Robot Sculptures
May 31st, 2007
Now these guys understand killer robots…
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There are many great webhosts… but some suck
May 23rd, 2007
I might be stuck using one of the crappy ones right now for a project I’m working on. Seems that they run only IIS (I mean honestly… a professional host without a single *nix box?) and it was just explained to me by their “sales guy” that I should be grateful that they’ll even let me run PHP on one of their boxes “because they usually don’t” but “the tech guy said (I) knew a lot”, and they were an “important client”.
Uh huh.
I should add that I won a bid wherein I explicitly laid out that I would be using a PHP framework (CI of course) and would require either a MySQL or Postgres database. It was revealed to me after I won the bid that the fact that I planned to use open source technologies was a major strength of my bid.
The rub? They’ll provide me with a MySQL database for the low, low price of $100 per month.
“Indeed” was all I could bring myself to say as I politely hung up the phone and told the client to switch hosts, pay these blackmailers, or find an ASP.NET programmer for their pro-opensource project.
sidebar: PHP 4 turned 7 years old recently, and PHP 5 is about to turn 3. I hope more hosts start adopting more quickly.
sidesidebar: You’ll be shocked to read that this host is giving me PHP 4 ;)
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Status update, May 10
May 10th, 2007
I’m not dead, but it’s been a bit since I wrote anything (13 days… yikes). So to that end I promise a few more interesting CodeIgniter things that I’ve been working on will emerge shortly on this blog.
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Feedburner experiment over - it crashed and burned
April 16th, 2007
A little while ago I switched my blogs RSS feeds to Feedburner. It has not gone well. The feeds are up and down, the interface is clunky, and as Derek Jones pointed out, it wasn’t really giving me anything I didn’t already have.
I’m not interested in an unreliable service, and it turned out to only be an exercise in frustration. I’ve switched back the feeds to http://www.derekallard.com/feed/ and intend to leave it like that. If you subscribed to feedburner, feel free to change back, although I’ll continue to maintain both.
Pardon the interruption… but Feedburner crashed and burned…
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Change to the RSS feed
April 08th, 2007
I’ve decided to go with FeedBurner to distribute my RSS feed. If you’re subscribed to the DerekAllard.com feed (thanks if you are!) could you please update your RSS feed to point to http://feeds.feedburner.com/derekallardcom.
I’m going to make efforts to keep the old feed alive for a little while, but please make the update now.
Thanks for reading!
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What happened to the design?
April 05th, 2007
To know more about why styles are disabled on this website visit the Annual CSS Naked Day website for more information.
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my business site, darkhorse.to got a facelift
March 23rd, 2007
Waaaaaay back in 1999 I started a small consulting business. I mostly did teaching of web related courses, html, dreamweaver and some javascript. Ah… good times. Man… back in 1999 I remember teaching the <font> tag and using tables for layout!
This posting is about the rebuild of the humble site, into its new version.
The paint isn’t dry yet, and there are still many more things to do, but its still much better then the bastardized site that was up there. I’d love to hear your thoughts, criticisms or insights into the new look.
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Writing personal content, and other assorted thoughts
March 22nd, 2007
This is one of those “a little bit of everything posts”. I’m re-writing my business site, building an ExpressionEngine tutorial and impressed by beautiful javascript, and I’m too sexy for my shirt (so sexy it hurts). Let’s tackle these in order shall we?
So I’m rebuilding my business website (no links right now, but its not exactly a secret URL). Through a series of unfortunate events (that would seem much funnier if they had happened to someone else) I lost every non-textual asset from my site 3 months ago. Every image, pdf, a few flash files… gone. Backups you say? Of course I had backups… and I can prove it. I’ll just get them out… I know they’re around here somewhere… maybe in this directory… no, well I know they must be… hmmm… Found them! And you doubted me? Oh wait, it seems this backup (and all my backups) have images from my site from 2 generations ago! Sigh… so now, only html pages, which means text and styles intact only.
So I took it as an excuse to rebuild, but then I got sidetracked when I was hired by Ellislab, and other work picked up, and I started getting really active bug squashing in CodeIgniter and well, you know how these things go. So I finally finished off the design, rebuilt the site using CI on my test server, and now all I have to do is drop in the content. The problem is of course, that the only content I have right now is probably 4 years old, and I’m not happy with what I wrote. So I’m off to re-write it now.
Let me just say that writing content for a website is hard work. No wonder getting clients to hand it over is always such a struggle. And writing for your own website is twice as hard. On top of all the normal “extra things to think about” when writing for the web (be brief, summarize, use headings and bullets) when you’re writing your own content you have to walk that fine line between “promote yourself” and “I’m a self aggrandizing attention whore”. Its a finer line then you’d think at first.
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EllisLab rebuild interview on Digital Web Magazine
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.
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Switched to Mac
March 15th, 2007
I’ve re-started this post three times now trying to think of something witty to say. Bottom line, I’m typing this post on my sexy new Macbook. Yup, I’ve succumbed to the allure of the Mac. I’m not sure if its those clever but over-played “Hi I’m a PC and I’m a Mac” commercials that I always skip through for some other cosmic factor, but here I am.
I figured it would be a pretty easy transition. I frequently flip operating systems (Windows and LInux). Pretty much every app I rely on is either open source (Firefox, Tunderbird, Open Office, Apache, etc), or is available on the Mac (the Adobe suite). The ones that aren’t have nice Mac equivalents (I liked HeidiSQL on Windows. The Mac has CocoaSQL).
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