T h o u g h t s
Web Applications I still use: Remember the Milk
>>Monday, February 22, 2010<<
Like most web geeks, I spend a lot of time playing with new and interesting web applications - however I only stick with a few of them for the long run. So to help fill out this blog and find interesting stuff to talk about in here, I have decided to review the ones that I still use.
I figure that there must be something that makes a web application stand out as useful enough to maintain interest even after the initial coolness factor has worn off. For some apps it is simply a case that the coolness factor remains high, even after the initial hype. For others the app is a very useful idea that I find hard to do without.
To help find out what makes these applications so useful for me, I will answer a couple of questions:
Tags: remember_the_milk, reviews, web_applications
Zend Framework Simple .ini Loader
>>Friday, February 12, 2010<<
When I am working on Zend Framework projects I usually find that I am referencing .ini files a lot within my code, which usually means typing the following line many times:
<?php
$oConfig = new Zend_Config_Ini("../application/configs/config.ini");
?>Although it is simple enough to remember, it does get tedious after a while and I always wondered what the execution time of the code was like calling the same config file multiple times on each load (i.e. in different classes).
Tags: scripts, val_config, zend_config_ini, zf
New valorin.net design live!
>>Thursday, February 4, 2010<<
It has taken be a while, but the new Valorin.net is finally live!
I've usually gone down the path of building a generic CMS to power my website which, although useful for building other websites, results in a lot of work building a generic system to do a lot of custom things... and the CMS usually never gets finished either. So instead of building a CMS I decided to use Zend Framework to power my website and build it specifically for valorin.net. In the process I have developed a blog module and a gallery module that I hope to release public copies of soon.
So here we are. A new Zend Framework powered website for me to have fun updating!
Forget AJAX and start using JUE (Javascript Usability Enhancement)
>>Wednesday, February 3, 2010<<
This is a post I made back in September of 2007 on my old website. I have brought it across to here as I still feel it is relevant and useful. My experience and use of Javascript has grown immensly since I originally made the post, but I still believe that it should be used solely for enhancing usability rather than adding functionality.
Anyone who knows me knows that when AJAX was first "the big thing" I was strongly opposed to it. Infact, the first time I used what people would call AJAX was a few months ago in a uni project. From that, I developed a blurb which was my mission statement, you could say, for my use of Javascript:
Collapsing and Toggling content with jQuery
>>Friday, January 15, 2010<<
Something I have always wanted to do with Javascript is collapse and toggle content blocks to be hidden/shown. I've tried many different implementations but all of them have either been too clunky (i.e. lots of classes/elements) or complex (define id's and hard code it). But none of them really worked well for me at all.
I recently started using jQuery as my full-time Javascript framework (having previously tried Dojo). So being new to the framework I was looking through the documentation to try and find some code to do what I was looking for. I came across the page about Accordion effects. The accordion is where only one box remains open in a block of boxes, so this was not what I wanted - but it did provide some code for collapsing individual boxes on demand.
