dougv.com | The Web home of Doug Vanderweide

Your eyes do not deceive you; I have changed themes, once again.

I really liked Barthelme. Especially nice about it was that it has lots and lots of style hooks. If I were more industrious, I would download its sister theme, blog.txt, which has the same style hooks, and get to putting together CSS worthy of its engineering.

But I do not want to do that; not when Fluid Blue is available. It’s far prettier than anything I would make.

My only problem with Fluid Blue is that no matter what I tried, I could not get ordered or unordered lists to appear as I wanted in comments. Given that otherwise, I adore the Fluid Blue theme, I decided, what the heck, let’s just go with it.

I suspect I’ll be sticking with this theme for a while yet.

Most Web sites are designed within a template or two. That is, the layout, typography and basic design of every page is fundamentally the same for most, if not all, pages.

Also, most Web pages tend to need the same resources. If you have a database-driven site, many pages need to use the same connection; other objects, such as user-made classes, functions and the like, often need to be used by many pages.

Templates are nothing new. Adobe has even built a dedicated Web authoring application, Contribute, that lets non-designers update content in templates made in Dreamweaver. Most open-source Web applications, such as Zen Cart, WordPress and phpBB, all allow you to “skin” their applications.

Thanks to the power of PHP, we can accomplish these goals on our own custom Web designs with abstraction and modularization. I’ll explain how I use both, in a typical PHP Web application, to streamline coding and provide, as much as possible, the ability to edit something once and have that change appear globally.

Continue reading ‘Better Managing Your PHP Application Via Modularization And Abstraction’ »

You’ve probably noticed I’ve been putting in some work on this blog lately.

Amid all the tweaking, one fact became obvious: I was going to need to make significant changes to the TypoXP theme to get it fully compatible with post-WordPress 2.3 releases.

I thought long and hard about that. I really like TypoXP and I wanted to stick with it as long as I could. But the more I thought about it, the more I decided it made sense to move on to a more recent theme.

Once again, it came down to two choices: Barthelme and Fluid Blue. In the end, Bartheme won.

Continue reading ‘Goodbye, TypoXP; Hello, Barthelme; Welcome Back, WP-Syntax; Tag, You’re It’ »

I decided recently that I wanted to use a social bookmarking plug-in* on this blog. The choice came down to one of two: Add To Any or Sociable.

After a day of fiddling with both, I finally opted for Sociable. Both plug-ins are very good, and each has things it does better than the other. The reasons I decided on Sociable vs. Add To Any:

• Add To Any uses a pop-up layer to display some top bookmarking sites, then an additional click to select all. Sociable allows you to select which bookmarking sites you want to display as 16×16-pixel icons. I figure it’s enough to show just the most popular, rather than virtually every bookmarking site.
• Sociable requires less space to accomplish the same basic tasks.
• Add To Any requires JavaScript to work; Sociable doesn’t require it for most functions.
• Sociable looks prettier on my pages. The Add To Any icon didn’t fit well on my page; it does allow you to make your own icon, but I didn’t want to bother with that, especially when, again, Sociable’s icons all work on their own, right on the page.
• Add To Any doesn’t easily allow you to rearrange icons or add / remove certain links / services; Sociable makes selecting the order of icons (and which to use) quite easy.

That said, Add To Any does have some strengths over Sociable:

• Add To Any’s code is a bit cleaner; but again, we’ll soon discuss how to fix Sociable’s faults.
• Sociable requires a knowledge of CSS to customize; Add To Any allows n00bs to easily change colors and certain display settings.
• That Add To Any allows users to select virtually any bookmarking site, rather than a list the blogger determines, may be considered a strength by others.

So even though I opted for Sociable, I had to clean up some problems, such as display problems due to my theme; the alignment of the icons; and incomplete information for certain icons.

Continue reading ‘Fixing Various Issues With The Sociable Plug-In For WordPress’ »

Recently asked on Yahoo! Answers:

Divide photo in 5,000 pieces with rollover text?
we are raising money and selling support tickets. To show our progress we are going to start with a black and white image split in 5,000 pieces then as each piece is sold we want to turn it into color.

When you roll over each piece the person who purchased that support ticket will have their name show up as well as a personal message.

any opinions on how this should be built? The admin section will all be managed manually, so we’ll just need a backend for the admin person to go in and make the changes manually.

This seemed an interesting challenge to me; not difficult, but with multiple steps that no beginner could hope to properly tackle on his own without some help.

This project calls on almost all the basic skills a competent Web developer should possess: Image editing; database design and simple queries; DOM manipulation; security and back-end systems, and therefore, it gives me my first real opportunity in quite some time to address a project in full scope.

As always, I’ll have a link to a working demo and code you can download at the end of this entry.

Continue reading ‘A Charity Donation Recognition System Using PHP, MySQL, JavaScript And DOM’ »