A Thousand Words

I’m anxious to get back to my web studies, but the t-shirt catalog/website project is still taking up most of my time. With what spare time I do have, I’ve been doing Flash and Blender tutorials.

I’ve been helping to develop a new line of rugby t-shirts. The project is huge;– almost half a dozen catagories. It’s starting to gel. Were into the presentation phase (web and print), so, study-wise, I might have more time to devote.

I did consolidate my web sites into one “glob”. I’m publishing several WordPress blogs under one portal (as GeekLog “folders”).

I updated the Hampton website and I think the gallery intergation looks good. Professional, if i do say so myself.

I started web tinkering cold, about two years back, and I swear I still don’t know what I’m doing. I just blunder along. There are still big gaps in my knowledge. I feel foolish in forums. My noobie sticks out like a sore thumb.

I just gotta stay cool and focused. I use to think I’d have a handle on this stuff in a just couple of years, but now I’m thinking a couple more at least. The big thing slowing me down is the coding.

I’ve got to get my mind ’round php. Back in August I took a lot of steps in that direction, but then got bogged down in other projects. I see now I was pushing learning php to the back of my to do list everytime, for almost two months now.

In my old post about php, I mentioned using special characters to show code in a blog. I just learned WP makes a plugin for that.

The last month has been hectic! I’ve been putting extra time at work, and extra is the key word. Not much time for teaching myself about the internets. Also, I ran into some trouble with some of my other projects. I think I was overloading my ISP account by having so many different CMS’s running at the same time, so I’ve thinned things out a bit. I decided to drop the new joomla install and the dream journal, which was a page design that had a WordPress blog embedded within it. And, regrettably, I lost my McGuffin Reader news project while tying to do an upgrade (that’s when I started thinking I was overloading my account).

Over at my original site, masonoller.com/blog, I also ran into trouble while performing an upgrade to one of the GeekLog plugins (MediaGallery). Long story short, I scrapped everything an started fresh with a new improved version of GeekLog and all latest versions of the plugins. I even added some new ones, including a forum and a file management system.

I will really miss the McGuffin Reader. I had spent a lot of time loading that site with RSS feeds. I still plan to install a Joomla site (for learning how to create my own themes).

I think I’m caught up enough on all my work, that I can now focus some proper time on Hampton Equipment. Last month, I installed Gallery2, which I think will more aptly serve the client’s needs. I just need to uninstall the embedded Ice Gallery (that only worked properly when first installed and hasn’t since).

A couple of weeks ago, I finalized my Second Life® blog. But, with the recent changes, I will need to update some of the links. I don’t know if I mentioned this before or not, but the blog is very small in size, so that It can be viewed within my Second Life® profile window.

Drupal didn’t last long. They have really come a long way, though. So fast and light;– I would reccommend it to anyone who wants to start their own business website or blog. But, it’s not what I’m looking for. Version 6.4 is the release offered by my ISP, but it’s so new that there are very few projects that support it. I found tons of blocks and plugins for v5.x but not very many for v6.

I also tried out phpwebsite. I found it to be very fast and stable, but many of the modules for it were dated 2005. I couldn’t find much current activity surrounding it. I’m looking for something that takes advantange of the newer javascript libraries so as to present a variety of media.

I even took a fresh look at Geeklog, the CMS I’ve been using on my blog for the last two years. But my ISP doesn’t offer v1.5 which looks really good compared to v1.4. My blog is very sleek and I can offer images, video and mp3s there, but it’s not easy to alter the look. It took me a long time to get it looking the way does right now. And, while I like the nononsense look of it, I’m afraid it’s not impressive design-wise. Right now, I’m looking to create sites that have a “wow factor” as part of my resume.

Looks like there has been a split over at Geeklog, too. The new branch is called glfusion. They look much more user friendly and offer a really cool user controlled template system that allows you easily change the look of your site, but I don’t know enough php to download apps and install them myself. I wish I did, because there are some others I would like to test drive that are not offered by my ISP.

All the CMSs that I experiment with our installed and uninstalled using an application called Fantastico that is part of the service my ISP offers. I once deleted a CMS manually and lost my site, and had to call support to get it back. They told me I must always use Fantastico. I’m sure it writes to my config files (a kind of auto-setup thing). To manually install and uninstall php applications, I first need to learn how to configure those files myself. But, right now I’m clueless about such things. But, I won’t always be.

Long story short, I re-installed Joomla, but without the blank template. I decided to start with a readymade template and learn from there to create my own templates. The average cost of custom templates is about forty dollars. If I can create some popular templates that would make for some nice pocket money.

After struggling all weekend trying to fix a text overflow problem with the blank Joomla template, I decided to tear it out and a try new CMS;– Drupal. The “New Home Page” link still takes you to the site. I tried to use Drupal two years ago when I first started messing about with CMS, and found it to be even more geeky than Mambo. Since then, it has really come a long way. It’s a lot easier to use now, and it offers quite a few new features including a built in forum. I spent a little time configuring the basics. Sometime this week I’m going to try skinning it with my brown bag idea.

I just checked out the site and the slide show for the image gallery is not working. No wonder the customer hasn’t been using it. I’m afraid I’m going to have to rebuild that site by hand (using GoLive), or by installing Joomla.

I just can’t seemed to find any projects that support Mambo anymore. Looks like Joomla has won the war. Joomla split from Mambo about three years ago, and it looks like most of the development community went with them.

I reread the Joomla template tutorial. It was a little easier this time through, but I still need to work through it some more. That’s just the way I am. I find I have a fairly good memory once I learn something, but the learning part has always been difficult for me.

Php is a good example. Man, have I been struggling with that! I have my virtual sever set up, and I have been writing simple scripts. So far, I can create a form and use an “action” script to echo (that is, print) the input (in this case, my name and age) into a page once the submit button is clicked. Pretty cool.

While researching joomla templates, I stumbled upon a “blank” template. I installed it on my website. UPDATE: Sept 6, 2008. I was looking on the forums for how to edit something in this template, and I found the original source for it. The most current version (1.3) can be downloaded from Bulletproof Templates. You need to register to the forum in order to download the template. They offer a tableless version and a standard tables version.

Using the Firefox Web Developer plug-in to identify the CSS divs, I was able to add a background to the template. The background is part of a new theme I’m developing in Photoshop. I think I’ll call it “brown bag”. It looks like an old grocery sack with coffee rings, stains and faded writing.

I found the rings, stains and old writing on a Photoshop brush site called brusheezy.com They have many sets of brushes there. Many are free to use however you wish, while others have an attribution request, and still others are purely demo versions and state clearly that they can’t be used without permission. So, if you want to use them in your own creations, be sure to read carefully and choose accordingly. There are also free samples from people who make brush sets to sell.

I downloaded some of the “free to use however I want” versions and a couple of the free professional samples. In addition to the rings and stains, I also downloaded some trendy floral and grunge brushes and used them to design some t-shirts for my boss. He’s been after me to make some trendy designs, and these brushes are an easy way to do them.

I think I will use my new Joomla installation as my main home page while I study how to “skin” a Joomla site. With that in mind, I decided to add some extensions which will add functionality to my site;– displaying images, music and video. While researching this, I came across something called Mootools for Joomla. Mootools, as I was to learn, is a Javascript library.

Libraries are a collection of scripts in a single file. They are also called “frameworks”. Some of the most notable are JQuery, Mootools, Dojo and Prototype. Prototype is one of the first and is found in a lot of older well established websites. Some sites use a combination of libraries, but it’s best to use just one, if possible, and so avoid potential conflicts. Dojo is among the newest and is very lean and fast. The most common and widely used is jQuery.

During my reading on the subject, I tried to answer the questions: Do I need to know Javascript to use libraries? And, which library should I learn? The consensus is jQuery is the one to learn and while you don’t need to know Javascript in order to use it, you should have a fundamental understanding of it. My research suggests that it’s good to know some simple Javascript so you can quickly insert it in a document as needed, and when there’s a proper need, instead of struggling with long and complicated scripts, using libraries will save you valuable time.

So it looks like I’ll be learning and using jQuery on my hand-coded projects, and Motools on my Joomla installation. They have jQuery extensions for Joomla, but they were all commercial products. Whereas, the Mootools Library for Joomla is a non-commercial (free) extension.

Also recently, I downloaded and completed a tutorial called, “How To Build A WordPress Theme From Scratch”. A PDF file written by Small Potato of Wpdesigner.com. I was going to link to it, but I can’t find where I got it. I don’t think I got it from wpdesigner.com (it was posted somewhere else). The site link is good. It looks like they recenty changed hands. Anyways, the tutorial’s main focus is laying out the default WordPress theme in Photoshop. As the author states in the tutorial, the exercise is not necessary for creating a theme, but doing it will give you a very clear understanding of the default layout.

And, it does. Also, after you finish the tutorial, you have a Photoshop template that can be used to easily skin the default layout. The default layout is a narrow header, a main column left, with two side bars on the right hand side of the page. The tutorial is 17 pages, goes step by step, and assumes you don’t know how to use Photoshop or Gimp. There are some misspellings, but overall it’s pretty good.

If you’re not using FireFox, I strongly encourage you try it. It’s plug-in architecture is flat out amazing. I recently installed a cool plug-in called Web Developer. It adds a tool bar to FireFox that allows you to really investigate the web pages you’re viewing. For instance, turn on “block size” to see all the CSS blocks in a page and the dimensions of each:

Pretty cool, huh?

PHP is a server side scripting language used to create and edit MySQL databases. Using PHP, you can store data from client side forms and retrieve it. To learn it, you need access to a network server or an ISP. PHP documents are created with code editors like BBEdit or HTML editors like Dreamweaver, published to a server and then read with a browser. In my case, I use GoLive CS, the next to last version before Adobe adopted Macromedia’s Dreamweaver.

An alternative to using a network server or ISP, is to create an offline localhost (often called a developer’s environment) by installing Apache, MySQL and PHP on a personal computer.

Luckily for Apple users, there’s a easy way to do this on a Mac;– MAMP (short for Macintosh, Apache, MySQL and PHP) is a free download from living-e. Just drag and drop to install. MAMP PRO is a configuration tool for MAMP used to create virtual hosts that can emulate ISPs, including the ability to publish sites and manage mail. I tried it (it has a two week trial period), but I couldn’t get it to parse any PHP. Don’t ask me why. If I had to guess, I’d say it doesn’t play well with the version of Apache that comes standard with the Mac. (Although advertised as able to run without interfering with the built-in Apache, living-e recommends turning it off when using MAMP Pro).

As a telecommuter, I use the built-in Apache to publish a website used by an office upstate. I installed it about three years ago, and naturally I don’t remember how I did it. Rather than read up on how to turn it on and off I decided to try MAMP without using the configuration tool, and viola, it works! If I ever decide I need to, I’ll figure out how to turn the built-in Apache off. Or, if possible, test my mail scripts on the sever that hosts my websites.

Now set up with a “developer environment”, I went back to W3schools and started learning PHP. Here is my version of the first two or three lessons. Remember when I wrote about HTML entities in My First Javascript? Well, I wondered if there was an easier way;– instead changing each character by hand, or even having to do a search and replace in an editor. I Googled “convert characters to HTML entities” and found this super cool utility.

So, without further ado, here’s my first PHP script.

Here’s what the file looks like when retrieved with a browser. Pretty cool, huh?

Hi, my name is Mason Oller.

This text is a string variable. In php, a variable does not need to be declared before being set. A variable is declared automatically when you use it.

11 is the string length of my name. Notice it is not 10. Because the string length includes the space between my first and last name.

6 is the string position of my last name. Notice it is not 7. That’s because string positions begin with 0 (zero).

Have a nice weekend!