the bofe blog

My sleep schedule from Sunday until this morning:

- 3am-10am
- 12pm-7pm
- 10pm-7am

That’s 23/28 hours… haven’t slept like that in a while. I remember having major sleeping binges when I lived with my parents or roommates, but someone would wake me up around hour 17/18 just to see if I was still alive.

So I’m officially 24 years old. It’s been one hell of a year. I’ve covered that in other posts, though.

One year ago today, Craig Clayton and I went to see the Deftones.

My non geek update:

- I’ve put out requests for information with Murray State, Brescia, Kentucky Wesleyan, and Western Kentucky University for MBA programs. I’d rather not attend WKU/MSU… but if the MBA is there the MBA is there (and I’ll do online classes)

- I’m still running… but I’m not losing a lot of weight. If any. A lot of that’s due to my diet, which is… less than stellar. I’m eating twice daily – lunch and supper… aka way too much for both of those meals. It’s weird, but I’ll just have to eat more frequently and smaller portions to get the running to work even more for me.

- Work is good.

Bye.

This made me laugh. I’m actually still laughing.

Not all of us can escape Windows, especially at our day jobs. Did you think you’d ever see this from a Windows Command Line?

ls -la | grep txt

Do you ever type ‘ls’ at a Windows prompt only to get “command not found”?

Enter UnxUtils which is a collection of GNU ports to Win32.

Extract these to your system32 folder or hit Windows+Pause (System Properties) and go to Advanced -> Environment Variables and add whereever you extract them to your “Path” System Variable.

Now that a lot of the loyal readers have gotten a chance do a demo run — any more ideas on a name?

This took me a while to figure out, so I hope this little tidbit helps someone…

If you want to send XHTML over GET or POST in an Ajax request with FCKEditor, be sure to do something like this:

var pars = 'page_content=' + escape(FCKeditorAPI.GetInstance('page_content').GetXHTML());

The critical part of this is escape() – it is the javascript equivalent of PHP’s urlencode.

Lee asked a few questions about the app, so I’ll answer ‘em here…

- How do you handle interactive elements – like forms?

At the moment, it’s really only for static pages. Currently the way I’m doing this is keeping the “content” and the interactive parts of the site separated.

- Will it be designed to handle add-ons?

Add-ons is a big term. I don’t see why someone would not be able to extend it, but currently writing the ability in for add-ons like mambots is a little overkill for my purpose.

- Will you be able to make “on-the-fly” changes to the html/css with certain permissions?

Nope. Let me explain the permissions a little more in depth when you ask about users. There’s going to be one CSS file powering the entire site that the app uses (and that is all set up by me)

- Is there a permissions scheme for users?

See the next answer.

- How do you handle users?

Currently I am doing it through something called LDAP. Think about it like this – the username and password you have for logging in to your computer, checking your email, and file server permissions is all the same. Why give users another account to deal with? Also, our LDAP system forces passwords to be changed at a specified interval.

In an LDAP setup, there are also user groups or “organizational units”. The way our system is set up is that each department/entity has it’s own group. Instead of dealing with a lot of permissions, I give everyone in the “Group A” group the ability to do whatever they want to do to Group A’s website.

There is a global admin — and it’s pretty easy to change. Think of it like editing a config file. I have a control panel that lists all of our user groups and links to edit their sites.

- What about images? I uploaded an image, but now I don’t know how to link it… and does it make automatic thumbnails? (edit – n/m – I found it, it’s just not graphical)

Images are a big concern. I will be thinking about how I want to handle this…

- Why is the sky blue?

Answer.

- Clicking on a child page does not keep the parent/child expanded menu open in nav

Right. Thank you. Will work on it.

- LOVE THE RE-ORDER NAV THING. HOLY CRAP, THAT IS COOL.

Thanks. Here’s how I did it.

- I did break it. I applied styles (custom bold, title) then de-applied them. Text disappeared. Plus, the text “here are the real questions” has the style “Code” applied – yet it doesn’t appear as such on the page.

I haven’t really done a lot of playing with the WYSIWYG except for pasting material in from MS Word with the “Paste from Word” button.

If you’re interested in a demo of what I’ve been referring to as “the app”, figure out a way to contact me about getting a URL and a Login/Pass.

Some more notes about it:

- Moving it to the server was a great learning experience. I’ve already made substantial improvements in performance and future compatibility which unfortunately are not in the version that I have somewhere on the web for demonstration purposes.

- The application’s purpose is becoming a lot more clear. It’s designed for the end users who need to be able to easily maintain the static parts of sites. It seems that everyone around here needs some type of database functionality. The directory structure I’ve been using is “site_url/content/page” for the static types of pages and “site_url/app/application” for others. I think it’s going to be pretty nice.

- It’s still early. I haven’t decided on a good way for users to include images in their pages. I originally wanted them to use some sort of 3rd photo gallery option, but that is not really sufficient regular inline images. Suggestions/ideas are welcome. I’d rather not do the uploading and thumbnailing on the server. =)

- The idea behind this is that I still maintain 100% of the control of the site’s “structure”/”look” while someone (typically a departmental secretary) maintains the content without having to talk to me. It’s very easy for me to make a new site with XHTML/CSS that uses content from this system.

Sorry that this is a little ranty… but I feel like a lot of us are like this.

Perfection is possible, but it will never happen. Striving for perfection leads to what my old boss referred to as development constipation. You just build and build and build, and never release. I’m so particular and driven by somehow obtaining perfection that I don’t launch anything on my own.

It’s extremely difficult for me to overcome. I feel like I receive a lot of validation from people I respect seeing and enjoying my work. That peer-validation is something I strive to achieve; it’s probably one of my psychological needs.

Unfortunately, that validation is what matters the least. Realistically, nothing else matters except for accomplishing the application’s goal. The users don’t and shouldn’t care about my needs as a person.

There’s always a better way. A perl programmer could always do it better. Doing something in the first place is what matters.