July 27th, 2009
I’ve done this and I’ve seen it a lot online: complaining about a client, your job, or other circumstances involving people around you. It’s so easy to get on Twitter or Facebook and just type something quick. What about the consequences though?
You are posting in a public forum and if you work online like I do, is your work life really separated from your personal life? I suggest that online, there is no separation. In the same place that your friends can find out info or read your updates, so can your clients and your boss. Bitching about your clients to a friend in a public forum is a great way to burn bridges and cause issues at work.
This is a bit of a privacy thing too, not just a reputation management exercise. I’m not suggesting that you be fake online and present a polished image, but rather do you really need to share all aspects of your life with all people? Maybe it is a good idea to keep some things to yourself.
This is just something I’m thinking through so I welcome comments and discussion.
Tags: complaining, social media
Posted in Business | No Comments »
July 16th, 2009
I’m fascinated by the huge amount of discussion going on right now around HTML 5. Both John Allsop and Jeffrey Zeldman have written some interesting commentary in the last couple of days outlining what they believe is wrong with both the spec and the process involved in developing the spec. Most interesting to me is that a lot of the so called mess is a result from an open process. A lot of us who work with clients on a daily basis have had the experience of working with a client that makes design decisions by committee and the pain if it there isn’t a strong leader in place to guide the process. Sometimes even if you have a strong leader you can end producing a lower quality product or a partial solution.
The openness of the web has created an environment where anybody can make a website without having to go to university or accept a specific standard to follow. You can choose to follow a spec but you can also choose to make your website work only on specific browsers or to develop very very messy code that can still work. I think that this is good – it is an open medium to which anybody can potentially publish – and bad – it’s now impossible to start over developing a new one-standard-fits-all solution.
HTML 5 attempts to address the web as it is and I think that all of this discussion is great. Let’s get it out in the open and have thoughtful commentary from seasoned pros and from new developers. Let’s not forget though that there does need to be guidance and direction otherwise we will never see HTML 5 move beyond draft status.
Posted in Web Development | 1 Comment »
July 14th, 2009
Sometimes you have to work with legacy code and you don’t have the budget to refactor it to remove practices that are deprecated. magic_quotes_gpc was a setting that was turned on for a lot of PHP 4 installations but it is now no longer a best practice to have it on. If you aren’t sure what that is, it automatically adds slashes or quotes data that comes in to PHP via cookies or a GET or POST HTTP request.
The PHP website has a good method of stripping out those slashes if you are unable to turn off magic_quotes_gpc (http://ca3.php.net/manual/en/security.magicquotes.disabling.php). But what if you need it on to run your legacy code? Here is the inverse of the solution that is provided on the PHP website:
if (!get_magic_quotes_gpc()) {
function addslashes_deep($value)
{
$value = is_array($value) ?
array_map('addslashes_deep', $value) :
addslashes($value);
return $value;
}
$_POST = array_map('addslashes_deep', $_POST);
$_GET = array_map('addslashes_deep', $_GET);
$_COOKIE = array_map('addslashes_deep', $_COOKIE);
$_REQUEST = array_map('addslashes_deep', $_REQUEST);
}
Put that at the beginning of your script and it will add all of the slashes back in. Not ideal, but if you have no other option it will get you going again.
Tags: hacks, PHP
Posted in PHP, Web Development | No Comments »
June 30th, 2009
It has been almost a week now since I moved my office home and I’ve been slammed with work so I thought it might be good to write a few things that I’ve noticed this far.
- I work just as efficiently in my home office as I did in my old office. I was discussing this with my wife and I think this is partially because I worked so independently while I was in the shared office, and partly because she is home about to give birth in a few weeks — I’m motivated to keep working and bringing in a decent income when she is around.
- I work non-standard hours. I used to work from 8-5 at the office, but at home I get up and start working at 6am, work until 8:30, have breakfast and a shower, work until lunch, take a break for an hour, work until 4pm. Its a bit more of a split up day, but I like the flexibility. I’ve also been putting in time in the evenings, but only because I have a big deadline this week.
- I eat better. My office was in a location that had a lot of options for lunch. When I’m working from home I can spend a bit of extra time to make a healthy meal instead of eating out or eating a bag lunch. Even though I used to bring my lunch 3 out of 5 days a week, the lunches I make at home are still better and fresher.
Posted in Business | No Comments »
June 18th, 2009
Next Wednesday, my long time business partner, Wes Straub, and I are moving out of the office we have had on 17th Ave in Calgary, AB. We’ve been at that location for almost four years and during that time we’ve done some great work but have also made some business mistakes. We’ve tried going beyond our usual service offerings to try and start web hosting, we had a partnership that didn’t work out, and built relationships with people that were frustrating in the end. We didn’t go into business because it was easy, but because we like the challenge. After four years of having an office we’ve realized: we don’t need an office.
Here’s what it comes down to: we pay $2500 or so a month for a space to work. We meet with clients at the coffee shop or at their offices. We aren’t going to hire anybody else — we’ve found its much better to work with people on a contract basis. So… $2500 a month for a space to sit down in front of a computer and work. I can do that at home for no money. So next Wednesday we move out of the office and move into our home offices. We’ve made an arrangement with a company that provides virtual office services – phone answering, mail and fax services, and has a boardroom we can use when we need it. We didn’t even have those services at our one room office on 17th ave.
I’m going to write a few more posts about how I’m surviving working in my home office, and how it works with a newborn, if all goes well in a month or so. Good bye, office!
Tags: home office
Posted in Business | 2 Comments »
June 12th, 2009
This site is now running WordPress, pretty much the best blogging software out there, and so I thought it might be good to quickly write about the process and why I love working with it.
Installation
WordPress is fairly straight forward to install, provided you know how to create a database and change some permissions on your webserver. A typical install for me goes like this:
- Create a Database and User – Login to MySQL and add a new db, and create a user that has access only to this table. This is important because I do have some other sites running on my server. Although you could do this from the command line, I often find it faster to just load up Navicat for MySQL.
- Download the wordpress archive. You can download this from your browser or ssh in to your server and type:
- wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
- tar -zxvf latest.tar.gz, and move the files to the right place.
- Load up the site in my browser and fill in the details. I also always change the password that is assigned to you. I have no idea why it assigns you one instead of asking for an admin password.
Theming
Theming WP is really easy. I take the design, usually a PSD, slice it up and write HTML as if I was doing a static page. Next I duplicate the default theme and rename the folder. I drop in my CSS and my images, and edit the header and footer files. That’s pretty much it. You can write the HTML how you want, but I find it easiest to stick to the default theme’s structure: #header, #footer, #sidebar, and #content divs.
Using WP
WP’s admin makes extensive use of AJAX which makes the interface snappy. They’ve really done great job working on the layout and design of the admin. It’s really simple to start using and very powerful once you get into the more advanced details.
Tags: Web Development, wordpress
Posted in Web Development | 1 Comment »
June 12th, 2009
If you spend a lot of time on the Internet reading up on web technologies you likely have come across the term AJAX. While you might be thinking this might just be the domain of indie web apps and social media sites such as Facebook, there are a lot of good reasons to look at implementing the technology on corporate, sales, customer service and other client facing websites.
Read more over at Inspire Studios…
Tags: ajax, Web Development
Posted in Web Development | No Comments »
