Shift8 Creative Graphic Design and Website Development

If you haven't heard about SOPA, then please go and read this or simply Google it to find a bunch of other great sites and material. It's a really bad bill. That's obvious enough...Or so you'd think. There are actually quite a few people in congress who don't quite realize the gravity of the situation. It truly is something that could threaten the internet all over the world - not just the US.

Many sites are considering a black out in order to protest. While it would send a very strong message, as an individual user what can you do? Or is there anything you can do without shutting down your site? Yes! For starters, signing petitions and writing your state's representatives. Of course you'll likely get a canned auto-reply via e-mail. Believe me everyone is well aware things by now, I just feel like with how many people keep talking about how they get a canned response that our cries are falling on deaf ears. I feel like the message isn't getting through.

So, yes, actions speak louder than words (and e-mails). Sites shutting down in protest will make a difference, but I think so can each and every user on the internet as well. It's pretty common to have a profile picture on the internet, yes? Be if Facebook, Twitter, Google, or otherwise. Today I saw a friend on Twitter replaced his profile icon with a "STOP SOPA" in white letters with a black background. Big and bold. It was brilliant. I thought about it a bit and almost took the image and used it myself. Then I thought, well that might get confusing. Which is ok I suppose, it really could help drill in a point...But I then thought about a band. A band like one might wear in mourning. The truth is, if SOPA is successful, it would essentially kill the internet in many ways. So I designed a black band with "SOPA" on it. The word stop wouldn't fit diagonally and reproduce well at smaller sizes. I don't think it was necessary either given everyone signifies a black band/ribbon with mourning...And black itself not being the color of joy. I believe it does a good job and it still allows me to keep a good portion of my profile picture. My last reasoning for this is also that even if your profile picture is shown at a tiny size (like certain areas on Facebook and mobile devices) a black diagonal ribbon across any proflie image (regardless of legible print within it) could easily become a universal symbol for stop SOPA. A simple black square covering up everything would also work, but I just feel it doesn't look as pretty.

So if you don't want to go all out and black out your profile completely, you may want to consider doing the same. I'm providing a 150x150 pixel transparent PNG image that you can easily overlay on your profile picture. That should save you some time and trouble. I would like to make a generator as well, but I don't have the time right now. I may do so later. Though, I'd also be concerned about my server getting pegged if I did that. It would have to be a very shareable generator so that more people could easily get it on their site to help host and distribute load.

Anyway, you can download the image here and it is also displayed below.

I can not begin to explain how beneficial this card is. What is it? It's a membership card that gives you some really sweet discounts on various business (and lifestyle) related expenses. Blows American Express' benefits out of the water. While you can't use it to purchase anything, it's an awesome card to have.

Is there a cost? Yes, there is. They are running a promotion right now ($249 per year locked in) instead of the $499. Is it worth it? Yes. I believe at the $249/year it's worth it. I would personally start to wonder at $500/year. It is conceivably still very worthwhile at $500, but it depends on how much travel you do.

Your biggest savings? Travel. Depending on the airline, you can save a good bit and get access to priority boarding, etc. Things you would eventually get over time if you carried a bunch of frequent flyer cards. However, it's the hotel savings that really help. There's some pretty massive discounts.

The FoundersCard site claims on some hotels as much as 60% off...But I went to the hotel's site and discovered that wasn't true. Perhaps the "normal" price was taken at the height of some season...But, there is still a real good discount of anywhere between about 10% and 25% (sometimes more). So when you go somewhere and stay for say 3 or 4 days...It's basically like getting a free night. If it costs a couple hundred to stay...Well then...You just covered your annual membership cost in one trip.

So yes -- the FoundersCard is very worthwhile. Additionally, there's discounts on things like AT&T wireless plans, Rackspace hosting, and a bunch of other stuff. Discounts on things like flowers and spas, etc. There's plenty of lifestyle benefits. Rental cars too.

Then they have networking events. Given that this is highly targeted at startup companies, most are tech related. So if you're in the internet industry, these are great networking events to attend.

How do you get it? Well, it's by invitation only. So you need to know someone who has one. Guess what? I have one! So you can get in touch with me if you'd like an invite. I'd seriously consider it and I would get on it really soon while they have the promotional pricing.

The thing that stinks is you can't see all the benefits until you've been invited. Once invited, you can review all the benefits and then decide to sign up or not.

Well, Slicehost is coming to an end. I think many people are sad about that, if there aren't...There should be. It was an amazing hosting company. So amazing that mega hosting company Rackspace purchased them a while back. If you don't migrate yourself, they will migrate for you...To Rackspace! That's the good news.

I've been avoiding the inevitable migration from Slicehost to Rackspace... But over the past few days here I have done it. I love Rackspace just as much as Slicehost and would always recommend them to everyone out there.

What does that mean? Well, depending on how much bandwidth you run through, you will likely be paying a little less per month for hosting. The control panel does not have as many features as Slicehost's did...Though the design is a little neater if you're a fan...I'm a minimalist (w/o things being fugly), so I like Slicehost's manager design better...But Rackspace does have a cool API.

I've used many hosts over the years, for myself and for clients...You name it, I've likely tried it...Slicehost, Rackspace, VPS.net, MediaTemple, Lunarpages, AptHost, HostGator, GoDaddy (yuck - please stick to domain names only), and many many more... Even back in the day, geocities! Yea! haha. So at the end of a lot of banging my head on the desk, if you are out there looking for a good host, I would absolutely reccommend Rackspace. Best hosting company I have ever seen hands down. I really do bet I've seen (and worked with) more than your average bear too.

That said. Hosting. What is the hosting landscape in 2011? Are you on a shared host? Get off. Now. If you're a web designer/developer then you should be on a VPS by now. Cost was a pretty hard thing to get around, but Rackspace has a 256MB slice (Slicehost terminology, I mean cloud server size or whatever they call it) and it's going to run you around $12/mo. With bandwidth maybe a little more like $15 tops. I was around long enough to see shared hosting dip to like $7/mo. I have no clue what it's like now...It should be free. Regardless. Switch to a VPS. Sure, you'll need to setup the server from scratch, but there's enough tutorials out there and the only way for you to progress as a web developer is to tinker with a VPS.

When you let technology and your web server limit what you can do...You limit what you can learn and do as a web developer.

Rackspace has some really great servers with their cloud server offering. They also have cloud sites which as far as I'm concerned basically replaces shared hosting as we know it.

What else in 2011? Well, even in 2010, likely 2009 we have this really cool new thing PaaS. "Platform as a Service" ... Things like OpenShift from RedHat, CloudFoundry from VMWare (hey, they are down the road from me!), Orchestra.io, and a whole ton of Ruby services. These services let you deploy web apps (the cool word for sites when they do more than just show a web page) in the "cloud" (the cool word for having essentially mirrored copies of your site on multiple servers so perhcance one go down, your site is still visible by the world and scalability or in other words, "many hands make light work"). 

These services are great because you just run a command (I imagine it's not long before some IDE has it bulit in, if not already) and voila! Your site is out on the internet. 

The future is cool. Well, the present...Sorta. A lot of these services still can't quite get a grasp on the beast that is PHP. Orchestria.io by far is the best for PHP. The other PaaS' have varied support for PHP when it comes to MongoDB. They'll get there though.

So, just as I have migrated...This little blog post is a reminder that you too should probably take a look at your hosting situation and think about a little spring ... er late summer or fall cleaning. I can't tell, I'm all out of whack, where I live spring felt like winter and now late summer/fall feels like mid-summer.

I really need to update my website. First, my portfolio section is way dated. I want to add reference to at least one more major website that I got the opportunity to work on while at ExpandTheRoom, but I also have a few other person projects I'd like to list under that section as well. I'm still trying to figure out how to best list all of my open-source contributions too. I may change up the "portfolio" and "projects" section... 

Aside from all that, I want to be more active in posting blog entries (which I always say) and I want to bring in my Twitter feed since I usually post some great links there. Also, I've been struck by the creativity bug and I just want to put more effort into design. I really have a minimalistic design here that I'm not happy with. The new expriments with web typography that I've been playing with can really help me out.

I've been using Croogo, which is a really, really good blog/CMS for CakePHP. However, lately I've been working with the Lithium framework. In fact, so much that I'm really getting out of touch with CakePHP. So it really makes sense to move my site onto Lithium...Likely, the Minerva CMS I've been working on.

I may also setup a Q&A type section as well...Specifically with regard to the Lithium framework (but open to all areas of the web that I may be privy to). I don't want to have some sort of open Q&A site, but I do want to provide more insightful blog posts in the form of a "Q&A" for the little niche of the internet I find myself in. Kinda like some of the tips/tutorials that you can find throughout my blog, but now with a little more organization/emphasis.

I've left my full-time job and have gone off on my "own" (working with some good people), so I'm a free man! I'm on the loose and I'm dangerous. So stay tuned for some updates!

Every web designer, developer, and just really anyone who does business should have one of these tablets, I swear.

Why? Well, normally I'd have to say tablets are not really that helpful. They are fun, I think everyone is crazed over them, but they don't offer any real productive value. Sorry, but it's true. You play Angry Birds on them is what you do. Then carry it to the office so you can try to justify it. I could see that if you don't have a smartphone, then a tablet is a great tool for productivity.

Not the HTC Flyer. This is a tablet that really is geared for business and its a great addition to a netbook, smartphone, or laptop because it's simply different than all of them. It's honestly one of the only tablets that has something unique about it. The pen.

While reading about this tablet I was concerned the pen wouldn't be precise enough. Well, it is. It can be quite fine tipped. It works just about as well as some other devices like a Palm Pilot or Windows device with stylus...Only, better. There's two levels of pressure sensitivity as well, so it's pretty good for sketching. Mind you, not as good as what Wacom tablets offer, but honestly pretty close.

Drawing on glass, a slick surface, isn't so bad...Though you do miss out on the tactile feel and it's not real natural. I assume you can put on a matte screen protector and you'd get some resistance that felt more natural.

So why for web designers? It should be obvious...You can note anything. So you can simply go to your web sites and mark them up. Conveying design changes, etc. are a dream come true when you can do that. You can sketch up fresh ideas for design as well to then share. 

Additionally, you can draw all over PDF documents. These can be saved down as flattened PDFs or layered PDFs that will open up back on a PC. You will need to get a file manager app in order to e-mail those saved PDFs out, but you can. It's nice to open those layered PDFs up on a PC to review what you annotated and then remove those markings if you wanted to.

Think about tools like Mockflow and how they export to PDF. Or any other design tool where you may have a site map or wireframe. Bring that PDF right into the Flyer, mark it up, and e-mail it right back out. Beautiful.

Further apply this to business and think about signing PDFs. You can sign off for things, contracts, approval, etc. Having a pen in a digital world means serious business. It helps bridge a gap.

Think about presentations too. You can be going through a slideshow and make markings with the pen to help annotate. Speaking of presentations...The notes app has a recorder. You can record a lecture or presentation so you can play it back later. While this recording is going on, you can take pen notes and those drawings are placed on the audio timeline of your recording. Another beautiful feature.

I can't wait until there's more pen apps out there because I could only imagine the number of apps that could help make my day to day job easier and more productive.

Simply put. Every web designer and graphic designer should have one of these tablets. If you do business in a creative field, this is a must. Even for other industries the pen is a nice tool.

I currently use Komodo for my IDE. It's a wonderful IDE and I like the name. However, it's not great for its code intelligence when it comes to PHP 5.3+ and it has trouble with the "go to definition" function sometimes. Other than that, I love the IDE. I think it's still in the top 5 for IDEs for PHP development.

So I never used NetBeans before and never really knew much about it. I always thought it was an IDE for Java. So when I came across their website again and it said it supported PHP I did some digging. I figured yea yea it can edit PHP files, so can notepad...But nope! I was pleasantly surprised! Here's a brief overview of the things I like about it.

Command Line Tasks/Special Framework Integration
The IDE even has support for the Symfony framework. It allows you to right click a Symfony project and clear the cache or run a Symfony command that you would normally do from the command line. So creating new modules and such is much more natural. I don't deal with Symfony for my personal projects, but it's nice to have that integration because I do work on sites that use Symfony almost on a daily basis for work. My current framework of choice is Lithium and I'd like to see if I could get a module to do something similar for Lithium (and if I want to learn some Java, I bet I can).

Code Intelligence
The autocomplete and code intelligence is amazing. It works with PHP 5.3+ namespaces and it picked up everything for me in my Lithium project. When calling methods from my own models it picks up all the inherited model methods and as I write them it guides me along with the arguments. Exactly what I always wanted in an IDE but seldom found. Eclipse would do it fairly well but it's a beast as you may know. NetBeans is a bit more light weight. It has a "go to definition" feature and also a "go to test" feature. It integrates well with PHPUnit. Too bad I'm not really using PHPUnit.

Revision Control Support
It has SVN, Git, Mercurial support and more. The Git support comes as a module you'll need to download. It doesn't seem to work with pushing and pulling from remotes, but it seems to do everything else fine. This is the one area I'm disappointed with. Git I think is one the more popular systems these days. I hope a module becomes available for it. This brings me to my last point.

Open Source
It's free! You can download NetBeans for free to use. It also has a community of developers that are working on it and building new features all the time. New modules, updates, etc. I really think that's a good approach for an IDE. The reason is because every developer is different when you're making a product you ultimately have to make decisions about features to include. Even if you later apply updates, there's still decisions about what to work on. Then your team is limited. With open source, your team is much larger and a different group of people (or even a single developer) can decide to work on something that they feel is important and work on it when they want. So the PHP developers out there can be happy with this IDE and get the features they need while the Java developers also get an IDE that serves them and both groups here don't even necessarily know what's up with the other. It's nice and it's how Eclipse works.

NetBeans of course has all the other nice debugging features working with XDebug and so forth. Lots of configuratin options, options for shortcuts, etc. It has an add-on module that helps you play with and test regular expressions too. It's a full blown IDE. It really isn't missing much. For me, it was the code intelligence that made me fall in love. I always wanted a no hassle IDE that had this. More importantly, code intelligence that works with your own code. It just means a few less browser windows that I have to leave open for reference.

If you haven't checked out NetBeans yet, you should do so. It's easy to setup and I think for PHP 5.3+ projects, it's a good IDE. Alternatively I've heard good things about PHPStorm too. I will likely check that one out in the future, but it does cost money.

Geek conferences.  Well, perhaps "trendy" conferences that all us web developers are always wanting to go to. Or...Meetups...But darn, that meetup and that conference they are half way across the country. It costs so much money and takes so much time. If you're lucky your boss might pay for you to go (as well they should for the value!). Though, probably that won't happen so you miss out. 

Well, that's where I believe in recording and slideshare, etc. However...That's only so useful. This is 2011 God damnit, where's my hover car and sexy computer lady voice that I can talk to when I'm lonely?! Ah, the Ballmer peak got to the best of us...Or maybe not. We actually do have many great examples of technology. We finally have tablets (again), but now that hardware is better they are actually somewhat cool. We have a lot of good web software too and don't forget the cloud. The problem is, you have to hunt for some of this awesome tech...And so, I've found something very noteworthy.

OpenMeetings.de is a great site (and open source project) that uses red5 to provide online meetings and presentations. Ok, yea there's AdobeConnect and Webex and all those other guys...However, they don't have quite as many features and they mostly all require some special software to download and have some problems. Typically most of those services run better on Windows as well. However, the most problematic thing is they all cost money. Lots of money. It's hard for open source communities that have little or no funding to afford these services so...They don't. You end up with conferences that try to get sponsors to cover the costs and you end up with wikis and slideshare and IRC chat rooms. Don't get me wrong, all that is still needed...But I think we should have somewhere to turn for virtual meetups.

OpenMeetings doesn't give you live screen sharing like most other services (and before I forget, join.me is another great mention). The screen sharing is actually a series of screenshots updated fairly frequently. Certainly frequently enough to show a presentation. Almost enough to show live typing, but I think that's enough for the needs of a meeting. Furthermore, you can actually record the whole event to later download as an AVI or FLV! In addition to this very elusive feature (RDP and RFB have been around for ages, yet it's still hard to find good free solutions apparently), it also provides video and audio communication via your web cam and microphone. It also provides text chat and a whiteboard. You can give control to other users and allow them to share their screens and video/audio as well.

It certainly appears to have all the features that one could need. It also has a few other goodies like polls but the most important feature, aside from the sharing parts, I think is the fact that you can plan meetings on a calendar and then invite people. However, how easy is it to use? How well does it work? From what I tested, it's very compatible and pretty easy to use. In fact, it's so compatible that it also worked on my Android 2.3 tablet! You obviously couldn't share your tablet's screen and it didn't recognize the webcam on my tablet, but it definitely worked as a viewer. The resolution being a bit lower than an actual computer made it a little hard to read text but you could see the shared screen and whiteboard. Further, you could actually interact with the whiteboard. Drawing on that with your finger was definitely fun. The speed was fair, again I don't think the whiteboard is 100% real time, especially due to how it renders when you first load it (it seems to replay all the actions). However, it works. Virtual meetings, virtual classrooms, here we come!

Note: Oh, and if anyone from 10gen is seeing this, YES that is a MongoDB mug in the background, I went to an actual conference to get to have it only break on me day one as I cleaned it...I can still use it, as long as I don't pick it up by the handle. You still owe me a mug, especially for entering that contest last month! It was a lot of typing...What does a guy have to do to get a mug? I've even now made a product/brand placement for ya. 

I finally took the plunge and got a new laptop (with the kind help of my parents with a generous Christmas gift). It's been a few years really and I did need a new computer. What did I end up with? Well, I almost got a Macbook Pro (of course) being the good web developer (and graphic designer) that I am. Apple finally came down on their pricing a while ago so I was all ready to do that but then saw this HP ENVY ended up being half the cost for better hardware. Apple needs to put a 1GB graphics card in their Macbook Pros, 512MB on a $3,000 laptop is just pathetic. 

So reasoning aside, how was I going to setup this machine for web development, design, graphic design, and photography? Prior to this computer, I had dual boot Windows (Vista, ick) and Fedora Linux. Awesome, it ran fast it was simply to setup a webserver and it basically mirrored the servers I worked on. Photo editing was tough in Linux and forget Adobe (though there is a portable version of Photoshop that works); GIMP was the real tool. So I had to go back to Windows for any design work. Not that I do a whole lot these days and that's more because I've learned to deal w/o those nice programs and get by with GIMP (and GIMP is good don't get me wrong).

Now this time around I decided that since I have 4 cores (8 virtual) why not run virtualized machines? No more dual booting, no more hard drive partitioning, etc. So I setup Fedora 14 virtualized, and here's in my opinion, the very best setup for web development/design that you can get (and you can do this if you have a Mac too):

Base Host OS: Windows 7 (or OS X)

Virtualized Guest OS: Linux and Windows (or OS X, oops yea you can virtualize this, but its slow, that's ok though read down further why)

So you virtualize Linux so you can setup a web server that's practically identical to the ones you'll be uploading your files to for the live sites. Why setup a web server with Mac ports, homebrew, or MAMPP? That's silly. Why use XAMPP or setup IIS if using a Windows host? Oh god no IIS. OS X is better but at the same time, you just can't beat a Linux package manager for speed and ease (and grabbing all the libraries you need when you do need to compile something). Also, you really want to mirror as close as you can the actual server that your files will live on because then you'll run into less accidents. You know that everything will work, not "should" work. Rolling with updates is also much easier.

So the trick is you have to make sure your virtual machine has internet access and it's IP is static. With VMWare and Virtualbox you can set things to NAT and then within the guest OS (in Linux' settings for the network card) you can assign a manual IP address within the range of allowed addresses. I have mine at like 192.168.126.200 or something. It won't conflict with any other machine on my LAN. It's not even in the same range.

You will want to probably disable SELinux since you aren't too concerned with security and it'll make things a lot nicer when it comes to shared folders. Make sure your firewall settings are letting Apache through as well. You'll want to setup a shared folder so your files are hosted on your host machine. So in my case Windows 7 holds my web site files. I have a different folder for each site and the Apache conf settings uses virtual hosts to assign a new domain to each site/folder. You can Google all of this. I don't want to make this a tutorial (unless I get some requests) but just a general idea for how to set things up. Pointing the Apache conf to the location for the shared folders. Awesome. Now you can edit files on the host OS with the editor of your choice, no problemo. Use git, svn, etc. The most important thing about this is that your files are now always available whether running the virtual machine or not and they are a bit better protected. Say your virtual machine gets corrupt somehow? Oh crap! Well, not anymore. Now it's just setting it up again worst case scenario, a few Apache config files lost. No big deal.

How do you access this webserver from the host OS? could setup a DNS server (like BIND) if you were nuts. Then set your host OS to look at that DNS before going out to your ISP. I personally didn't want to do that because I figured it would make things just ever so slightly slower. Then if Linux wasn't running, maybe even slower until things timed out before moving on to the next DNS. Instead, I alter my hosts file. In Linux this is easy because Gnome (and I'm sure other desktops) has a GUI to add entries to your hosts file. Very nice, but wait just one minute! There's an app for that! Windows and OS X both have 3rd party apps that will allow you to change up your hosts file in a nicer way. The one on Windows 7 that I'm using now is called HostsMan. It's actually quite cool and can provide some other handy features to help warn you about possible hijacks and such. Anyway, I just use it for my sites. So I have a lithium.local for example that points to the IP of the Linux virtual machine. Save that...Open up the web browser and bingo! Again, there's apps for OS X too and some that also work in your dashboard I believe, which is handy.

Yes, I do need to add a new setting (line) each time I setup a new site, but I have to also do that in Linux under the Apache configuration for the virtual host anyway. No big deal, it takes less than 5 minutes one time every time I setup a new site. I could figure some sort of automation script maybe or something through the web browser. You could setup a free control panel like you see on hosting providers...But I'm ok with typing in the config manually from a terminal.

Bonus! I don't need to use Putty (or Kitty) because I can use the terminal from Linux. Putting the virtual machine into "unity" mode, or "seamless" mode for Virtualbox users, will make this so much nicer. I basically now look at things and get confused...Am I running Windows? Or Linux? Nice, best of both worlds.

Now, virtualizing OS X isn't kosher. It's a no no. But...You can actually do it. I find that I can just test with Chrome and Firefox and be ok. I don't use OS X. There's also a Safari for Windows (though it's slightly different I hear). However, Firefox and Chrome are pretty good and I don't typically end up with OS X only CSS issues. Conversely, if you're doing this in OS X, you can virtaulize Windows XP or 7 or ME? Vista? No no, you'll be ok with XP or 7, haha. Now you have two virtual machines giving you ALL of the major operating systems. Why do this? Well, dual booting is a pain in the rear and it doesn't matter how fast your Windows or OS X guest runs because you're just going to use it for browser testing. Microsoft used to have images available just for this purpose. They were incomplete operating systems, but gave you just enough to test browsers. Personally I think it was genius, but also...They owed it to the world because of Internet Explorer.

So there you have it. My idea of the perfect setup for a web developer/designer. I can run all of the programs that I want to for design (since Linux isn't great for design of course) and also have my proper webserver with Linux. There's also a few helpful apps that Linux has that neither OS X or Windows has so now I won't miss out on those. I can test just about every web browser and make sure my site looks the same on all. The things we have to go through in order to make web sites. It's absurd...But at least we don't need 5 computers to do it. Running two operating systems full time is not a big deal either on any newer i5 or i7 processor. Also as an added bonus I can play Starcraft 2 :)

Yes, Apple fanboys will say they can do it all with just OS X...Well, no you can't actually. You can't test all the browsers without virtualizing and your web server is just going to be a joke running on OS X. I've setup several web servers before on just about every operating system short of Solaris. So believe me, you want the "real deal" you want something that's going to reflect the final live environment. You don't see hosting companies offering up OS X to run your web sites now do ya? Also, it's good to have your web server virtualized because it doesn't take a lot of resources to run and it will familiarize you with a Linux machine. That's important! It's also still just as convenient as setting up (through port/brew or compiling from scratch) a web server on OS X. In fact, it's more convenient. While MAMPP is probably the most convenient, it doesn't offer enough when it comes to all those PHP extensions. Now this is strictly speaking to PHP developers...Now how about you want to run other things on the server? Some things simply aren't available for Windows or OS X, and that's why you really want to virtualize Linux for your web development. Plus, you can have multiple machines and simulate/setup/test out load balancing and database clustering...But of course, to each their own.

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!