July 1, 2008
I’ve been using WordPress blogging software for about four years now. I started messing around with themes pretty early on in the process. My approach has not really changed too much over that time span. I start by going on-line and just browsing through themes that are available to down-load and use. There are tons of them available and usually I’ll hit more than one that looks pretty good. I download it, and then I start messing with it, making changes so that it perfectly fits what I want. I am not really inclined to learn all about CSS, PHP or exactly how WordPress works. I just change, save and refresh and usually I eventually get where I want to go. But now, those days are over. Tessa Blakely Silver’s new book “WordPress Theme Design” has made it possible for me to quickly learn the basics, without getting bogged down in minutiae and tons of documentation. This has been a real life-saver for someone who just wants to knock out a nice WordPress theme. I do have to admit though, I’ve learned a number of things about web design that relate to quite a bit more than just WordPress.
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June 28, 2008
A few days ago Karl Seguin made available a free e-book, Foundations of Programming. The link will take you to his blog, where there are two different links for downloading the book. It is released under a Creative Commons License.
I haven’t read the book yet, but intend to do so and do a full review. I thought it would be good to point it out now for those that might want to grab it. I do know that Seguin was an MS MVP and the book is MS centric in the technologies described, code samples, etc. This may help you decide if you want to go grab it or not. It looks to deal with rather broad issues that are applicable to other languages, so I’m not saying it is useless if you aren’t using .net or something, but that is the orientation of what I saw skimming quickly over the book.
June 24, 2008
It seems that it wasn’t long ago that Google was just a search company. The number of on-line products that fly under the Google moniker, today, is impressive. Google has moved well beyond it’s office-suite-like applications and excelled with everything from mapping to blogging to 3-D drawing. “Google Apps Hacks” is a new book from O’Reilly, published in conjunction with their Make magazine. This volume presents the reader with 141 hacks in an attempt to get the most out of a wide array of Google’s on-line applications. The result is a quick ride that is rather fun and while a bit shallow at times, provides a great overview of just how much is available out there.
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June 22, 2008
I’m a big Wil Wheaton fan. Probably the first time I ever saw him was when I went with my brother to watch Stand by Me at the movie theater. My next exposure, was of course, when Wil played Wesley Crusher on STNG. After that I mostly lost track of what Wil was doing. It wasn’t until a number of years later that I bumped into a post by Wil on slashdot, did some googling, and discovered his blog (currently though he blogs at WWdN in exile).
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June 16, 2008
Hackerteen is an interesting new project, a graphic novel being published by O’Reilly. What makes it interesting is not just that this is a rather new direction for O’Reilly but that this is, to my knowledge, a rather unique publication in that it seeks to educate teenage youth about an array of issues ranging from privacy, free software, security and the impact of politics on personal freedom as it relates to the use of technology. Making topics like that exciting, and understandable to a young person may sound like a tall order, and I think it is.
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May 24, 2008
It doesn’t seem like it has been 3 years since the Mambo dev team split and a new content management system, Joomla! was born. Over the last few years Joomla has grown to be very popular and has very strong developer and user communities. Joomla is extremely flexible and a wide array of extensions exist that allow the system to provide many different capabilities. In “Joomla! A User’s Guide”, Barrie North provides everything needed to get anyone up and running with a Joomla based site, even if they have little or no experience with creating web sites or applications.
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May 22, 2008
I remember the first time I saw a program I had written after the interface had been revamped by a designer. I had been pretty happy with what I had made. It worked very well and met the client’s requirements. It was extremely functional and I thought it didn’t look bad either. But when I saw the new interface, not functionally different, just so much better looking, I was really blown away. My application had gone from useful to cool. (That might be a slight exaggeration, it was still just a database app but it sure looked cool to me.) Since then I’ve learned to primarily leave the user interface work to the experts in that arena, and I stick to the getting the functionality in place. But sometimes I don’t have the luxury of a design team at my disposal. Or when I do, I still need to be able to talk to them and discuss what is going on. I found Dr. Ji Young Park’s new book “Visual Communication in Design” to be a friendly and accessible introductory primer in visual design.
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May 17, 2008
Just checking to see that the upgrade went well.
April 27, 2008
April 21, 2008
The Groovy language is relatively new on the scene. I confess that I had not even heard of it until early this year when I came across a Developer Works article about unit testing with Groovy, written in 2004. So I am a little late to the party, but the article did intrigue me and the new addition to the Pragmatic series, “Groovy Recipes” came along at just the right time for me to jump on board. This book is a no-nonsense, solid introduction to groovy. It is specifically written with the experienced Java programmer in mind, but I found it useful even though my Java experience is primarily as a hobbyist. Davis brings his extensive experience with Groovy and Java to the table and has written an excellent primer and reference that is fully worthy of the Pragmatic label.
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