Managing the CSS and JavaScript files of a website can be an extremely frustrating, but rewarding experience. I've been introducing tools at work to help manage this experience such as SASS, LESS, CoffeeScript, etc, with mixed results. By themselves, each of these tools do a great job, but how to I leverage their power together? Having fifteen JS and CSS includes in a site is still extremely inefficient. Chirpy is a tool that helps to bring all of this together in one plugin in Visual Studio...but I see a lot of people completely missing the most powerful feature of Chirpy: FileGroups.
Read MorejQuery and ASP UpdatePanel Integration
With my latest gig sending me back into the .NET world, I have been busy migrating quite a few of my tools and experience to play nice with ASP.NET sites. One of my favorite open-source tools that is gaining popularity in .NET is jQuery. For several years now, I have been using jQuery heavily to provide rich interaction on websites. When faced with the basic UpdatePanel in ASP.NET, I was presented with a challenge. I wanted a solution that would automatically call jQuery so that new content was properly parsed and updated. Read More
New Language Direction With Erlang
In my two most recent posts, Always Learning and Coders at Work, I talked about my personal and professional need to keep learning. My most recent addition to my development arsenal has been Python. Why I considered learning the language a success, I didn't really feel that it a significant amount of new materials and features. As a result, I have chosen to dive into the functional programming language Erlang.
Read MoreBook Review: Coders at Work
The book, Coders at Work was published at a very ideal time for me. I was pretty comfortable with my progress towards learning Python last year, and have been looking around for another language to start tooling around with on my computers. The book seemed like a good opportunity to get a peak into the minds of a select group of coders and see what they might have to say on the matter.
Read MorePosted in Always Learning Leave a comment
New Category: Always Learning
One of the most apparent aspects of both my professional and personal life is that I am always learning. As my friends and family can tell you, I constantly have my nose in something and am very eager to share what I just learned. As I have written about what I have learned here, I have realized that I have been holding back on something important: how do I choose what I want to learn next.
Read MorePosted in News & Events 1 Comment
Mako Authentication Required
I have been using my mod_python Mako handler for several months now in my personal projects. For the most part, I have been very happy with Mako and am finding it extremely useful. One issue I have had to wrap my head around has been the inability to halt template execution cleanly. A common practice in many a website has been to flush the current output buffer, display the required authentication information with a form or a redirect, and then end the request—making authentication required on a page of content.
Read MoreCustom Pages with WordPress Plugins
One of the more interesting challenges I have faced with WordPress is offering custom pages. These could be pages such taking a survey, asking a question, or suggesting a topic. Previously, I had gone about coding these kinds of pages by just sticking the php file in the web root. Read More
New Dish: Chili Lime Pork
After spending a good portion of the day with Chris and Xander out in the Chicago heat, I let them know that Dad would be taking care of dinner tonight. I remembered that we had a pork tenderloin roast in the freezer, so I got an idea. Little did I know just how good it would turn out!
Read MoreHijack the WordPress Media Gallery
I have a friend that wants to update a banner on his WordPress blog homepage without changing the template files. I tell him I'd be glad to help him out and start working on a plugin that provides a custom administration page to allow for this. As I am a firm believer in the power of a lazy coder to get things done faster and better, my first thought was: "Why don't I just see if I can hijack the 'Select Image From Gallery' page to do this?" Read More
Apache Optimization and NGINX
Once again, my WordPress friends had to hit me up for some help. These are the same friends that I helped with a Custom Field Search Plugin. They have been maintaining a community site, SuccessNet Online™, and an email mailing list of several hundred thousand participants for Business Networking International. Read More