Tom’s Graphic Design Journal

I saw cakePHP a while ago and kinda skipped it by nearly forgetting it. I was recently reminded of it again by a colleague. I decided to take a second look as I've become so busy with work that I'm desperate for anything that could save me some time.

After checking it out and trying to wrap my head around the whole MVC structure and taking a crash course in object oriented programming (always done procedural php scripting in the past which I was quite happy with) I came to realize...WOW. It's magic. It really is and when they say it's easy...it really is. At least in regard to getting the framework of an application off the ground. You can very quickly and easily see a lot of progress within a few short hours of creating an application.

It's the refinements, look and feel, and special functions that I found to take the bulk of your time. That's fine by me! I'm a designer by nature.

Believe it or not, after working with it for about 12 hrs I'd say solid over the past two days, I've managed to create a light weight blog with user login and groups permissions! Of course this is the total time I've had my hands on Cake and about 11 hours of that time was spent reading and asking newbie quetsions on their irc channel.

I can very quickly see how cakePHP would save time. I like this because I feel more time should be spent on the look and feel and usability of web applications. There are far too many that are confusing and/or ugly.

I feel the most powerful feature of cake (aside from it's MVC model) is their "bake" script/feature. It gives a developer an almost non-scripting approach to developing an application. You merely need an idea and a database structure, from there you "bake" and simply follow what appears to be like a wizard for installing a program...answering questions and changing settings as you go along...a little while later, voila! Your code is generated and your application comes to life.

The only thing left to do is refine, build upon, and re-design the looks. Cake has a default look for their generated "templates" and it's not bad, but of course everything can't look the same.

Even if you end up going the long way around or not using cake at all (I don't see why not), you can quickly "mock" up examples to show others. This practice comes from more of a graphic designer's thinking. As designers, we like to show people how things will look before we start and with as much clarity as possible. Programmers don't really have that luxury, because if they start work it generally gets involved and if they don't do anything, then all they can do is sketch and not really show functionality. Well, with Cake, a developer can now quickly throw up a framework and show someone exactly how it would work very quickly.

I just hope that Cake doesn't demean the industry and make programming seem easy. While I feel PHP is one of the easier languages to learn, it certainly isn't something to underestimate. It takes a lot of time to get something working properly and securely. Cake or no Cake....but things certainly are changing in how we work and how we utilize the internet. I won't ever say, web something point "o" because I hate that phrase...but there certainly are many new and exciting things coming to life on the internet.

Adding more text and bulk to my blog is one thing I certainly like to do haha...but I also like to keep notes so I don't forget how the heck I did some things. I'm adding this quick note here and hopefully it benefits someone else out there.

My portfolio site was recently updated and I went back and started playing around with the CSS a bit and wanted to make some subtle enhancements. Being on the opacity theme with the effects on my site, I decided I wanted to have the thumbnails of my work grayed out and then show 100% when you rolled your mouse over them. Simple right? Well, yes, it is easy but there was one tiny hang-up with making it compatible with IE.

As many people know IE has some quirks with opacity, transparent pngs, etc. My blog took a lot of work and time making it cross-browser friendly. I still have yet to go back and make a version for Safari that I'm happy with...but I digress.

What I did to get the thumbnails 25% opacity was used a CSS class. I could've used moo.fx for this all mind you, but I didn't really need them to "fade" smoothly in, just popping from 25% to 100% was fine. It would probably be too taxing on some computers anyway and the code would be longer, yada yada. So this was most effecient.

I simply added the following in my css:

.gray { display: inline-block; opacity: .25; filter: alpha(opacity=25); }
a:hover { opacity: 1; filter: alpha(opacity=100);}

A little trick here, the "opacity" value is not recognized by IE, but filter is. That same filter property is used by IE for transparent PNGs too if you take a peak at the CSS running this blog.

There was absolutely no harm in making a:hover 100% opaicty because any link that was 100% still looks like nothing happened! So that's a good trick and saved some time coding.

The real trick here, though, is the "display: inline-block" because IE's dreaded "hasLayout" issue. I needed to specify something to trigger this property in IE and messing with the size was not something I wanted to do. The "holly hack" is merely making the height of an object set to 1% or 100%..whichever. Again, I didn't want to take any chances of browsers that did pay attention to that size to make my thumbnails be too small or too large.

So after adding the CSS, I merely added class="gray" to any A tag that I wanted the effect applied to. It was just the images in this case, but it could be any link and anything that's inside that link tag of course gets the opacity applied to it! Cool! Also, it doesn't have to be just a link tag...it can be anything you want to have this rollover effect.

Very simple. Nothing earth shattering, but something I found soooooo simple to do and why everyone resorts to Flash...I'm really not sure.

So I finally updated my portfolio site...It now has some of the most recent works I've done and I've weeded out some of the work I felt wasn't as strong. It's only been like two years...

With the new work, I've also setup a new design. The new design is fully XHTML valid and search engine optimized as well as nifty looking haha. Nifty.

It uses moo.fx javascript which was nice to play with, but took a little time to fix some of the display glitches...at least for the way I used the script.

I also used lightbox to display the images which is really nice. I think all in all, it's a major improvement. Check it out!

Check out my custom search engine.... Curious? What is it? Read this.

Google has about a million tools that are all hidden...some aren't very useful and some are REALLY good for the right purposes, but you never really hear about all their tools. They like to keep their homepage/search engine page clean which is just fine by me. However, if you explore further you'll find this interesting tool that allows you to "create your own search engine."

I actually had the insane idea of starting my own search engine with a complex process to help validate and cross-reference the results by querying other search engines, directories, and even thought about peer to peer use...but those ideas are definitely for a future where the internet gets full of junk and any single search engine isn't performing how it should....oh...well maybe that day came sooner than I thought..but still I don't have the time to be creating anything like that right now.

So this custom search engine became the next best thing! I have hundreds of bookmarks and they are all really meaty and full of wonderful information. Afterall, I've hand selected this list of bookmarks for reference, interesting tutorials, software, scripts, and more. It is MY interests and very relevant ones...however, what I've come to realize is that some of the sites I pull information from actually have more useful information that I've been missing.

The hard thing about acquiring information is you rarely value it or know where to begin until you know what you are looking for.

Searching through millions of results that are completely unrelevant is a waste of time and often I have the answer to the question I have right in my bookmarks, but I've forgotten or don't know where to look. So I tried this custom search engine out. I have to say I'm completely impressed. It doesn't have to be limited to just the sites you choose, but I left it that way for quality control. It will be the first search I use from now on and when I don't get an answer there, I'll use regular Google or MSN or Yahoo when I want to get broader.

This is one feature about "Google Co-op" (beta)...and after looking at Google Co-op, I'm starting to think they are tired of DMOZ and are going to be making their own - better - system. 

You can even have other people collaborate with you to help build it! The really cool thing I just saw was not only can you make money off ads clicked on it (yea, like maybe 50 cents...my faith in adsense is not high these days), but you can implement it into your site many different ways. I will certainly have to add it to my blog...they even have some nifty AJAX feature. Some special implementations exist for Blogger and WordPad...hmm I should get to messing around with this and WordPress next. Sigh - I need another project like I need another hole in my head.

So enough talk, you get the point. Check out my search engine!