mysiteonline™

I've updated the plugin version to the most recent core files (from somewhere of like August 2007...oops). If you don't wish to download the files using Spartacus, you can manually install the files by downloading them here

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

Those of you looking towards "widgets" and cross-platform application development, but are primarily web developers with some background (or none) of programming with a desktop application, perhaps you should take a look at Adobe AIR (formerly known as Apollo). It allows you to create rich, cross-platform applications using just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript! ...and, technically, I suppose you could leave out the CSS and JS part of that and it would still run...but what's the fun in that? It can be integrated into a Flash application, or a Flex application - but it does not have to be.

If you're seemingly interested in the technology, I went through and found some interesting links on the subject (read: tutorials) that will hopefully help to get you (me) started. Okay...so I did it because I'm interested and this blog can serve as an access point for me rather than using my Bookmarks as a temporary storage medium. Whatever. I was looking for simple tutorials, so I ignored anything with an "adobe.com" or "ibm.com" (developer works) domain, so if you'd like more when you dive head first, you might want to look to those resources instead of the ones I've provided below.

1. Pete Freitag - newest one (by published date) that I could find
2. NOT A TUTORIAL - Get the AIR SDK here
3. Jonothan Snook on 2007's 24 Ways: Christmas is in the AIR - a simple to-do list tutorial
4. AOL Developer Network - Part 1 of a Series - Simple "Hello World" type page with a self-signed certificate
5. Jonathan Snook (again) releases Snoto Foto source code to help you learn! - No tutorial, but I'd imagine it's commented well

Enjoy! I hope I will!

Update: Make sure you've updated to the latest Sun Java JRE package or you might get some really, really odd and weird undocumented errors when trying to compile!

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

Well it's about time, the site is now live! As I've said in a previous post about this, it's not complete - all the content (sans images...which was almost all clipart) is directly from the old version of the site, just rearranged.

Put in use to this design are some rather obnoxiously tricky CSS tweaks along with JavaScript, Flash, and RSS feeds all pulled together to create a single site.

JavaScript:
sIFR
Dustin Diaz's SweetTitles (tooltips)
Homebrew DL list FAQ
NiftyCube
AmberJack Tour Script (temporarily)
...and some other various stuff...

CSS:
Tripoli CSS "Framework"
Stuart Landridge's Image Replacement Technique

Flash:
Monoslideshow ($20 purchase, site license)
sIFR

...and lots of HTML! Ha! I also used the WeatherBug API, and MagpieRSS (I used my own SimpleXML RSS reader but I didn't write a caching method, Magpie seemed faster and it already had caching, so...), as well as a "Beta_RSS" feed of our Event Calendar (which is incorrectly serving non-ISO-8859-1 as ISO-8859-1, causing problems I can't figure out how to fix. Regardless, it looks pretty!

Now, to wait for the dust to clear and the smoke to settle (all the little things that bug me that I will fix, but aren't important) so I can move on to updating the content and more visual hierarchy of things. After that I should start talking about programming some more here.

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

I spent more than half the day today (24 hour day) thinking and trying to find a way to get a mod_rewrite call to work properly. I felt so dumb, retarded, and plain uneducated in my attempts. I left work a little bit early so I could concentrate (no distractions, no phone calls, no "how do I send an attachment", no nothing). Even after that, I kept running into a stumbling roadblock. My friend was trying his hardest to help me out (no idea why other than possibly a sheer curiosity - it's now almost 1:00am).

What I wanted to do:
http://example.com/contacts/form/recipients/bKozlowski/
...transformed to...
http://example.com/contacts/form/index.php?contact=bkozlowski

Sounds easy, right? Yeah, I thought so too when I first started. I tried every iteration of something that looked so darned simple and could only be done just so many ways... The eventual problem?

I needed to use: RewriteBase /
I have no idea what this directive does. I have no idea why my pattern now matches and works. The RewriteLog really wasn't helpful at all except to tell me that it wasn't working...something I could have figured out without a log, obviously. Anyway, if anyone really cares, the following is the actual end result:

RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteRule ^/?(contact)/([A-Z_@\.]+)/$ contact/form/index\.php?$1=$2 [NC,PT,L]

I both love and loathe mod_rewrite.

(Special thanks to the people over at SitePoint Forums for their immediate response!)

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

For the new website I've been developing and finishing up some "final touches" on the design to make the experience just a little bit better (before I can delve into the out-dated content after launch), one of the last things that was needed was to speed up the efficiency and download of assets - this included CSS and JavaScript files for the most part. I made the sIFR flash files as small as possible and my PNG images were compressed (and fixed for IE color rendering) using PNGGauntlet (which uses PNGOut). Until I can figure out ETags, a proper time for an Expires header, and GZip to work on CSS/JS files on our hosted server, this should suffice. It loads amazingly quick on my iPod Touch.

Continue reading "Compare your Minimized JavaScript"

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski