Web

With the upgrade to Snow Leopard, I took the opportunity to make my MacBook Pro, a better development machine. This meant creating a Web server environment which matches my production shared hosting environment. Far easier said then done. I started with MAMP. I wanted to have a complete server environment that is well supported by the community and was easy to maintain. I felt that MAMP met these goals better than going with the native OS X web environment. Apple hasn’t been the best at offering the latest stable release of Apache, MySQL (in fact, not supported at all) and PHP. MAMP offered all three plus PHPMyAdmin (handy at times) and a smattering of additional goodness. ...

I haven’t updated the blog in quite a while. I’ve been working on a lot of things but haven’t found the time to document the work. The latest thing I did was update this blog to 3.0. So far I haven’t seen a huge difference. I also changed the theme from “minamalism’ to twentyten, which is the new theme for Wordpress. I like the new theme. Very simple, great style. ...

Oh, the agony. I spent the better part of a day trying to get Xdebug working on my MAMP site on my Mac. I read here, here and here… all you have to do is to “edit your php.ini file” and bada-boom! you are off to the races. No, no and no. The problem was that it kinda works, then it doesn’t, then nothing does, then things work but xdebug doesn’t. Over the years, I have realized that when things start to get real hard, I’m doing something wrong, terribly wrong. Some where in some place, I’ve made the simplest of errors, creating a cacophony of bugs so bad, I’ve got to look down to see up. ...

I’m interested in what HTML5/CSS3 are bringing to the Web. A simple thing like using CSS to drop shadow an image is  quite nice. Beats having to use Photoshop… Based on the drop shadow alone, I thought it would be good to begin using these two new web standards, So I changed my photography site Stills from one using a Lightroom HTML template to one of my own implemented with HTML5 and CSS3. ...

A extremely helpful service from Feedback Army is the ability to ask for feedback from a number of users. The cost is low, typically $1 per user and the advice from my limited sample of 1 time was well-worth the cost. I wanted to know if my wellys.org site was intuitive and easy to use. Yes, quite easy was the feedback. Was the performance acceptable? Yes, no issues. ...

In my continuing efforts to learn web programming, simplify things and make a better site, I changed the site (again). This time I switched from a manual, hand-coded implementation to a SQL-based version. The new version uses a database to display the movies, making adding a new movie much easier and more intuitive. And it was a lot of fun to see if I could do it! With any luck, there shouldn’t be any obvious differences with my old site. The new site allows me to create a web page for each movie explaining in greater detail all aspects. ...

So thanks to Nathan Henderson, I tried filming my drive home. I didn’t have a Gorillapod, so I used the next best thing, a glue clamp ($3.99) and a pair of rubber bands. It worked great! I attached the clamp to the rear view mirror then used rubber bands to hold the Flip to the clamp.  Then I drove home… (click on image for Going Home) I can hardly wait until we drive up Hwy 1!

This is something I gotta do! Creating a scalable video webpage (First, sorry about the delay in posts… been on the road.) I saw this on one of my favorites… A list apart. It is a method for scaling videos that is based on the size of the viewing window. Given my site is ALL video and I try to make it friendly, I gotta give this a shot. Give me a couple of weeks.

The last time that I worked on my page about Tools was when I was using Final Cut Express… ok, I can’t remember when that was. The Notes are about the films, once they are made and the notes are written, its over. But the Tools, they are ever changing! To help me focus on what I need to work on, I’ll add some comments here to either set me up or give me guidance. This blog is my conscience. ...

A few more tweaks made late last night! I still have some image line-up issues but my new site is ready to go. It isn’t dramatically different than last years model but its no longer a TABLE! Woot! OK, its not that big of a deal but it no longer nags me as I lay awake at night… New version and Old Version. Next up? The remaining pages, new look and new text!