filtering your view.
April 8, 2007 - 8:23
- coding - tag cloud - Sopranos
First off, I would like to take this opportunity to, on behalf of everyone here at sethdesantis.com, wish you a very Happy Easter. If you were able to spend it with people even half as awesome as the people I spent mine with then I know you had a great day. I really enjoyed the opportunity to visit with my parents, they are the reason I am able to do everything I do, have done, will do, and don't do (ie: not doing bad things). I could write volumes of blogs on the reasons my parents are so great, but that would require you and me to take our relationship to the next level....it's not you, it's me, I just don't think we are there yet....please understand, let's just take this whole thing slowly....
I opted to take the train for my holiday trip. The reasoning behind this decision has yet to be announced, until this exact moment. Oh, how excited you must be! Yes, it was certainly as I previously told people, due to me just not really wanting to drive anywhere, but I must confess I had a secret motive. For the past three days I have been really stuck on how to write the code for my Tag Cloud. Much like almost everything in the world , there seems to be several good paths to to acheive my goal, but finding the best wasn't very obvious. I have previously written the code for a Tag Cloud that ranked every tag into 1 of 3 categories based on it's use. That code was semi-solid, but I needed to rewrite everything from the ground up. I just wasn't getting the exact information I needed on the plethora of internet resources to comfortably write the tag functions I was looking for. Thus my decision for the train. Armed with some in depth PHP books and my laptop, I was able to bang out exactly what I was looking for. The code will certainly need to be tweaked once I upload it to the server later this week, but I am confident it's approach is the appropriate one for the Cloud.
Sopranos will be starting is a few minutes, I am excited to watch it. I would be lying if I said I was as excited as if any episode of Rome or Lost was on. Worthy to note, I have not watched the first few seasons, which is likely why I don't have the Soprano craze everyone has. Or maybe it is just because it isn't as good as Rome, Lost, and even Carnival for this tangent discussions sake. Regardless, this last season will undoubtedly be very entertaining.
[side note: I just wrote a very funny paragraph but erased it, it is so hard to write anything when everyone to no one could be in the audience.]
From your filtered view of the inside, out, good night.
Album - Photo
January 20, 2007 - 13:20
- coding - photo album
I have been working on the photo album page for the past day or so. Since access to this page will require user login, this project was a good opportunity to create functions for the login code, opposed to continuing to put all of the form display and form handling code into each page that will require it. The site coding trend thus far has been along the lines of directly coding any functionality into the page that requires it, and then later when that functionality is required in another page, I take it out of it's original place and move it into a function, that I can call whenever and from wherever. This is has worked well thus far, since I get the code to work for it's direct intended purpose, and then later, clean it up a little bit to make it usable from anywhere.
I have placed a link to the photo album page under the link section of the Splash page currently found in the Sandbox. Eventually, this page will usually be called to display a particular album, but I will almost certainly have a main photo page, displaying some kind of index of albums.
As previously stated, all of this technical talk regarding the sites development will ultimately be the exception when coming to blog posts...but until I am further along with certain features and pages, it will seem more like the rule.
Organizing code and other dorky ramblings...
January 17, 2007 - 7:23
- coding
I think it's about time I start work on the photo album pages. My head is filled with a bunch of different layout options, but I will attempt to resist the temptation of working on the pages "look" before I work on displaying the actual content.
I am not yet sure what is the best way to approach a web site and/or part of a site. In regards to my own site, historically I have focussed a lot of time up front on the "eye candy" part of a site. The header picture, buttons, etc... But my recent approach to Splash 6+ has been the opposite. I found that developing the content first, and then arranging the way it looked second was a good strategy. Thus far, it has worked out very well; as I am happy with the progress I have made in generating content (although I am ultimately less than halfway through with displaying all the content I have in mind), and I am happy with the layout/feel of the site (again, although it is not close to the final appearance I wish to achieve).
I think in regards to the way I like to implement CSS, generating the content first helps a lot. It let's you see way the content looks completely raw, allowing you to visualize the final look you hope to achieve in your head, and then experimenting with the code. Making changes to a bunch of CSS declarations doesn't do much use unless you have something to actually apply those styles to.
In the end, I think a happy medium can exists between ones early efforts on appearance and content. It makes little sense to start creating a page and/or site without at least an idea of what you would like the finished product to look like, just as it is silly to start working on the layout without an idea of the content that will fill it.
and on an unrelated note...
I really enjoy cleaning up and organizing code. When writing a new element of a page, I often find myself using very sloppy style habits. I don't intend on it, but between copying and pasting variable names, inserting divs, writing loops, etc... I do not preserve the proper nesting of the code. And by the time I get everything to work correctly, I am so sick of looking at that particular code, I don't want to go back and add the proper indentations, comments, white space, etc... Normally, I would not be very proud or happy with such tendencies, but I always end up going back and "cleaning up" the code. Tonight for example, I wanted to add the functionality to my Main Control page to list all of the photo albums I have uploaded on the server. It was not very hard to implement, since a list of all the albums as well as info about them, are stored in a DB table. I got the code to work right off the bat, but for some reason, one of the other functions stopped working correctly, leading me to "clean up" the code. After a little while, I was able to find the extra tag that was screwing everything up. It was satisfying, relaxing, enjoyable, and incredibly dorky; just like this entire blog post :-)