2010 – My Year in a blog post

2009 was a year of 2 halves. The first half of the year was hectic, disorganised and I would very much like those 6 months back. The second half of the year was brilliant. I am determined to ensure that 2010 follows on from how 2009 finished off. This post covers some of my goals for 2010. As with last year these goals are all achievable and are all on-going throughout the year.

Before setting goals I think it is important to ask why I am doing it. The new year is a great marker, its an opportunity to draw a line in the sand, reflect on the previous year and give your life a kick in a slightly different direction. Time flies and it is easy to get consumed by the small day to day emergencies and lose sight of the big picture. Each new year I zoom out slightly, survey the landscape ahead and think about the following 3 questions.

1. Am I happy where I am now or is there somewhere I would rather be?
2. Is there anything that I should be doing but am not?
3. Is there anything that I would like to achieve this year which I need to plan for.

The answers to these questions usually define my goals. These goals then become things that I try to tackle throughout the year. These are the things I have come up with. (All goals are techie based, I have separate personal goals such as go to a music festival, sky dive and perhaps finally propose to my girlfriend on a separate list.)

Release Software:

In Q1 of this year I would like to release some software. I have been working on a framework for a little while now and I would like to make this freely available. It is easy to extend and a great starting point for small projects or for people looking to build their own. It is reaching the point where I am building a website with it, locating niggles, adding missing functionality and rewriting core code every other day.

I simply feel it is time that my name went on something open source and freely available. I feel that late Q1 / early Q2 is a realistic and achievable release date.

Publish Blog Posts on other websites:

This was a goal in the final part of 2009 but I didn’t get round to it. In 2010 I am setting the rather lofty goal of writing 12 posts. That is one a month. I do not expect this to be difficult, it simply requires a small amount of organisation to find time to work on these posts. These posts should be a step toward defining myself as knowledgeable in certain web related fields.

Redo Stanley Web Design

Stanley Web Design is nice but it is a year old and has a few small things which are bugging me. I will be creating something simple which better carries the brand message and is easier to extend than my current website. I hope to have this launched in the first half of the year. I plan to build the website with the framework mentioned above. With these working in tandem I expect them both to be completed around the same time.

Improve my blog

I do not mind if someone reads what I write or not. I blog so I can keep a written record of what I was doing or thinking about at a specific time. In a few years time I can then look back and see what I was up to work wise at the time.

This said I want to improve the design, coding standards and javascript magic on the website. I feel that I can still improve the readability and aesthetic look of the website and this is what I hope to do. I also plan to post more.

Learning

The world of technology moves forward so quickly. It is important to keep up and this year I have set 3 goals to stay on top of things.

Goal 1 is to take my PHP skills up a notch. I am very good with PHP but there are still things that I am not great on. Things like SOAP, working with images and getting to grips with some of the PHP5 features are all things I could  and will work on.

Goal 2 is to further my JavaScript and Ajax skills. I know enough to use JQuery well and can edit almost any level of JS. However, I would like to write better JS and better understand AJAX. This will be the year it happens.

Goal 3 is to do with PDO, Doctrine and Security. I will be covering these in later blog posts.

Photography / Art

I have a £700 camera which is gathering dust. I have a numerous ‘unsketched’ sketch pads. 2010 will be the year I finally learn what the buttons do on my camera and take some pictures. I am looking to take a picture a day and sketch something once a week. To ensure this is achieved, an event will be added to iCal. This I hope will help fuel my creativity and pull me away from my TV and xbox in my free time.

That is about it. These goals will punt my life a few degrees to the left and push me more towards being an expert than a jack of all trades. If you would like to comment on my goals or add your own, as always, feel free.

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Personal Projects

In my opinion for a developer there are few things that are more important than working on personal projects. Personal projects typically do not matter whether they succeed or fail. They give you an opportunity to go in your own direction and perhaps most importantly, experiment with new technologies you would otherwise not use.

While many of my personal projects never see the light of day, – This is something I would like to rectify – I certainly enjoy doing them. Where client work can be stressful and limiting, personal projects can be liberating and help a developer re-find some lost inspiration.

My Personal Design Projects

I have 2 examples. This website and WordPress SOS. I own both, to be honest, for the better part of a year both sites have been somewhat inactive. I decided both needed a face lift. I located 2 old designs which I made years ago and had a race against the clock to convert them into WordPress templates. I set aside an hour for each website.

This website was sliced and erected in just under an hour. It isn’t perfect, comments especially look acceptable but under styled. I am sure that some browsers may look a little rough. This all said it was fun. I wrote the vast majority of the stylesheet without testing until the very end. Then, with minutes left, I touched up the numerous little issues. I even had a few people watching me do it which was interesting and they gave feedback throughout. A client would have never OKed this work, especially not on a live website. However, this is a personal project and I wanted to see what I could do.

WordPress SOS did not fair as well, I ran into some issues. (I lost the admin account) and the result was that the fresh install ate up about 25 minutes of my design time. The result of this is a header! More is styled but it certainly isn’t ready to be displayed. If I did this with a client site I am fairly sure I would get a slap. As a personal project though it is an interesting experiment.

My Development Project

I am a CodeIgniter developer, I have been for years. I know it pretty much inside out and I enjoy using it. However, I used it for so long that the boring parts of coding that it protects me from have become a little interesting. Things like database abstraction layers, validation classes which I haven’t written in ages interest me. As a result I have started messing around with my own framework. Will it ever be released? NO! Will it ever be used on a live site? I REALLY DOUBT IT!

However, while it is in mind a dead end project, it is also making me a better developer. I am looking more into the architecture of applications. – Something that I haven’t done in a while – I am playing around with namespaces and inheritance and seeing what I come up with. Client work would never let me do this. However, in my own time, its interesting and somewhat freeing. What I learn in this project will no doubt be used in part on future projects.

My Client Management Application

Something that I have been wanting to have for a while now is a client management application. The features of the application are as follows.

• Clients can register
• Clients can view on going projects
• Clients can request a quote
• Clients can view milestones
• Clients can download finished work at any time
• Clients have a standarized way of messaging me

While I know that there are applications around that can do this and much more. I have been unconvinced or disappointed with either what they do or the way they do it. I plan to come up with something and either release it as open source or charge a nominal one off fee.

As for what I will use to build it. I keep jumping around. First of all I was going to use CodeIgniter, then I was going to use the framework mentioned above. Now I think I will use Solar. While it is still in alpha it looks very interesting and I always enjoy playing with new tools. I will also be writing about my experience’s with Solar as I go so stayed tuned.

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And I’m Back!

After a prolonged period of inactivity and offline-iness (not quite a word but ill rolll with it), I am back. 

Why was the site offline for a month?

1and1 got in touch to tell me that my hosting account was close to expiring, thus I decided to jump ship, I backed up all my sites and databases. Moved my domains and reuploaded everything, all in a single afternoon. At the end of the afternoon I had stanley web design back up and running but I simply had no time to get my blog up. Then as days passed and client work mounted I simply had no time. Days became weeks and weeks became a month.

Then today came and I had a few hours free. This time was put to good use setting up my blog.

What have you been up to?

Firstly, I got into twitter, you can take a peek at what I am to here. My Mac broke down (again) and was promptly repaired. This time everything was backed up via dropbox meaning that all I had to do was install drop box and sync up. The great thing about a computer breaking down is that when you get it back up again its all fresh and new. This time round I am actually doing hourly house keeping. Everything is so organised and well stacked, its just awesome really. We shall see how long I can keep this up.

My CMS for stanley web design is almost finished. The next stage in my CMS is to then port it to this site. WordPress is great, however, I don’t really use many of its features and my CMS can do what I need it to. It also gives me a little more flexibility and allows me to further develop my CMS platform.

I am sure I did a lot of other things in the past month but meh… most are unrelated to the web which this blog is essentially about.

I will be back to my blogging ways from next week and you can expect some ‘proper’ posts being churned out soon.

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Vanilla Installation Bug + Fix

I was installing Vanilla on my dev environment today and had a little bit of trouble. As the Vanilla community requires staff authentication ‘with no guarentee of being approved’ I thought that I would just post it here. The following post contains a description of the bug as well as how to fix it.

I believe this only effects databases with no passwords on them.

The Bug

The bug is that when you install vanilla on a database with no password, no password configuration variable is set. This means that when the database class attempts to connect to the database it can’t because it isn’t passing the empty password string.

Is this the bug affecting me?

If you have a database without a password, the installation has successfully added the tables to your database and you are getting a database connection error when you fire up the board then its probably this bug.

How to Fix it?

Open up Vanilla/conf/database.php

Add the following line.

$Configuration['DATABASE_PASSWORD'] = '';

This will set the password configuration variable and everything will work perfectly.

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