com/flash/maps