DerekAllard.com : CodeIgniter, ExpressionEngine, and the World of Web Design

Writing personal content, and other assorted thoughts

March 22^nd, 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.

When I finish that up, the next project for me is to write a quick ExpressionEngine tutorial to demonstrate how to use Dreamweaver and/or other editors to create templates with.  In all honesty, I didn’t even know this was possible until a conversation I had with Rick, Les, Paul and Derek when I was down at South by Southwest.  Punchline, export your templates to files then interact with them via FTP as you’d do outside a CMS.  Seems so obvious now that I think of it, but I only every really thought of saving templates to file for the purposes of backups or quick moves.

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I notice today google-code-prettify, a small javascript library released under the Apache open source license.  Looks very nice, its a small unobtrusive script that looks though your code for class="prettyprint”, and then colour-codes up your code.  It looks like it was intended for SQL, HTML, XML, CSS, and Javascript, but reports that it works well on other similar syntaxed languages, such as PHP and Ruby. I know there are other nice libraries out there that do similar things, but this is notable because of its license, its adherance to unobtrusive principals, it works on all modern browsers, and its easy to implement.  Nice to see another strong alternative out there.

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Finally, with all due respect to Right Said Fred, I pulled this out of my closet this morning.

This entry was made on March 22^nd, 2007 @ 12:45 and filed into ExpressionEngine, Javascript, Noteworthy, Personal.