I recently launched a simple, clean website that showcases MSK’s interior design work. The site combines jQuery SerialScroll by Ariel Flesler with jQueryUI library for the image scrolling.
MSK Home Page
New Website: MSK Design Group
December 16th, 2009Sitemaps
August 24th, 2009Some useful tools for intermediate-level LAMP developers: A compilation of sitemap generaters on google code, along with platform/language and cost.
I started testing Simple Sitemaps — a free PHP script that generates sitemap in XML, RSS, and based on a txt file. So you can use PHP to generate the txt file and call the PHP script to generate everything in one shot. Obviously if you can generate such .txt file you may as well jump right to creating the sitemap, but why reinvent the wheel? The advantage of using .txt to generate sitemap seems to be that the process of gathering site data can run by a different scripting language than the one that generated it.
I tweaked around with it to generate this HTML sitemap for my site. This is purely optional for a small site like mine, but it was a good exercise anyway. The package out of the box generates a php file (from the main PHP script) that simply ouptuts the RSS, which seems superflous. Changing the PHP code to output an XML file is easy.
Seems to be a good addition to my home-made CMS.
Two New Websites! - CFD27.com and MichaelBocian.com
July 31st, 2009This week I launched two websites.
First is www.cfd27.com, a silk floral store in the Chelsea district of NYC. This site went through quite a few iterations of change in design and content. It was my first project in delivering a site with customizable color-theme, which is a great idea considering the color palette of a floral store changes by the season. Unlike my previous project, this one had no issue with servers because the client signed up with the hosting service that I recommended (and one that I use), hostmysite.com. Also to be thanked is the creator of lightbox2 Lokesh Dhakar for the nifty javascript in displaying images. I was more than happy to donate a small sum for having used it in this project.
CFD27 Home Page
The second project, just launched today, is an amazing jazz guitarist Michael Bocian’s website: www.michaelbocian.com. Although I’m the least qualified person to comment on musical taste, I know great music when I hear one, so to make Michael’s website was quite a joy. Plus, I learned a thing or two about MP3s, as well as how to collaborate closely with a creative man.
Michael Bocian's Official Website
Playing off the guitar theme, the strings light up as you hover over the menu items on the left. I struggled to find an elegant solution to extending the strings to the bottom of the window. It works great in Firefox, but in IE I had to use a kludge in the end. The advantage of using well-formed HTML & CSS, as in this case, is that it works even in Safari 1.3!
Web Development Writing
July 16th, 2009Whoa, I must have been on hiatus from the webdev world too long… Digital Web Magazine closed its doors back in March and I just found out. Even though it’s sad to see a quality site go, I suppose keeping up such a site without a steady source of revenue run by volunteers is a difficult proposition. I really hope that AListApart doesn’t do the same. These sites don’t offer in-depth coverage of any certain topic or the detail how-to of the latest trend; instead the articles tend to be generalized, with broad strokes, aimed to argue the finer points about web development and offer a broader perspective. Quality writing in web development is hard to come by, as most websites simply offer up chunks of code without any consideration to best practices. Most of the latest information is mired in discussion forums that is too difficult to decipher unless you’re actively involved in the thread. (I recently tried to make sense of this forum but gave up half way.) I suppose this is good for book selling… except that books are not as user-friendly when it comes to programming.
Other sites I find helpful are evolt and sitepoint. All these sites have too many awesome contributors who also run their own sites with tons of information, but with increasing amount of info, organization like this is sorely needed.
New site launched - AENA
June 26th, 2009A project of mine launched today: www.aenac.com. It was in collaboration with Adelheid at CZA Design. She does the design, I do the coding.
A Page from AENA
We had quite a difficult time with the client’s hosting service. The original hosting company ran PHP4 by default, which was okay because you can let it run PHP5 by using .htaccess file. Also their idea of preventing directory listing was to put a blank index.htm file into every directory… that’s just wrongheaded. The biggest problem was that MySQLi was not supported, so I gave the client an option of editing my code, but they found a new hosting company. With the new one, something was screwy with the FTP connection, which kept dropping connection on me. After providing them log files, screenshots, etc, the support gave me the following ultimatum:
It might be the issue with the network connection which you have used. Hence, I suggest that you to try to use different network connection and try to connect the FTP in different computer.
Also, please make sure to disable the firewall connection and disable the antivirus and try to upload the files again from your end. Please let me know if the issue persists.
Hmm, if I have no problem connecting to 5 other hosting services, why would this be my problem? Why would I ever want to disable my firewall and antivirus? Thankfully they had a decent file manager through their control panel, so the problem was averted, but using FTP is so much easier.
I always recommend my hosting company Hostmysite.com even though I get no kickbacks from them (unlike people who recommend DreamHost…) and it’s not the cheapest service around. Their support is awesome – a real person picks up the phone when you call support! No navigating through the maze of phone system. It’s a cliche but so true — you get what you pay for.
Anyway, enough of my gripe. In the end it worked out; glad to have it live.
New Look for the Site
June 15th, 2009Finally I finished updating my own site after letting it languish for over a year. Still need to update some of the links, but this is a big step. Plus I’m happy to have started the web development blog.
Here are the old layouts:
Original Home Page
Original Portfolio Page
The new look is cleaner on the eye, and the non-functional home page is replaced by the portfolio page. The downside is that it lost the elastic-width layout, but from my experience so far, I’m not sure if flexible width is all that great.
New Layout
Synching for Firefox browser users
January 29th, 2010A piece of good news for owners of multiple computers (who doesn’t these days?) and have resorted to Google Bookmark (or given up bookmarks all together?) because of synching problem. I haven’t found a good alternative to Google Bookmark, which is not a stellar product either but so far the best solution to across-browser/across-computer synching problem. If you use the web on your mobile heavily, Google Bookmarks is particularly a bad solution.
Firefox Weave lets you synch them and other settings in a breeze. Read about Weave Sync on Mozilla website. You can also read more about a nice overview of the ins/outs of Weave on Webmonkey’s blog.
As for add-on synching, it almost sounds like a dangerous idea if it installs new add-ons for you onto your computers, instead of merely upkeeping settings and versions… but I’m sure they’ll figure it out.
I’ve been working on a brand new website for an artist. It’s almost done and I’m looking forward to launching it.
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