April 27th, 2007
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?
Continue reading “Productivity Tools”. Posted in
Browsers, CodeIgniter, ExpressionEngine, Mac with 10 comments 
April 22nd, 2007
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.
Continue reading “Web Application / CodeIgniter face to face course in Toronto”. Posted in
CodeIgniter, Education, How-To with 14 comments
April 16th, 2007
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)
Continue reading “I introduced a version “butt” into CodeIgniter”. Posted in
CodeIgniter with 7 comments
April 10th, 2007
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?
Continue reading “Not so useless! image_to_text() as a CAPTCHA”. Posted in
CodeIgniter, How-To, PHP with 3 comments
March 29th, 2007
Video tutorials are a great way to learn, which is why I built my own video tutorial for CodeIgniter, and made it available online as a working demo application.
Well active CodeIgniter member, Elliot Haughin, has decided to raise the bar, and has started releasing a series of CodeIgniter video tutorials. The first one basic pages module had some audio trouble, but overall looked great. The second, Dynamic Routing, Models and Page Navigation has none of these problems, and the app is starting to come together nicely.
Another fantastic contribution, thanks Elliot! As in my tutorial, its great to see how other people do things, even if you might choose to differ away slightly.
Continue reading “More CodeIgniter video tutorials from the community”. Posted in
CodeIgniter, Education with 2 comments
March 20th, 2007
Digital Web Magazine has posted a great interview entitled Redesigning the ExpressionEngine Site with Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain about his resdesigns of EllisLab, ExpressionEngine, CodeIgniter and EngineHosting (I mentioned these earlier). Sure, the title of the article isn’t very creative, but the designs sure were!
In it, Jesse walk through the full process discussing workspace, wire-framing, concepts, mockups, typography, icons and more.
Continue reading “EllisLab rebuild interview on Digital Web Magazine”. Posted in
CodeIgniter, ExpressionEngine, Noteworthy with 2 comments
March 08th, 2007
That’s right, the repositioning has happened, take a look for yourself!
It’s finally happened! Whew! The amount of work that’s gone into this by the whole team has been tremendous, but it was so worth it. The artist formerly known as pMachine, is now formally EllisLab. There is also now a more clear-cut distinction and cross branding between ExpressionEngine, CodeIgniter and EngineHosting. And each of the sites has a sexy new look. The stunning design cross-brands us, and is a sign of things to come!
Although all of areas (EE, CI and hosting) have seen tremendous growth, the update is especially welcome for CodeIgniter in my mind, who has grown from “new kid on the block”, into one of the “must-see” PHP frameworks that automatically gets consideration for most new PHP projects. Yeah there’s still some growing to do, but heck, its not like [http://www.zend.com]Zend[/url] has released anything except beta-versions of their framework (which is excellent by the way, but has different goals then CI).
One of my favourite new features of the website is the small area near the bottom labeled “Built on CodeIgniter”. Over the last little while I’ve been accruing a list of sites that are (um) built with CodeIgniter. There is some really great work going on out there. Now we show them off a little and feature the great work of the community.
Continue reading “pMachine becomes EllisLab with a sexy new look”. Posted in
CodeIgniter, ExpressionEngine, Noteworthy with 9 comments
February 27th, 2007
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!
Continue reading “Code Igniter in the Real World : Part 2”. Posted in
CodeIgniter, How-To, Noteworthy with 3 comments
February 21st, 2007
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.
Continue reading “Code Igniter in the Real World”. Posted in
CodeIgniter, How-To, Noteworthy with 6 comments
January 23rd, 2007
Have I written the most useless helper Code Igniter will ever see? I think so.
It takes an arbitrary image and arbitrary text and builds an image out of them.
becomes 
(full size)
Which really doesn't do it justice until you see it full size, or run the demo. Here's a zoom.
- Completely impractical? CHECK!
- Chew up server and browser resources? CHECK!
- Fun to take images and overlay completely stupid slogans and sayings? BIG CHECK!
I should note that the helper handles colours just fine. Here's the rendered robot (2.7MB... be kind)
I proudly present the most useless helper ever written! The (useless) helper is available for download, and I've appropriately named it "useless_fun_helper". Run it just like you'd run any other helper.
$this->load->helper('useless_fun');
$txt = 'Code Igniter is an Open Source Web Application Framework that makes writing kick-ass PHP programs simple as apple pie';
$img = 'http://yourserver/ci_logo.jpg';
echo image_to_text($img, $txt); // typically you'd pass that into a view... I know... no hate mail ok
So this is my formal entry into the most useless helper of all time. Any runner-ups?
Continue reading “Most Useless Code Igniter Helper Ever?”. Posted in
CodeIgniter, PHP with 9 comments
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