Recently finished and launched a new website for a client. The website advertises a lice removal service and provides means for potential customers to learn about the service and get in touch with the business quickly and easily.
Lice Helper

The site is built on a CakePHP application and actually uses Wordpress for the blog section of the site. It doesn’t use Wordpress for any of the front end, but in the back end the standard Wordpress Dashboard is used to manage, edit, and write blog posts that are then displayed in the front end blog section.

The site also utilizes my meta description and title components, that allow the application to manage those parts of the page independently of the page content. Basically it just ties a URL to a title or a description, matches them up when pages are requested, and if it finds a matching record it outputs it in the proper place. Otherwise it will output a sensible default text.

I did enjoy working with CakePHP again as it’s been some time. But all the things I liked about it still apply. It’s still lightening fast from prototype to finished site, and design modifications couldn’t be any simpler. All in all, good project, and I think the end result looks and works very well.

I just recently finished up a Firefox Extension for the social video site Flixya. Extensions are all written in JavaScript and a sort of XML called XUL. Most of the framework was already written for me though, so I just hacked together the bits that worked with my code and nixed some of the old stuff.

Basically the extension grabs some relevant data like tags, the title, etc., from a video hosted on a number of online video sites like Veoh or YouTube. It then fills that text into the extension’s interface so user’s can edit or add to the provided information. Finally it posts all of the information to the user’s Flixya account where other users can view and comment on each other’s videos. The idea of using an extension like this is to streamline the video submitting process, and it works quite well.

Grabbing the text from all the various sites took a while and was the most difficult part of the process. Some sites like Veoh are coded in XHTML so they use CSS for presentation and a minimal amount of actual markup. This makes parsing a page much easier with either XPath or grabbing elements with the JavaScript getElementById() function. Other sites like LiveVideo use tables almost exclusively which makes finding a unique part of the HTML rather difficult and sometimes near impossible since the code around the desired text is so similar to other undesired text.

But the resulting extension works very well with a number of online video sites and allows easy posting to Flixya.

Flixya Firefox Video Publisher 2.0

Just finished a Google Gadget for the LocalWineEvents website. It uses the Google Gadget API, of course, which is in JavaScript, XML, a little HTML, CSS, and the obligatory IE CSS hacks.

Basically it asks the user where he or she lives when it’s run for the first time, then it grabs the corresponding RSS feed from LocalWineEvents.com, parses that, and produces the output as shown in the screenshot below. Clicking on the + reveals the event’s details and changes the + to a -, which can then be hidden again using the – button.

I used a new tool to make this gadget, since it’s primarily coded in JavaScript, called Aptana. It’s essentially a plugin for Eclipse, but the authors also provide a stand-alone client preloaded with the plugin. I liked it except that it didn’t detect JavaScript inside an XML document, which is the format for Google Gadgets. So I just coded the JavaScript in an HTML file and pasted the JavaScript into the XML as needed.

I was once again reminded how bad I am at using the GIMP or any other graphics editor. Must be missing that visual creativity gene…

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I created this project as part of a scholarship program and also for a research symposium.

It is made with Ajax, PHP, and XHTML.

The RSS Reader is called with a simple URL so it can be placed easily in a link or a block of text. Since XMLHttpRequest cannot access non-local content, PHP was used to mirror the feeds locally. This was done with Remote Procedure Calls to PHP functions.

The Timeline is built with the SIMILE Timeline API. It allows an XML file to be read and its contents displayed on a movable timeline similar to Google Maps. I then extended its functionality to allow users to input new events on the timeline. This was done with a PHP RPC since Ajax is unable to modify the server file system. And finally to allow quick navigation through the timeline I implemented a script that would jump to a specified year on the timeline.

It uses different technologies like PHP RPCs, XML parsing and manipulation, and other general Ajaxy techniques.