blog | CreateSean Web Design

The End of 2009

Thursday December 31 2009

Today is the last day of 2009. Personally I have had a pretty good year. From a business perspective it hasn’t been very successful. Only two clients, one of which flaked out on me mid contract. My second client site of the year should be finished as very soon. I’m just waiting on access to the the hosting server to transfer files and then complete testing on paypal integration. For some reason I’ve never been able to get the paypal sandbox to work when using localhost—even with a no-ip internet address set up.

For my current client I switched designers and have a kick ass design to show off once the site goes live. I will additionally be using this same designer to redesign this site and blog.

Now on to 2010. I really need to figure out a way to attract clients. Here in Korea, due to my limited Korean language skills, I’m really limited to the English speaking expat community. This makes it extremely difficult to get local clients. My current client is also looking for a redesign of a magazine site which I will be taking on. I’m also waiting to hear back in the first week of January from a designer about doing the development for one of her clients.

Ideally I would love to regularly do development for other designers. I find development interesting and fun to do and have little talent for design.

During 2010 I’ll be ramping up my plans to move back to Canada. You can read more about that over at Repatriate Me! where I blog my plans to move as well as pictures and videos of life in Korea. It’s all about transitioning—what I’ll miss about Korea, what I’m looking forward to in Canada and all the paperwork involved in moving a family back to Canada including getting a visa for my wife and ensuring that my Kids have their Canadian citizenship and are ready for English schools. In summer 2010 I’m making a scouting trip to Ottawa to look at housing, schools, business regulations, talk to banks and a bunch of other things I haven’t even thought of yet.

I’m also going to let EEforums4You expire due to a lack of business. I launched last April or so and have only received two jobs in that time. Clearly there isn’t as large a market as I had thought. I was expecting to get 1-2 forums a month but that never materialized so I’m going to let it go.

This past week I started reading PHP for Absolute Beginners and am now in chapter 3. There is a lot of jargon and concepts that I’m having some trouble wrapping my head around. But I am planning on working my way through the book and doing all of the exercises. Once I’ve finished that I would like to learn some basic CodeIgniter so that I can start developing add-ons for ExpressionEngine. My first add-on will likely be a subscribe to comments without commenting plug-in/extension. I think that’ll be a plugin but at this point am not exactly sure.

Also with PHP I figure I need to come up with a couple of projects so that I can continue to practice and not forget anything that I have learned. My only plan at this point is the “subscribe w/o commenting” add-on. Maybe I’ll start scouring the forums looking for add-on requests that haven’t been filled and build a couple of those. But first I need to get the basics down.

Looking back on my 2009 goals I achieved 1, 4 and to a point 6. I did redesign this site, but did it myself and while it looks better than the first version I recognize that it is a little flat looking. Anyhow as soon as I get the final payment from my current client I’ll be paying my designer to make a smoking hot design for CreateSean.

Sean inscribed these words of wisdom on Thursday Dec 31, 2009 at 10:16 AM

| tags: clients, codeigniter, goals, php, add-ons, canada, |

Season’s Greetings

Thursday December 24 2009

Today is Christmas Eve and I wanted to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a happy New Year.

Sean inscribed these words of wisdom on Thursday Dec 24, 2009 at 03:27 PM

| tags: general, holiday, |

ExpressionEngine 2.0 Public Beta

Thursday December 03 2009

ExpressionEngine 2.0 Public Beta has finally been released. You can read the announcement here or head over strait to the public beta section for all the details.

I’m excited about the public beta but have no time to play with it until after Christmas. Right after Christmas I’m going to be redesigning this site and will at that time see if I can port it over to EE2.0. Would be nice to be running what I want to use with clients.

Congratulations to the whole team at EllisLab—I know this will be a great product and am really looking forward to working with it.

Sean inscribed these words of wisdom on Thursday Dec 3, 2009 at 03:34 PM

| tags: |

Breadcrumbs in ExpressionEngine

Wednesday November 18 2009

I’m working on a site and for the first time am setting up breadcrumbs with ExpressionEngine. Since I’m not using the structure module which as I understand it has a plugin tag I had to figure out a way to do this myself. With a little google help I found a plugin called Crumbee which got me a large part of the way there.

The problem was that I ended up with a lot of extra pieces in the breadcrumb including “site” (my renamed index.php), cat (Category URL Indicator) and a couple of template names. In the comments to the plugin there’s a way to remove them. This worked, however there was a side effect in that now the links didn’t work and when clicked refreshed the page and added a new gibberish link to the breadcrumb.

A little investigation later and I found that the plugin had a couple of single curly quotes on line 49. Replacing line 49 with the following fixed the problem:

$this->return_data .= " <a href='/$url'>". ucwords($crumblabel) ."</a> ". $delimiter; 

After that I noticed that this plugin didn’t pull out the last segment of the URL which I wanted displayed but with no link. Fortunately @low has a way to pull the last segment into an ExpressionEngine variable.

Then I discovered that this resulted in the last segment displaying with my url separator meaning that “This is a Blog Title” ended up being in the breadcrumb looking like this “this_is_a_breadcrumb” which I did not like. I searched for a find and replace plugin and Low to the rescue again with EE Find and Replace.

Yes everything looks fine except that Crumbee is adding the breadcrumb separator in front of the first crumb. Time to find a plugin to strip characters from the beginning which I remembered existed but could remember the name. In the end I found it—trimmer but in the process of looking I found JackMcDade’s fabulous plugin URI Prettify which auto strips the url separator and automagically adds sentence case back to the segment.

Out with find and replace in with uri prettify. Now everything looks great. Find and Replace is still a great plugin and I know I’ll use it again, but URI prettify is better for this particular job.

My final code is this:

{exp:trimmer left="25" }{exp:crumbee delimiter="&rsaquo;"}{/exp:trimmer} {exp:uri_prettify uncap_keywords="yes" keywords="a|is"}{last_segment}{/exp:uri_prettify} 

hope this helps someone.

Sean inscribed these words of wisdom on Wednesday Nov 18, 2009 at 05:44 PM

| tags: expressionengine, code, breadcrumbs, plugin, |

PHP for Absolute Beginners

Monday November 16 2009

I just ordered PHP for Absolute Beginners which should arrive sometime around Christmas which is right when I start a 10 week vacation from teaching. Clearly I will have lots of time to go through this book and learn. I’m planning on doing every exercise in the book from cover to cover. Hopefully by the time I’ve finished the book I will have the fundamentals of PHP down.

Why a book? Well I learn better from books than reading online. Also because my knowledge of PHP is limited to opening and closing a php statement I am truly an absolute beginner and will benefit from a very structured approach. Additionally a book will allow me to annotate the pages, which is something you cannot do with a web site. Once I’ve gone through this book and learned the basics I plan to start in on CodeIgniter so that I can make add-ons for ExpressionEngine.

Sean inscribed these words of wisdom on Monday Nov 16, 2009 at 02:18 PM

| tags: codeigniter, reading, php, |