For a couple years I’ve had a photography site at photography.brentdanley.com that few people visited. I built it as a project to learn the Flickr API and the JavaScript framework Prototype. I’ve been wanting to incorporate it into my main site for a while, and now it’s done.

Click on the Photography link to check it out.

The new Photography page at BrentDanley.com

css · flickr · jquery · photography · php · phpFlickr · webdev · wordpress

Yesterday I read an interesting article in .net magazine of Dries Buytaert, the founder of popular open source web content management system (CMS) Drupal. In the interview Dries mentioned a new offering from Drupal, Drupal Gardens. Drupal Gardens is a hosted Drupal solution, much like WordPress’s WordPress.com. It allows people who may not know Drupal or who need a quick site to build on on a powerful system with little cost or experience.

Brent's Drupal Gardens site

drupal · drupal gardens · webdev

The Mind of a Web Developer: An Illustrated Diagram
Matt, Mingle2, June 13, 2007

The Mind of a Web Developer

humor · programming · web development

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

(more…)

adobe air · lamp · linux · tweetdeck · twitter · ubuntu · windows

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

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.

(more…)

.htaccess · php · phurl · redirect · twitter · url

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

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.

(more…)

development · php · plugin · programming · social networking · twitter · wordpress

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

ajax · communication · email · google · html · im · tool · wave · web

The Twitter web page is nice, but it lacks the functionality of a stand-alone application. For several months I’ve been using Twhirl, by Seesmic. Twhirl is good, but now there’s something much better, Seesmic Desktop.

With Seesmic Desktop I can have columns for both Facebook and (multiple) Twitter accounts. I can add photos to tweets and shorten URLs. I can like and reply and direct and share. One of the nicest features is the ability to create userlists to organize “friends” based on the nature of the relationships. It’s brilliant!

Seesmic Desktop runs on the Adobe Air platform, which is very nice (and easy).

My Seesmic Desktop, so far

adobe air · application · desktop · facebook · seesmic · seesmic desktop · social media · twitter