Let me reveal the Derek Allard Action Figure^™ to the world! Yup, that's right, an action figure! Kung-fu grip and everything. Well, not really kung-fu grip. I guess that'll be kind of obvious when you look at the pictures below. Jennifer Dungan is a former student of mine who now earns her living as a freelance web designer/developer. Despite being busy coding up actionscript wizardry, she finds time for her hobbies. Now some people (not me I swear!) would say that this is an unusual hobby... but its hard not to admire the talent, skill and patience that goes into a project like this.

Check out the images to see what I mean! But first, let's get one thing absolutely clear... this is a Derek action figure, not a doll!

Over the last little while, I've documented how this site is changing. I thought I had arrived at a pretty stable look, but if you are a keen observer, you may notice that the the hanging robot on the side of my site has changed. How do you start a blog post about a robotic chimp that's hanging out on your site? It's hard, but I wanted to chronicle the evolution of the hanging robot, and see if I couldn't find him a name.

This story starts with an innocent email from a good friend and colleague (and skilled artist), Cliff. He wrote ...love the new look, but hate that hanging robot on the side.

For reasons I'll disclose in the near future, I've recently been convinced that Scriptaculous, despite my thoughts on its "bloat", is in fact the best library for me to focus in on if I'm going to integrate it with Code Igniter. I'm currently committed to a project that I'm just finishing off that I've been developing using Mootools, but when its done any work I do in this area will probably be on Scriptaculous integration.  I'll release the mootools library when I'm done of course!

Hmm... lools like my love affair with SQL related posts continues.

MySQL has posted an excellent resource posted called Top 10 SQL Performance Tips. Although, it is kind of a misleading name, since its a wiki, and everybody is able to post. Currently it's up to 84 tips, most of which look really great. Here is a small sampling...

UGH! So apparently I need one of those Matrix-style brain implants to help me remember SQL.

I'm writing this down now as both a personal reminder... and maybe I'll save you from the same fate. When writing the archive for this blog, I wanted to create friendly URLs, so that /blog/archive would display all posts, /blog/archive/2006 would show all of the posts from 2006, and finally /blog/archive/2006/11 would show all of the posts from November of 2006. Simple enough right?

Well, this humble blog started as a standard Wordpress install. I quickly moved to the Hemmingway theme, but then thought that my site lacked any of my personality. So I set about to rebuild it. My first attempt was chronicled on this blog. My intentions were to make it available as a Wordpress theme for anyone to download.

Well, the time has come to properly do this site. Until now I've been using a Wordpress theme that I hacked together in an afternoon and named "Kill All Humans", but it never quite felt right. There were so many little things here and there, CSS inconsistencies, etc. So what I've decided to do is rebuild my site in Code Igniter, and chronicle the whole process in short (maybe 10 minute) videos.

The first step is re-building the XHTML to be like I want it to be. Below you'll find the XHTML/CSS building blocks of the new derekallard.com.

When I originally released BambooInvoice I learned a lot about trying to code for a site specific goal, and coding for a mass audience. I originally wrote these tips on the Code Igniter forums, but since I was recently asked for advice again, I thought I'd repost them here. The original thread is still active.

Since I released BambooInvoice I've received a number of interested emails from developers looking for tips on getting started building an application using code igniter that you intend to widely distribute. Here is a small collection of useful processes.

Seriously. Recently I’ve had the "pleasure" of working with some pretty messed up projects. Basically, I've been called in to put out a fire caused by some work that another "web designer" had done. Here’s a newsflash, websites are not just single high-resolution jpegs inserted between <html> tags.

I don't like the way Firefox 2 handles closing tabs. Here's how I fixed my Firefox to get back to the behaviour I wanted.