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).
Continue reading “Switched to Mac”. Posted in
Mac, Noteworthy with 18 comments 
March 12th, 2007
“... and its the start of March break, the airports are flooded with hundreds of kids out to enjoy the sun and fun. If you’re travelling today, get to the airport extra early….“ I hear as I flip through the radio on my way to the airport Friday morning. I’ve only got 1 coffee into me, and I’m not off to a good start.
A pretty customs officer says “And where you heading to today?“.
“Austin by way of Houston”
“No you’re not.“
“... um… sorry?“
“Why would you fly all the way down to Houston to go to Boston?“
“No, Austin by way of Houston” I chuckle nervously.
“Oh” she said unimpressed, “why?“
“Business”
“What do you do?“
“I’m a web designer, there’s a big conference I’m attending.“
<awkward_silence />
I volunteer, “It’s called South by Southw…“
“I didn’t ask you that!“
And thus starts my otherwise incredible trip to Austin. I lurch (literally, the plane was really small) into my seat, and the pilot squawks out “we’re a few minutes late, but don’t worry, we’re going to cut a few corners and get you there on time”.
“Did he just say ‘cut a few corners’?“ I ask myself and start to wish I was on a flight to Boston.
Continue reading “South by Southwest Story”. Posted in
ExpressionEngine, Noteworthy with 13 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
March 07th, 2007
Are you reading this page in Internet Explorer 6? For shame…
I’ve never thought that my site attracted an “average” interweb visitor. I mean, we talk about boring things like accessibility, frameworks, scripting… the kind of things that makes Joanne roll her eyes if I even think about getting started*. In short, my readers tend to be web-savvy, standards-aware and generally pretty technically “hip”, so it doesn’t surprise me in the least that most of you would choose to surf in something besides Internet Explorer.
Continue reading “Browser Stats for DerekAllard.com for March 2007”. Posted in
Browsers, Noteworthy with 8 comments
March 04th, 2007
Wasn’t it just 4 months ago that I rebuilt this site in a custom built Code Igniter platform? Wow time flies, but I’m proud to announce yet another change. Actually, not a change - an upgrade. What you see in front of you now is DerekAllard.com completely rebuilt using ExpressionEngine. It was actually a really painless migration, although moving the data sucked… Anyhow, there are still a series of “under the hood” improvements to be made, and some refining here and there. If you find anything on teh site broken, please let me know!
I’ll start writing a few entries about using EE as a blogging platform, but I’ve been using it for some time as a content management system in other capacities. Actually, this move brings to mind one of its foremost strengths… flexibility. I was able to re-create my (old) custom url structure, so no Google penalty. I was able to implement all the features I had custom built, and easily at that. And finally, I was able to build it entirely on a local system, and move it live in the time it took to FTP the files up.
If you’re reading this and run a blog, and still use Wordpress but are looking to ditch that horse and buggy, then take a look at the free ExpressionEngine core. There are easy migration paths into EE, and I promise you that you won’t regret it. The honest truth, is that there is a learning curve, but its pretty short, and once you are up to speed, you fly!
Incidentally you Wordpress users… make sure you aren’t affected by the latest in a long line of security concerns.
Continue reading “DerekAllard.com has been rebuilt… Again!”. Posted in
ExpressionEngine, Noteworthy with 15 comments
March 03rd, 2007
DerekAllard.com has completed the transformation into ExpressionEngine, but it’s not live yet (want to migrate the data first). It took all of about 2 hours after I finally forced myself to sit down in front of my computer and turn off my email. Funny how your own “personal” stuff always seems to take a back seat to “important” work, but I’ve just finally grown frustrated with the roll-my-own solution.
I’m really, really, happy with the codebase I built for this site in Code Igniter, but the problem is that every time I want a new feature I need to go fix it up. And also, in honesty, it pains me to see all the kick ass features in EE that I haven’t built into my blog yet… and well, I want to be one of the cool kids.
So now the really painful part - data migration. Anyone who’s ever worked with legacy system and/or code can tell you want a pain that can be. The good news, moving the posts over is a pretty straight-forward process. The bad news, moving the comments over won’t be.
Sigh… no rest for the wicked I suppose!
Continue reading “Moving to ExpressionEngine”. Posted in
ExpressionEngine, Noteworthy with 4 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 22nd, 2007
Inspired by Matthew Inman's "How to Make Square Corners with CSS", I hereby set out on a journey to reveal the one true technique to create coloured, non-gradient backgrounds for divs, paragraphs and other XHTML elements. After literally seconds of painful research, I'll show you how to do this technique yourself. Here's a sample of what you can expect to see.
Continue reading “How to Make Coloured, Non-Gradient Backgrounds in CSS”. Posted in
Noteworthy, XHTML & CSS with 4 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
February 11th, 2007
In the last ten days I've gotten three separate emails from people about something that, I have to admit, really surprised me. They were concerned about my use of the words "colour" (two emails on this one) and "favourite" (this one appeared in my post on Code Igniter Wiki resources). And honestly, "concerned" is probably a good choice of words. I've written back to 2 of them with a brief explanation - but since 1 of the notes came from my contact form with an obviously fake email, I couldn't respond directly to the writer. I also don't mind quoting a few lines here.
...if you're trying to show people professional resources, maybe you should use the accepted international spelling don't you think?...
Go ahead, read that again, I needed to read it three time before it made sense. Look, I have absolutely NO problem with how you choose to spell colour, or favourite, or centre, but please, please, please don't think that the rest of the planet should spell it like that simply because you want to.
Finally, maybe there was a time when people didn't recognize that some words are spelled differently in other countries (I'm Canadian), but I don't think its been in my lifetime, so lighten up - there are SO many other things you could criticize me for anyways.
Continue reading “The Vast Cornfields of Canada”. Posted in
Noteworthy with 13 comments
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