RasterWeb!

I was watchin a video from Markus Sandy that featured an interview with Mena Trott of Six Apart. I often work while having videos playing on my second monitor, so I was just-barely watching, but as I was, I almost thought I was watching a White Stripes video. Am I the only one who sees a resemblance?

Luckily, the “Mena Trott Six Apart” text reassured me as to who it really was…

Did I say I was using osCommerce? I’ve switched to Zen Cart, which so far, is looking much better… I’ll post a review once I get deeper into it.

As for osCommerce, I started down the path of customizing the templates and layout, and started to get fed up. I’ve been using XHTML for over 5 years now, and when I have to move code from HTML 4 to XHTML that’s not much fun or a good use of my time. Since Zen Cart is a fork of osCommerce, which is much closer to a standards-based application (XHTML+CSS) I switched. More on this as we get deeper into it.

One of the strengths of WordPress has been that they say they “focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability” and while this isn’t always 100% correct, it’s mostly correct… enough to allow you to not worry about the details and focus on what you can do with the application.

Exciting times we live in, eh?

Good gosh, how could I have not recommended Human Dog before!

You know those goofy viral videos that are sort of funny? Well, Human Dog is like that, only well done, with good production values, and what appears to be good writing, and it’s actually funny and… Ok, I suppose it’s nothing like those goofy viral videos, except that they are “video on the internet…” done right.

I ended up wasting too much time today trying to add a feature to a CMS I wrote a few years ago.

See, between the code, the templates, and the database, it passes an id to keep track of each piece of content. I had to add the ability to write out static text files for a Flash application to read in. (What, Flash can’t read data from MySQL yet? On a sidenote, I actually thought about adding a feature like this years ago as a file cache that would use includes rather than dababase hits. I might still do that, but anyway, back to our story…) The application uses the id, but not the path, which is what I needed. My first attempt added about 10 lines of code, but didn’t work due to the path variable not being there. After much thinking about the code I’d need to write, I finally realized I didn’t have to write any more code than the 10 lines I already wrote! I just needed to add one line to a template file to pass the path data as a hidden variable.

I like to keep things simple, and use GETs and POSTs whenever possible rather than cookies and session variables which always seem to cause problems in the apps I’ve been given to work on in the past…

Anyway, that feature is done, and it’s on to the next one…