Category: Code
Another Month, Another Job
Yes it’s true, I am leaving my current position as Lead Web Developer at The Journal Register Company and joining the highly creative team at Klunk & Millan Advertising Agency.
I was only at JRC for 2 months and I feel bad about leaving so soon. I had some goals I wanted to accomplish when I first got there but sometimes unplanned events are the best events of your life.
My commute will be cut from 3+ hours a day to 40 minutes. That means my round-trip 100 mile journey a day will be about 38 miles. That is a plus. That is not the main reason I decided to leave but it sure didn’t hurt any.
CONTINUE READING | TWEET THIS | COMMENT (0)
WordPress vs. TownNews
Note: This entire blog post in my opinion and solely my opinion. Take it for what it’s worth, an opinion.
If you follow me online you’ve probably noticed I have been pretty flustered with the current CMS that I have to use, TownNews. I have been sending a lot of jabber across Twitter recently like:
$time_for_change = ($WordPress > $TownNews) ? true : false;
if ($time_for_change) {
$save_money = true;
$save_time = true;
$faster = true;
}
else {
$save_money = false;
$save_time = false;
$faster = false;
}
I’m a coder, that’s how I think and talk; There is no gray area, it’s true or false. It’s my opinion, but factual and it truly does equate. Time equals money and I seem to be wasting tons of time with TownNews.
CONTINUE READING | TWEET THIS | COMMENT (9)
Print to Digital – Change Resistant
So I jumped back into the online news world and it has delightfully brought back all these grandiose ideas, things I wanted to try when I left this business, things I thought would work, etc. Little did I know a lot of folks still in 2010 are having trouble letting go.
It doesn’t help that the company I now work for, Journal Register Company, had a corporate mandate not too long ago that prohibited its newsrooms to post any news that wasn’t at least two days old and a max of four stories a day (all from what I’ve been told). This is absurd to me. Think it was hard to get print-born folks to transform before, try to now break them from a previous communist corporate parent that would burn you to the ground if you disobeyed its laws.
Luckily JRC signed on John Paton as their CEO and put Jeff Jarvis on the board, well maybe not put, he was probably asked. Paton is all about good journalism and digital first. Jarvis is well, Jarvis. If you don’t know anything about him, Google him; he makes sense, and says things that some of us ‘younger’ online news folks have been saying for years. He makes sense, he is all about trying new things and empowering not just employees but your community. Makes sense.
CONTINUE READING | TWEET THIS | COMMENT (1)
PHP Viddler API Client – Forked
Okay that title sounds either a bit naughty or nasty, it’s neither. I forked the official PHP Viddler API wrapper and wrote a new one. Why? Well because when I worked there I wrote smaller client which worked out well for me so I’ve decided to release it.
If you strip out the comments from the new client, it’s less than 200 lines of code. Now I just focused on the core API, I didn’t add any of the add-on methods for embeds, oembed, etc. If you are looking for those I would suggest using the original Viddler client. I wanted to keep this lightweight, I may add it later on as an extension so if you want to use it you can, but for now, just keeping it simple.
So how did I strip so much out of the original? I used no 3rd party classes. I used only what is in PHP. I ditched the xmlparser.php file and went with SimpleXML. I also didn’t write a method for every for every possible API method. Actually I didn’t write one for any of them. I took advantage of PHP’s magic method __call(). Which is automatically called when the user calls an object method that doesn’t exist.
$viddler = new Viddler('API KEY');
$res = $viddler->user_auth(array(
'user' => 'USERNAME'
'password' => 'YOUR PASS'
));
CONTINUE READING | TWEET THIS | COMMENT (1)
Simple Tag Bar for WordPress
So when I did the little redesign of my site earlier this week I added a right rail. With that I wanted to add some way to show tags that was not a tag cloud and wasn’t just a list of tags. I noticed on a co-worker’s blog (Kyle Slattery) that he had a really nice tag display. So I stole it, er better yet re-purposed it. The way Kyle did it reminded me of how Django makes its graphs, very clean and crisp. I really liked the idea and the presentation.
He doesn’t use WordPress so I had to build a quick script to accomplish this in WordPress. Easy enough actually. What it does it grab your top ten tags then do a little math to display them in a graph format. The more times a tag was used, the larger the graph. Again pretty simple.
