Since July I’ve been working on a large web dashboard project for Tri-County Mental Health Services in Lewiston, Maine. It’s been fun learning their business and working with the great people there. Although the project is moving more slowly than I’d like, progress is good and I think it looks nice. It will certainly be simpler to maintain than their manually generated legacy Excel spreadsheets. Not only do the charts tell stories about the business impossible with tabular data, they will see significant reductions in the amount of time spent generating their business analysis tools.

The user is able to not only change the date range, but also toggle the display of each individual metric series on each chart, including goals for each. The interactive changes are made dynamically, without requiring a page load. Kinda cool, eh?

The data is culled from disparate data sources and aggregated into a Microsoft SQL Server database I designed. Some of the data is entered via web-based forms I also developed. The server side code is written in PHP and the client-side scripting, obviously, is a combination of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I make heavy use of the jQuery JavaScript Library and the flot plotting library. All data is sent from the server to the client in the JSON data-interchange format.

Site navigation is done utilizing CSS lists and the fixed zoom buttons–which change the range of all charts on the page simultaneously–use a single CSS sprite image technique.

There’s a lot of work to do, and I’m having a great time.

TCMHS Web Dashboard

January 26, 2010 – While there is much to be done on the web dashboard, there is not enough money to do it. Today my contract is over and, unfortunately, it has not been extended. Here are a couple screenshots of the product as of today.

TCMHS Web Dashboard - AGENCY

TCMHS Web Dashboard - ADULT

css, flot, javascript, jquery, php, sql server, web development, webdev Hide

Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

Tonight I installed Ubuntu 9.10. The process was wicked simple. I burned the image to a disk and rebooted my machine. I verified the language and location and told it to use the entire hard disk and in a few minutes it was installed.

Configuring the wireless card was a breeze. It automatically recognized Kirsten’s Windows XP box so I could access her files. I got all the updates downloaded and installed. I’m currently listening to mp3s in Rythmbox and editing a screenshot in GIMP. Bliss.

Tomorrow I’ll set up the LAMP web server stack and configure dual-monitor support.

My new Ubuntu 9.10 computer

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adobe air, lamp, linux, tweetdeck, twitter, ubuntu, windows Hide

I haven’t been satisfied with The Rhetoric’s theme for a long time and have been intending to design/develop my own from scratch. In the past I’ve always selected a well-designed theme and modifying it to meet my needs.

To prepare myself for this adventure I read the WordPress Codex sections about theme development. I also read the applicable chapters of WordPress 2.7 Complete: Create Your Own Complete Blog or Website from Scratch with WordPress by April Hodge Silver and Hasin Hayder.

Yesterday I spent a long time in Photoshop doing design mock-up. The early stages were frustrating and a bit humorous as the design shifted wildly and often in not-so-good directions. I was only vaguely sure of what I wanted; I know I want a fairly simple and clean design that fits my personality.

Design mockup - The Rhetoric

This afternoon I readied a local sandbox for theme/plugin development: I created a MySQL database with a copy of data from this blog for testing, installed and configured WordPress, and created a folder to hold the files for the new theme. A development sandbox allows me to play around with the new design without confusing and annoying the visitors of the live blog.

When the new theme is done I’m going to create several custom plugins. That should be fun, too.

Then I’ll update my resume.

codex, custom, mysql, php, plugin, theme, wordpress Hide

Sometimes 140 characters just isn’t enough room to express our thoughts, activities, quotations, recipes, tutorials, diatribes, announcements, affections, tips and lessons. Our most valiant attempts at compendium often extend beyond the limitations imposed by Twitter. The solution is quite simple: all a tweeter has to do is include a URL to point to a blog post, photo or video.

But, what if the URL is too long?

This URL is 176 characters: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1416594787/ref=s9_intb_gw_tr02?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=1Q4Z3EN485H4KY6HXSVS&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=470938631&pf_rd_i=507846

URL shortening services have sprung up to satisfy the burgeoning need for shorter links. They accomplish this by storing lengthy URLs in a database table with a corresponding alias. When a user points to the shortened URL the longer link is fetched from the database and the user is automatically redirected.

While perusing tweets I noticed Justin Russell had posted a link using a short domain that looked close to his own name, http://jusr.us/. Upon inquiry he pointed me to an open source PHP URL shortener called Phurl.

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.htaccess, php, phurl, redirect, twitter, url Hide

Love this! Thanks, Jason.

xkcd: Exploits of a Mom

Confused? Read this.

Be sure to check out xkcd: A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language. Great stuff over there!

comic, funny, geek, humor, sql injection Hide

Tweeting is nice because it’s terse; I can update my tweeps about what I’m doing, resources I’ve discovered and articles I’ve read between more lengthy and media-rich blog posts (and to publicize those posts).

The Twitter Tools plugin is a great way to integrate tweets into a WordPress blog. The most obvious benefit of this is that it keeps the content on the blog page fresh and allows bloggers to communicate bitlets of information that do not require their own post.

In addition to other worthwhile features, Twitter Tools allows a blog admin to display recent tweets in a sidebar widget, and to automatically publish tweets in a daily or weekly digest format. Twitter Tools caches tweets in a table of the WordPress database to reduce the number of calls to Twitter.

There were a few things about the plugin I didn’t particularly like out of the box. First, there was a link below the last tweet in the sidebar widget to take a visitor to my Twitter page. I prefer to have the widget title be that link. Second, the digest post title date format was ugly: “2009-06-29″ instead of “June 29, 2009″. Third, the link at the end of each tweet in the digest post had a simple ‘#’ instead of the date and time of the tweet, which also serves as a link to the original tweet.

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development, php, plugin, programming, social networking, twitter, wordpress Hide

Very cool! I can’t wait to get my own account!

ajax, communication, email, google, html, im, tool, wave, web Hide

From a Justin Russell tweet.

coder, development, interview, job, programmer, web Hide

I discovered a plethora of treasures while reading an excellent post at Smashing Magazine this evening. One of them is powerful backup utility from 2BrightSparks called SyncBack.

Downloading and installing the freeware version was a snap. I created a profile using the advanced tabs and set up the scheduler to backup my 2008 pictures folder every morning at four o’clock. The coolest part is that it does the backup to my web server through an FTP connection.

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backup, free, ftp, software, synchronize, utility Hide

Replace Microsoft Notepad With Latest Notepad++ v5.0 in Windows

With this fix my favorite little text editor, Notepad++, is now my default Windows text editor.

I love this quote on the The Ultimate Web Developer’s Christmas Wish List post on the Smashing Magazine blog.

Please notice: if a web-developer uses Notepad++, a robust freeware editor for Windows users, he or she will be very unlikely to switch to one of the above mentioned applications.

LOL.

development, editor, free, notepad++, open source, programming Hide