This is most likely the last – or one of the last – posts I will make before the Greg-J.com redesign. I love this theme, but the site no longer reflects my interests or represents my thoughts the best way it could.
07.22.08
CSS-TRICKS.com is another feed in my Snackr roll, and a visit there never disappoints. Recently they finished up a 3 part series on designing a wordpress theme and rounded it off with a download to the theme pictured above. I like the idea of the theme and its straight forward approach, so I thought I’d share the find.
Visit ChrisCoyier.net to see the theme in action. Download it here.
06.13.08
I’m tired of using the word “awesome” to describe things that are awesome so I went with majestic instead. Awesome, huh?
Rather than get techy about Google’s new AJAX Feed API I’ll focus on their much easier to understand wizard for creating a very simple AJAX Feed widget. To do that though, I need to cover the AJAX Feed API so much to say that it’s a way for you display snippets of an RSS Feed – or multiple RSS Feeds – on your website without doing anything more than click a button.
06.09.08
This is the second time I’ve written this article so it’ll be much shorter now. Damn you back button!
I’ve been using vBulletin to create a webmaster social network at MySpacePros.com for the past month now and while it has all the features I need, I can’t imagine using vB for a social network that wasn’t aimed towards webmasters. As awesome as it is, it’s a beast to work with. What would I use then? WordPress. Or more specifically, BuddyPress. Take that last sentence with a grain of salt though, because I’ve never actually seen it in action. This is all just speculation.
06.04.08
I’ll make this short since I’m no font creator, but this is too cool not to talk about.
Fontstruct is a flash based font creation tool that allows you to point, click and create fonts using a number of preset shapes and tools. It’s crazy easy to use and I felt right at home the moment it loaded. It’s as powerful as many other full blown font creators and as simple to use as MS Paint.
05.28.08
Cushy CMS bills itself as an online content manager created to “take the work out of managing content” that is “Super. Easy. To. Use.”.
Account creation takes less than 30 seconds from start to logged in. They score big points from me on this. Had it not been so fast I wouldn’t be doing this review. Anything that makes me click a link from my email to verify an account and then manually enter my login details irritates me enough to pass it by completely. You can get signed up and start using it faster than you can type this sentence.
02.09.08
In the process of writing the new WebMaster Marketplace over at MySpacePros I used InnerFade for jQuery and realized it wouldn’t work when it was packed with Dean Edward’s packer. I found the issue and fixed it (just a missing semi-colon), but contacting the creator didn’t go so well (Anyone speak German?) so I figured I’d post the fix here. That and it’s been a while since my last post.
If you’re wondering, it’s line 69. $.innerfade = function() {} should be $.innerfade = function() {};. If it’s not, it won’t compress.
02.06.08
It’s been a week or so since my last entry and for the sake of keeping the momentum going I’ll write about one of my upcoming projects, tentatively called cart.
In my opinion there just isn’t a great solution for those people who want to sell digital goods online. There are numerous solutions, but of the dozen or so I have used I don’t really like any of them. So naturally, I’ve commissioned my own.
Here’s a sneak peak into a piece of software I’m think is going to be big. The development version is off-site as I don’t want anyone messing with it, deleting customers, that sort of thing – but I do have examples of the front and back ends up.
The first template can be seen here. I haven’t had the time to put it into code, but the overall look and feel is there. I’ve had to start over 3 times on this layout because I’m trying to make one that is plain so it’s easy for people to edit but my creative side is getting in the way still. I’ll probably get someone else to make a theme since I can’t seem to focus on a generic one.
The admin side is much more complete. You can get a good idea of the functionality from these pages:
- AdminCP Index
- Customers
- Mass Email / Newsletter
- Transactions
- Create a Transaction
- Manage Product Assets (images, files, etc)
Questions, comments, feature requests. I’m all ears.
01.22.08
About once a year I’ll spend a day – sometimes two – evaluating IDE’s. I’ve been using Dream Weaver for the longest time, but for me it’s basically a glorified text editor with half decent code completion and syntax highlighting I’ve grown accustom to. It has almost no features I would like and my main complaint is it completely taxes one of my cores. I didn’t buy a quad core processor so a text editor could use 25% of my available horsepower even when it’s sitting idle.
Earlier this year I found the new – and always free – Aptana. Overall it’s good software. I wouldn’t say great, but it’s good. The problem with it also lies in its strength: It’s written in Java. It can be used on any platform, but it can be painfully slow when double clicking on files in the file browser and that’s a deal-breaker for me. It has some interesting features (like built-in FireFox preview) and for those looking to save their pennies, it’s by far your best option. I spent a few days here and there with it, but it never stuck. I spent a lot of time trying to configure it, but it just never felt comfortable.
01.18.08
This is a layout I’ve worked on over the months here and there in an attempt to create a layout that could accommodate every possible ad size while maintaining a clean structure. It’s modular and (I hope) easy to understand. It’s completely free, but I would appreciate a link back this post if you use it – although it’s not required.
Questions and comments are welcome as always. If you create a demo page or a more complete stylesheet and would like to share, forward it to me and I’ll put up as a demo with full credit for other people to see and use.
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