Anne Kowalski

Friday, November 02, 2007

Photography I Project Photos

I found these photos in my room today. They’re from the class I took last June/July, which kick started my interest in photography and SLRs.

The first one is of my six year old horse Cheyenne, with his mom Patty in the background. He was unimpressed by my first photo shoot.

This one is of some strange flower I found in the yard. I’m not sure what it was...when I shot it it was half dead. I used the sky as a background.

Sewing area still life. I have yet to use this silk, which my brother bought for me while on business in China. Its almost too pretty to cut into…

And the final one is of my Ruger Single Six. I consider this one of my stronger projects.

Ask for PHP 5, and You Shall Receive

After reading this post on the ExpressionEngine newsfeed, I was sold on PHP 5. (And also the fact that support for PHP 4 will be discontinued at the end of the year also had something to do with it.) I decided to ask my hosting provider InMotion Hosting when they were planning to move to PHP 5. Turns out they already had another server which was PHP 5 ready, so they moved my account overnight to the new server. Awesome.

I’ve been working with InMotion Hosting for almost a year now, and have zero complaints. I’ve always gotten quick responses and had every issue resolved, no matter how silly or mundane. All I have to do is ask.

Thursday, November 01, 2007

The Move is Almost Done

I’ve got most of what I want done on this site. In about a week I was able to go from a plain XHTML/CSS design to a complete EE site. I have a few more things I need to fix, such as the individual entry breadcrumb for my portfolio page and styling the login and search pages. (And there’s still some design elements I’m not sure about...but that’s easy to fix later.)

Overall it wasn’t too painful, just very, very involved because I was learning the system as I went along. I logged in a considerable amount of time searching the forums and RTFM. The good thing was that every problem I encountered, every question I had, was resolved by using these two resources. I definitely feel smarter than I did last week.

Since people do the same things in ExpressionEngine so many different ways, I thought I’d list out what I’ve done so far for this project. This site uses the personal version of EE.

Overview

Setup the blog entry section

This was pretty easy to do. I used most of the default EE settings, which work great for the typical blog. At this point I was hardly familiar with the template tags, variables, and parameters of EE so

“Chunk" the design

At first I kept everything in one template to get the hang of how things linked together in EE, and to focus on debugging the XHTML/CSS integration. But this became very overwhelming once I started working with more than one template. I ended up with way too many typos and broken links. Once I put the header, footer, top navigation, and sidebar into their own Web Page template files (which were referenced from within the other template files via {embed="template_group/template_name"} (and in some instances {embed="{my_template_group}/template_name"}), I was able to work faster, with fewer mistakes.

After I dug into the documentation a little more I discovered dynamically assigned global variables. This saved me a significant amount of time.

This is another thing I like about EE. You don’t need to jump in 100% in the beginning. You can start out manual, then as you get more comfortable with the system start automating things.

Setup a weblog for pages

It took a little while for me to wrap my head around the idea of using a weblog for something besides the traditional dynamic blog posts. I’m pretty comfortable now with the whole concept of weblogs now. Once I thought of it less as a blog post and more as dynamically generated content and sections, I started to get the hang of how to use them. I guess it is like how people trip up over the idea of nodes in Drupal.

Create the contact form

The email form capabilities included with EE are not very powerful. I used the Freeform module from Solspace instead. It gives many more options, such as input validation for any field(s) of your choosing. I put my contact form in a separate template.

Configure the portfolio gallery

This was one of the more involved parts of the site. I ended up setting up a weblog for this section. I’ll be writing more about that in a later entry.