Shift8 Creative Graphic Design and Website Development

So I want to make sure that I keep posting content on my blog. I not only want people to come back to my site, but I want to get in a good habit of writing as well as make sure that I'm jotting down some of my thoughts. The amount of crap that runs through my head is probably more than the average person's. That's not a pat on my own back, that's actually quite sad because I just want things to turn "off" sometimes. Sleep deprivation, lack of focus sometimes, and overall insanity is really what it leads to. Sticky notes and endless reams of printer paper, and sketchbooks (not that I sketch anymore like I should) really aren't cutting it. I need to decompress on my blog as well. So I'm adding some new categories to help stay organized.

Believe it or not, I use my own blog for reference. I do come back to what I wrote down and use it to copy and paste code snippets and keep tabs on where I was and where I am now. Sometimes I rant sure and those posts may not do any good for anyone...But I'm bored, and probably angry at the moment. Or, maybe I'm procrastinating. Like I am now...It's about the middle of the evening and I should be working on my little lightweight CMS but instead I'm writing...Hmm...Oh well.

So in the spirit of keeping it interesting for you all, check this out! Have an Android phone? Remotedroid can be found in the app market, but the server can be found on its Google code site. It's cross-platform, just run the jar file. Make sure that you have port 57110 open for UDP traffic (check computer firewall and router). 

You can hold down on the track pad area with one finger and swipe the other up and down and it should scroll. It may support some other gestures too, I haven't tried. It works really well as a mouse. The keyboard I found to be a little slow, but bearable for simple things like surfing the internet or perhaps your media center computer (ie. Boxee, etc.). That's really what I intend to use it for. Sure, there's a Boxee remote app for nearly all phones, but this works much better in my opinion...Especially if you want to do more or Boxee crashes or you don't run it all the time. Boxee seems to get a weird resolution change issue after my computer wakes up...So I have to exit it and restart it. Can't do that with the remote app. However, the remote app does have a novel picture of whatever is playing.

Anyway, a nice little discovery. What else? Well, just boring stuff. Things that I'm working on as I mentioned...A lightweight CMS. It's coming along well. It was the basis of the previous post about including external JavaScript files from another JavaScript file. This lightweight CMS doesn't use any framework...Or database even. It's intended for very basic, static, sites. Old sites. Imagine those sites for small businesses that were designed a while ago, or not necessarily a while ago, but perhaps designed very statically...This is quite common actually even in a world where we have Wordpress and Joomla and Drupal and Croogo! Don't forget that nice CMS. One day add Minerva to that too. Another project of mine for those of you who want to laugh, go ahead...But I promise that one will get finished as well.

I'm calling this lightweight CMS "Argos" with the metaphor/slogan of "Who says you can't teach an old dog new tricks?" So these very simple (1-20 page) sites are really the target. You can't use Argos on a dynamic site. Argos actually writes directly to the HTML or PHP page and alters the HTML contents of it. It of course stores data in JSON files to keep backups (also for historic rollbacks) and also backs up the entire site on installation (well, it will when I'm done). This ensures that the site using Argos doesn't get messed up and also helps to prevent user mistakes...Or rather, allows a user to "undo" things...Something I think that's missing from many CMS' out there. It's also designed to be quite compatible. Basically PHP 5 is the only real server requirement. It has to have the JSON PHP extension. That's the extent really of the requirements. Of course many shared hosts do offer MySQL but I figured I'd keep it as compatible as possible. Plus, do I really want to setup a database? What if I'm not installing the CMS? I want to deliver it with one PHP script. Let it download the files it needs and walk the user through installation. I'm assuming that they don't know what MySQL is and they certainly don't know how to setup a database and then a user to access said database.

The CMS does have a backend, but it's very simple for now. It does include a nifty file manager script that I found. So, there's another great find for you all...phpFileManager. It's just one PHP script actually, it works really well! I was thinking about expanding upon it and adding a few features and then just using it as a "swiss army" knife for web development. Adding things like markItUp! to it and so on...But keeping it all one file. It doesn't matter if it ends up being a few megabytes even...Just being able to get onto a server, wget the file from my server or FTP it somewhere, then load it up to go work on something in a pinch would be great.

Anyway, enjoy the discoveries and updates. I do post minor things like this on my Twitter feed by the way, so follow me!