After a week of sporadic work, and a long haul today, I’m proud to announce the launching of the new and improved Coraloo website. The website now runs off of WordPress (Blegh.) and was designed by yours truly.
After a week of sporadic work, and a long haul today, I’m proud to announce the launching of the new and improved Coraloo website. The website now runs off of WordPress (Blegh.) and was designed by yours truly.
Since summer has been winding down, I thought I’d do a recap of it and discuss some objectives for the future. The most important thing is the recent launch of Fuzzco’s website. I have been interning at Fuzzco over the summer, and it has honestly been a blast. Their new website is the first that has not been done in Flash; which is a major milestone in my opinion. As the school year starts up again, I hope to continue development work on Constrictor (Which hasn’t gotten enough attention), as well as launch Mason in the next few weeks.
I’m just going to go out an admit it. I do all of my photography on a three-year-old cheapo Kodak EasyShare camera. I use this example as the preface for a thesis: that the best tools do not make the best results. I’m reminded of the times of fanboyism in which people would proudly brand “Made on a Mac” or “Hosted on (mt) MediaTemple” at the footer of their sites. However, the sites themselves were a cesspool of poor design and despicable coding. This assumption of one tool guaranteeing a certain result is sadly still evident. Define your creation by it’s content, design, and functionality, not by the tools it utilized. It’s possible to make a beautiful web site in Notepad, TextEdit, or nano; and while Espresso or Coda may make the coding easier, it doesn’t mean their can be any less of an attention detail.
I want to take a quick look at the role the Request object will play in the overall grand scheme of Constrictor. As its name defines, the Request represents the entire request, from start to finish. This means that it will both handle the request and serve as the way for controller methods to access headers and sent data back to the client. While this sort of lumping is what drove me away from Rails (Putting both querying and result data in the same Model class.), I feel that, in this case, designing everything under the same system will make the Request be a unifying hub for all of the information instead of a convoluted, inelegant solution that Rails’ Models turned out to be. However, I will be constantly evaluating how the Request class performs, and, if necessary, will be placing the actual handling of a request back under the roof of the main Constrictor class.
Well, I haven’t used CodeIgniter since about version 1.5, and it’s been an experience catching up with some of the changes that EllisLab has made. Thankfully, the corporate nature of CodeIgniter means that all of the changes have been thoroughly evaluated, documented, and tested; meaning that re-familiarizing with the framework was a pretty painless process. One thing that I felt I must note is the new and improved form_validation library, which has made CRUD systems a bit easier, though they’re still a pain in the ass to implement, whether you’re in CodeIgniter, Rails, or any other framework. Another thing to note is the fact that it is still fairly fun to do stuff in CI, though Rails is a little bit easier, the more down-to-earth construction of CI is quite refreshing.
I also wanted to revisit a point I made a few sentences up concerning CRUD systems in frameworks. This is a critical feature that I wish to address in Constrictor, and I am currently writing up two detailed posts about both CRUD systems and the (planned) growing importance of the Request object in acting as a middleman between the Constrictor core, controllers, and the server system, allowing for the development of third-party servers as soon as possible. The development is still on track for an alpha release within the next month, though I am planning for a one-week no-Internet retreat in about five weeks to focus on my creative side and hopefully put together some massive documentation of current and upcoming Constrictor features.
Well, I thought I’d sit down and write up a short update on Constrictor and where it’s headed. I’m currently working on tying all the disparate parts together with aims for a solid pre-alpha release in the coming weeks. After that it’s going to be chugging away pushing more and more functionality on, as well as cleaning up existing code and building the templating system. My current object is an alpha release of Constrictor within the next three months.
If you’re interested in helping out, feel free to shoot me an email and I’m sure we can work something out.
Now, I’ve read story upon story concerning the DiggBar. Bloggers have been attacking it, Digg has been defending it, and just a few people have taken the time to truly think about its true meaning. Ted points out some important facts and explanations about the reasoning behind the DiggBar (You really should take the time to read his article). And, while bloggers should be angry that Digg is pulling this kind of “sleazy shit,” that doesn’t mean that the kind of ultra-negative response is warranted. You can’t forget that Digg does control a large number of readers and has the capability to drive a massive amount of traffic towards your blog, so an intense, anti-Digg reaction may not be proper.
The DiggBar has made it obvious that Digg is feeling the heat to deliver, and in tough times like these, childish bickering on both sides is counterproductive to the best interests of both parties. Instead, I propose that bloggers and other content producers work on meeting Digg in the middle. Digg has shown that to they need to maintain the readership and involvement of their users, and bloggers often rely on the readership that sites like Digg can bring to them. I guess, in a sense, that I’m asking for Digg to realize the mistakes they’ve made, and work with bloggers to find a solution to this. Bloggers, in return, need to realize that Digg is facing difficulties and work with Digg to help Digg help them.
A possible solution would be to have Digg act more like a true URL shortening service. This means providing actual 301 redirects and being more SEO-friendly. I happen to remember Digg saying that the ‘Bar was for their users. So why not target the DiggBar to the actual Digg users and let everyone else browse in bliss? The current heavy handed tactics of imposing the DiggBar on everyone make me think of the massive corporations with little experience with the Internet and who are accustomed to running roughshod over customers. Digg needs to clean up their act and begin working both sides of their profit aisle, target the DiggBar towards actual Digg users, while allowing everyone else to enjoy the handy URL-shortening service without being forced to bust out of frames.
I’ve been nurturing an addiction to two games recently, both of which are improvements on an already developed concept. What I find most interesting in this is why I’ve been addicted to them instead of more groundbreaking games. One of those games is my favorite game of all time, and the only game to get top scores in every single one of my primary rating categories. Gears of War 2 (Henceforth referred to as Gears) takes the spot above all other games, and a bit below it is Warhammer Online. (I hope some astute reader has realized that both titles have “war” in them.)
Read more…
Some of you may have noticed a mention of something called Constrictor on the home page. And I would like to quickly go over exactly what Constrictor is and what my aims are with it. Constrictor is a high-performance Python web-development framework centered around speed and simplicity. However, “simplicity” can be interpreted many ways; in this case, the simplicity implies code that will be fairly basic, not arcane, and extremely easy to understand. In most cases, any sort of “magic” that is so familiar in Ruby will be eschewed in favor of logical, heavily documented systems and standards of development.
Read more…
Well, after two days of delays, I’ve finally managed to get the next redesign online. Originally, I was going to use ExpressionEngine, but some problems arose with their templating system; following that annoyance and a bit of mild curses, I ended up settling down with a local copy of WordPress last night and started a bit of hacking. Less than a day later and the design has been successfully templatized and is now live. Eventually, I will hopefully release this as a free WordPress theme if enough people contact me.
As of now I have disable commenting since I have discovered that it rarely provides to be that useful. Instead, feel free to contact me using the link in the header or @reply on Twitter. I’m currently working on a post about a user-interaction concept that I will be publishing tomorrow.
