Alexander Dickson

Hello world.

I have not posted here for some time, so I’ve decided to do a  late night Saturday post.

A fair bit has been happening for me in the web developer world. I recently started using a framework for the first time. I had been copying around a core set of classes for most sites, and had realised I had essentially built my own sort of framework. Ater realising this, I went and hunted for a suitable mature framework to use. After downloading Zend, CodeIgniter, Symfony and Kohana. I had a quick flip through the code base, and readin a lot of online material on them, and decided to use Kohana.

I originally decided to go with CodeIgniter, but after digging a little deeper, I discovered that Kohana was a fork of CI, implementing PHP5’s improved support for objects, and being community driven. This should mean that development shouldn’t feel as stagnant as what I’ve been heard about CI.

In also learning Kohana, I had to learn about the MVC pattern and how to implement it with Kohana. I discovered it was relatively simple, and has so far implemented it with my last 2 projects. These have been an online plants database and an interactive style brochure site for a Fiji resort.

I also discovered that my previous collection of classes followed a loose set of MVC principles… I had a router controller, one massive controller to handle all logic, a set of classes that acted as models, and views for each ’section’ of the site.

All in all, I definitely recommend learning a framework. It is good experience.

First, to clarify, my last post was an April Fool’s Joke hehe.

Frustratingly, I have been unable to find a WYWISYG text editor written in JavaScript leveraging the jQuery framework. I have found some alright ones, to be continued…

It seems Microsoft, once adopting jQuery as the JavaScript framework for their IDE, have set a new precedent for adopting open source software into their projects.

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/04/01/ie9-to-use-webkit.aspx

I have finally done it! Redesigned my site that is, with my own design. Whilst I know it is very basic, it is probably my only design I have been happy with so far. I originally was doing something similar to twitter, but ended up with what you’re looking at now. I think the orange might be a subconscious influence from spending a fair bit of time on Stack Overflow. But at least I didn’t copy them almost verbatim AKA CNProg.

Well I hope you’re happy with the first proper design of this site, and look forward to some actual exciting content soon.

See you on the intertubes.

P. S. If telemarketers piss you off to no end, please see https://www.donotcall.gov.au

P. P. S. The Who were awesome, but sadly I did not meet them.

It appears that Webkit now supports scrollbar styling… just like IE5.5 +. Except for one thing, at this stage it looks like it won’t style the parent window’s scrollbars (like IE can). I think this is a good step, as messing with the default scrollbar causes all sorts of usability issues.

The psuedo classes are listed on the Webkit page, and at this stage they support textareas, select boxes, list boxes and overflowed elements. This could come in handy to further immerse people in sites that have a distinct branded feel, or another one of those grunge sites where OS rendered scrollbars might ruin the design/feel.

In saying this, there has been a way using JavaScript to emulate this for a while. The example given is a jQuery plugin, and honestly, if you’re not leveraging a framework to do JavaScript, you’re either wasting your time or just wanting a better knowledge of raw JavaScript, which is OK :). This of course isn’t as elegant as Webkit’s implementation; the jQuery plugin inserts extra elements and fails without JavaScript, returning scrolling duties to the default scrollbar.

If only other rendering engines would keep up to date with Webkit… CSS transitions, text shadows, etc etc, then life as a web developer may be a little bit easier. Actually, if IE’s support for CSS was as good as Webkit, then life would be much easier.

In other news, (and I hate counting chickens before they hatch…) but I am going to meet The Who tomorrow with my girlfriend in Brisbane… I am excited!

Hello, it has been a while, but I am back! Firstly, I’m going to steer this blog entirely in the web development area. Less personal blogging and no more further blogging about my band, as of a few weeks ago I left due to what might be called a personal dispute.

I downloaded the IE8 beta today and gave it a whirl. I fired up a few sites I’ve created recently and they seemed to look alright. Here are my thoughts, in an easy to read bulleted list!

• It’s a shame they left out many of the cool new CSS3 proposed features, like border-radius. This could have been very cool and a good push for IE6/7 users to upgrade. Imagine this “Hey Ma, look at the new Internets, it’s got all rounded corners now when I upgraded my Googler (read Web Browser). You should upgrade too!”
• Web slices look cool… but it’ll be interesting to see how many sites actually provide these. I can see big players like Google, eBay, Amazon and the like jumping on this though.
• Finally providing support for data URIs… now you can embed data into the src element of images! Handy for favicons, or simply making portable HTML files that contain all images. Not to mention shaving a few of those precious HTTP requests!
• We now finally have vendor specific prefixes for CSS properties! As Firefox adopted -moz and Webkit -webkit, IE8 has gone with -ms.  This also applies know to the IE properiety filter property.
• You probably already know this, but to save old sites from being munched when IE8 comes out officially, you can the following meta tag to your page: <meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=7″>. This must of been a hard decision for Microsoft, when they were deciding to either do this option or make IE8 render all pages like IE7 by default.
• IE8 finally has a set of developer tools. Yay!
• JavaScript errors are also more intelligible. The dreaded ‘operation aborted’ from IE6/7 now has a friendlier message, as I witnessed today.
• As I hear, they are now supporting the CSS value for the table-cell property on any element. This is the best news… people can finally drop the whole tables for layout thing. At the very least even if someone creates a page suffering from divitis, it will be semantically more pure (having not used tables which will upset Screen Readers and ruin the semantics of the page).

Well that’s my wrap up for now. Hopefully the next time I blog won’t be so far away. Here are some things I’ve been doing in my spare time, in a handy bulleted list of course!

• I have been on Stack Overflow a lot… it’s slightly addictive. I do prefer learning more to getting reputation points though. I think that’s the way it should be too!
• I have downloaded 2 frameworks and am about to get familiar with them: Symfony and Zend. I intend to write a CMS soon that will be of benefit to work. I intend to build on top of a framework, to make life easier and just to teach myself a framework which I am yet to do. I am learning all the time and am currently putting off the development until I decide which framework I want to go with.
• I have still been unable to get past level 16 on Halo 3!
• I’ve been learning more about jQuery and intend to learn a bit more about the JavaScript objects, which I have sadly only been implementing my first read over of them. Things have been busy at work and unforuantely I have had less time to improvies and refactor, resulting in a few projects using less stellar code. Hopefully I can get a bit of time to redo a few things that have been bothering me.

Okay, I’m really going now! Take care out there on the iTubes.

Hello! I am in Bali enjoying a holiday… lots of time here to think about everything. I changed my perspective on a few things.

Hello readers.

Wordpress 2.7 is great… the new backend completely eliminates my need of the lighter menus plugin. I still have been far too lazy/busy and havn’t updated the design/layout of this site. I need to spend a good amount of time poking around Wordpress’s codebase so I can know exactly what I’m doing.

I am also back at work, but only for 2 weeks. Then I’m off to Bali for 12 days, to relax a bit and just generally get up to some fun :). I can only hope this time I don’t crash a motorbike. My last trip (early last year) was quite eventful, but not always for things that I’d go through again!

Welcome 2009 and let’s make it a good year!

Alex Dickson

Hello there

Today is new year’s eve. This year has been alright… did a solid years work in a profession that I’m finally happy with, moved permanently out of home, got a new car etc. But of course, not everything runs smoothly forever. I’m hoping 2009 will be a better year for me. I’ve set a few personal and professional resolutions for myself and I think I can achieve them as I feel more determined than ever. I’m not going to let anyone get in the way of achieving these goals in 2009.

I’m also going to spend more time with my bass guitar, I feel it has been neglected recently because of a few distractions, namely Halo 3 on Xbox Live, drinking, girlfriend and my obsession with programming :P. I’m going to concentrate on things in 2009 that really matter to me.

Apart from this, I’ve just been trying to help some people on Stack Overflow, learn some more object orientated principles (to be used in the new year) and just further try and better myself as a human being.

See you in 2009.

Hi!

As you can see, I’ve had a bit of a site redesign. The image header and background are credited to Jean Paul of Acura Multimedia, and the stylesheet (while still pretty basic) is my own little concoction. I’m glad to have finally gotten around to a site redesign, the default one felt so bland and unprofessional.

This current design (at the time of writing) is still a work in progress, so expect it to  be spruced up a little more soon. I’m going to implement some of my jQuery tricks I think to bring a bit of movement to a page.

In other news, I’ve finally started reading Code Complete by Steve McConnell. It’s an amazing book so far, it doesn’t seem to be language specific, but more a guide on good programming.

In reguards to my last post, the DVI cable did in fact fix up my monitor and make it flicker free. I also played Halo 3 on Xbox 360 via the VGA port and it worked fine. Maybe my video card doesn’t like big screens!

My zCinema system is also alright. It doesn’t go too loud, which is a bit of a problem. At least I won’t have the neighbours knocking on my door. The faux surround sound is alright too, but as I thought, doesn’t quite match a good 5.1 setup. The subwoofer is also huge, with such a big foot print that it’s had to reside on a stand of it’s own.

I’ve also been involved with PHP5’s object orientation more than ever, and I think I am finally getting the hang of it. I am reading Object Orientated PHP by Peter Lavin. It covers PHP4 and 5’s implementation, and I can tell you I’m glad PHP5 has managed to get pretty good widespread installation.

I am also still considering writing my own shopping cart. The benefits of course are for my own learning, putting my recently aquired OO skills to the test, and it would also have great application at work. I always dread the thought of editing a brand new osCommerce installation. Wading through all that procedural crap and nested tables makes me queasy. C’mon, it’s 2008! Why are we still using osCommerce?

I’ve tried a few alternatives, but they have all seemed too bloated for a simple cart for a small business. Magento has, in it’s defence, some great programming in it. It uses the Zend framework, of which I have adopted (most of) it’s coding practises.

So that’s the end of another post, stay tuned for next time!

P.S. If you are an experienced PHP programmer, CSS guru or just think you could help me out with my cart project, drop me a line at alexia.w.y _at_ gmail {dot} com