Jen and Jon Johnson

The transition to flickr is now complete and the gallery has been moved over to their servers. This means several things.

1. My bandwidth isn’t being eaten up by photos
2. everything is much faster
3. everything will get updated a lot more frequently because flicker is easier to use than the system I had built for myself
4. Categories can get much more fluid and I will soon have some other cool stuff

You can also check out my photos directly at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonjohnson

This transition was made possible mainly because of the fantastic php library at http://www.phpflickr.com/Â so many thanks go out there.

This is defiantly a step towards the future of web 2.0 as multiple services can be combined to create fluid dynamic user experiences…. enjoy.

This is definatly a step towards the future of web 2.0 as multiple services can be combined to create fluid dynamic user experiences…. enjoy.

I’m woring on changing to flickr for my photo storage and display… temporarily there will be a photosFlickr link… you can click on it if you want, but I doubt it will work… if it does then YAY Me…

So I’m currently re-writing Jen’s Gradebook web application into Ajax and the results are stunning. I had no idea how much time went into reloading the web interface to reload as opposed to passing data to the database. I actually had to add a sleep() to my php backend code in order to ensure that I was getting the visual response I was looking for. Well.. back to work…

Some Great Ajax Links:

Ajax in Action Is a great intro and overview of the necessary worlds including an indepth look at design patterns and performance which I found pretty fascinating.

Jesse James Garrett at adaptive path - this is the article that started the buzz and gave this technology its really crappy name (I know I’m the onlly one who hates it, it is just so corny and difficult to work into a normal conversation)

 prototype.js provides a great starting framework and it will lead you to other projects. Check out rico and script.aculo.us and Behavior to get some wonderful pre-built functions.

 There are obviously a bunch more places to check out, but these should give you a great head start.Â

The end of the internet
I’m not being dramatic the internet will be dead in 5 years if the telcoms are allowed to create this kind of structure. For a decade now the WWW has thrived on the backbone of the internet. This has been possible because of the end to end structure of the internet which allows individuals to publish and small companies to thrive. This proposal by At&t would kill the internet as we know it. By regulating the content that can travel over their infrastructure the telco would be in control of the internet. This is unacceptable. Call your congress person and demand that the internet remain free.

OK well the photo gallery is all done. I wasn’t able to use the WP built in Page functions because I needed to pass GET data and that was proving difficult with the permalinks and my limited knowledge of mod_rewrite. Instead I put everything to gether into a single application photo.php and I was able to import the WP functions and theme very easily. Very cool. I love open source! Everything looks good, so all in all a full WP install customized to fit my needs was easily accomplished in a weekend. Very nice piece of software.

Well I got rid of the papercrane so now this theme is called Golden Gate. I’m pretty sure that I have all the kinks worked out, so I hope that it works all around. Now all I have left to do is re-write my photo gallery to work within this theme… I’m not sure that I can do that within the WP framework as the static “Pages” which are available are not really up to the task in this case.

Well as you can see I have started development of my new theme which I’m lightly dubbing “papercrane” for the header image. So far I’m very impressed with the WP 1.5 theming engine and everything is coming along nicely. The only thing I would wish for is better commenting in the default files. Some function seem to be used in obscure ways. wp_footer() for instance is a cool bit of code which allows plugins to drop info into the footer, however it took me a bit of searching to figure that out.
Update: I now have the wp functions bookmarked so I’m moving a bit faster… anyway back to work.

Well I know have the entire site running over SSL which isn’t all that big a deal, but kind of bugs me especially since I use a server cert from CA Cert which will give most people a warning. I’m also having trouble with URIs dropping the www which for some reason gives a security warning in SSL logins even though I generated a wildcard cert for the whole domain, I guess that if now prefix is given a wildcard doesn’t work. I will have to look into how to set that up. For now I think this is it. Hopefully I will get time to do more work over thanksgiving.

Day 1. Worpress setup took even less than the 5 (as advertised) Minutes. I highly recommend this piece of software for beginners as it was pain free to install and get running… now I just need to secure the login and put together a new theme.