David’s Thoughts

I’ve been saying for years: “Yeah, eventually I’ll shave my head.” Just one of those things that I was sure I would do eventually. Well, today seemed like a good day. I plunked down $25 on a combination haircutter and beard trimmer. (My old rechargeable beard trimmer was fizzling out anyway.) And I gave myself a haircut. I know what you’re thinking. “wow. that’s heavy.”

But seriously now, there are a couple of significant firsts here. this is the first time I’ve even attempted to give myself a haircut. And this is the shortest haircut I’ve had since I was born.

Ah, you’re thinking “it’s a haircut, not a shaved head.” And you’re right. It’s still not shaved bald. Maybe someday. But for now, I’ll just live with this style for a while and see how I like it. And so far, I do!

(I only look this smug in photos.)

Hopefully that one wasn’t too scary. Don’t get lost in the fuzzy pattern. But wow, look at those ears. Have they always looked that funny?

It’s back to Biking for me.

Many years ago, I was an avid cyclist. (I keep saying biker, but I guess the word is cyclist. I’m not a big guy in a leather jacket riding a Harley. I’m a computer nerd trying to get in shape and save a few bucks on gas. Gotta conjure the right picture here.)

But for the last few years, I’ve been more or less sitting on my butt.

So I finally got motivated or inspired or tired of declining fitness, and went and got a shiny new red bike! It’s Specialized Allez 2007 model. But more importantly, it’s 6 pounds lighter and much better tuned than the other bike I’ve been riding for the past 25 years.

I’ve been riding this new bike for the last week. My endurance is increasing. Next I’ll try to work on speed, and try to maintain higher speeds. I’m not shooting for the Olympics or the Tour, but I am trying to make cycling more of a lifestyle, and replace some reliance on my 19 mpg pickup.

Hopefully I will post more details about my experiences in the future. (umm, like maybe getting used to clipless pedals. My knee is about halfway healed.) But for now, I’ll just say I’m having a blast getting back into cycling.

This is just a silly experiment.

update: I probably won’t have this on very often. it really eats up my computer’s CPU.

I have put together my first video to post on the web. I chose Vimeo because of their high quality, clean, and quick site.

http://vimeo.com/343685

I’d really like to hear what suggestions or comments you might have about the video. Were there things that bugged you? Things I should do differently in my next video? Of course there are some things that I’d like to differently, like include more music.

The whole video is shot and mastered in high definition, so if there are parts that you’d like to see in much higher quality, please let me know what sections those are.

http://vimeo.com/343685

Enjoy!

About a month ago, I set up my del.icio.us account to send a daily post to this blog, containing the bookmarks that I had added that day. Now that some time has gone by, I realize that this has mainly just cluttered up my blog. The point of doing this was to share my bookmarks, and let you open a window to what I’ve been doing (bookmarking) lately.

So, I have added a del.icio.us linkroll to the sidebar which is now the window to my bookmark world, and I am deleting all of the del.icio.us posts that were made automatically to this blog.

I think this will be a cleaner setup.

My del.icio.us page is http://del.icio.us/nadavoid. My username is nadavoid. An RSS feed of my links is available at http://del.icio.us/rss/nadavoid.

As far as approaching an estimate… Well, you need to break the project down into some sort of manageable pieces. Most projects for me have mostly the same big pieces, but there are always something different about each one too.

Here’s the way I usually break down an estimate for a new site project

- planning & research
- graphic design (photoshop/gimp)
- frontend coding
- backend coding (cms integration)
- any special features or add-ons
- client consultation, support and training.

If you are planning on entering a lot of the content yourself, add a section for that - “content entry”.

Now, I may not list ALL of those when presenting the estimate to the client. If I think they’ll balk at the idea of having to pay me to do planning, I’ll just pad the other items with time from my Planning section.

See the comments on this post:
http://david.thelaniers.net/2006/12/how-do-i-invoice-for-good-planning.html
Interesting is the ADDIE method
Analysis/Discovery/Design/Implementation/Evaluation
You could use those as the primary categories for your estimates.
I know that’s way too much detail for probably most projects, but it’s good to have it rattling in the back of your mind somewhere. - that there’s more to the work, than just Design and Implementation.

So, as far as pricing based on the number of pages, I would just keep that info (the number of pages) as something that clues you in to how much work will be involved in the other categories… how many variations of the design, how flexible should the backend of the CMS be, how many special features, etc etc.

I would definitely recommend using a CMS. It’s not as crucial to use a CMS when all of your design is controlled by a CSS file. But the benefit of using a CMS comes when you want more flexibility - including allowing users to update their own content, and changing the HTML structure (site-wide, or just for a section).

You’re talking to a moderate CMS junkie here, so I would probably use some sort of a CMS for even 5-page site.

CMSs to consider

I have very limited knowledge regarding all of these except typo3, with which I’m very familiar.

CMS Made Simple - if you’ve never dug into a CMS before, and you need something that mimics how you’d normally think of a site, this is the one for you. Pages, Content, HTML Templates, CSS files. To me, it all makes sense, just by looking around. And it’s extremely well-suited to making clean frontend code.

If you have a little more time to learn and explore, there are some others you might consider.

Textpattern - probably the most highly revered CMS among coders and people who like clean code. To me, it’s a lot like CMSMadeSimple, but TXP is a bit more data-centered instead of page-centered. It might be more flexible in that way, since you can output that data however you want.

ExpressionEngine - I probably know the least about this one. But it seems to be very well supported, and well-liked. It’s definitely in the top CMSs list. It’s a commercial product, but there’s a free version for Personal and non-profit use.

modX - it’s pretty new. looks very powerful.

TYPO3 - the granddaddy. probably the most complex, and the most powerful. Allow a month to learn it. And find a tutor and ask questions.
typo3.com - overview info
typo3.org - for site developers

final note: This post began as an email to a colleague. Then I realized that others might benefit from these thoughts as well, so here you go!

Here’s a nifty gem in Pathfinder. I’ll admit, it’s pretty geeky, but if you’re a mac coder doing stuff on the command-line at all, you’ll dig this.

If you have Pathfinder installed, just go to File -> Reports -> Man to PDF. Type in the command or program you want the man page for. Select it from the list, and boom, you’ve the manual for it as a PDF. I think this is cool because I can easily have it open in a separate window from my terminal window, plus, it seems like I can explore the man page more quickly.

Here’s an example, for the ‘ls’ command.

ls.pdf

cheers!

I just read this post, and I agree very much. Your time is worth so much more than money. And some simple rules can strengthen your good decisions.

When using the typo3 extension “rtehtmlarea” there is a compatability issue with Firefox 2.0.0.3. The issue is explored on the typo3 bugtracker here and here. Toward the bottom of the list of comments you’ll find the solution. I’ve tried it, and it works. Here’s the boiled down solution.

in this file:
sysext/rtehtmlarea/htmlarea/htmlarea.js in line 85
change this:

HTMLArea.is_wamcom = (HTMLArea.agt.indexOf("wamcom") != -1) || (HTMLArea.is_gecko && (HTMLArea.agt.indexOf("1.3") != -1));

to this:

HTMLArea.is_wamcom = (HTMLArea.agt.indexOf("wamcom") != -1) || (HTMLArea.is_gecko && HTMLArea.agt.indexOf("1.3") != -1 && HTMLArea.agt.indexOf(".1.3") == -1);

Then disable the compressed scripts option for rtehtmlarea in the extension manager.

And, remove from typo3temp all files that start with rtehtmlarea. Clear the cache and Firefox, and you’re good to go!

So, you’ve started using typo3, and you’ve even built a couple of web using typo3. Then, of course, you’ve heard of typoscript, and seen things like this:

lib.something = TEXT
lib.something.value = hello there.

Well, have you ever wanted to just append a value, or slightly change an existing value?

Welcome, :=

Here’s an example:

lib.something.value = hello there.
lib.something.value := prependString(Umm, )
# results in “Umm, hello there”

Here are all the functions that are available, copied right out of doc_core_ts.

prependString: Adds a string to the beginning of the existing value.
appendString: Adds a string to the end of the existing value.
removeString: Removes a string from the existing value.
replaceString: Replaces old with new value. Separate these using “|”.
addToList: Adds a comma-separated list of values to the end of a string value. There is no check for duplicate values, and the list is not sorted in any way.
removeFromList: Removes a comma-separated list of values from a comma-separated list.

For all of you intermediate TYPO3 configurators out there, I know your gears are turning already, thinking about all the times you wished you could use something like this!