The I.T. Life

Whos with me here? Ever since my time at NSCC, they have pushed the “portfilio” concept. I have seen its use, and lack there of. Yes, a portfolio is a great idea, espically in IT, and web, where we can put all our stuff in one location to show to a potential employer or a contract. Company portfolios are extreemly powerfull, to be able to give a presentation to a client and quickly show what you have down. On the other side, as a IT worker, to beable to show what you have in a very slick way can be just as powerfull. Now, I have never been asked for a portfolio in a interview, however I have been asked for work examples. My idea is for a very quick way to do this. I want basically a purpose driven CMS. I want to develop a product that has a uber slick install like wordpress, has a great backend, has a very customizable front end. I want it to be Ajax driven, PHP/MySQL, I want to use a solid open soruce framework, and I want it to be popular. But will it be? If you had this, would you care? Would the kicker for you be that you have a very powerfull back end, and a front that is so customizable you can create a flash template instantly? or a flex site for that matter? I’d like to hear from some guys in the community right now, users, and developers. What do you want, what do you need? What can make this something that you want to use? So, whos with me?

So there not mine. But I keep them in my toolbox, and use them regularly. So far everything I have ever needed to do Ajax related, has come from these libraries. So here they are, and a brief summary.

• Spry, by Adobe:
  • This is a great framework, though still very early, and a bit rough. It has a lot of excellent features. It has some of the more common items like sortable tables, tabbed interfaces, fun effects, all that jazz. It also has a very extensive XML library to it, it makes dealing with datasources a breeze, and takes most of the heavy work done. One of the best things this provides is a dreamweaver plugin that allows drag and drop use of all these tools. This will be a very very powerful library, once they get all the kinks worked out. My biggest complaint is that it is almost impossible to combine this XML capability with the rest of the library. It seems to die instantly
• Script.aculo.us:
  • This Library is very well known. It is based on Prototype, and is a very nice library. It’s more noticeable features are its easy as cake drag and drop, and its effects. It has a very large set of DOM utilities, and unit testing tools as well. It has a lot of support for incorporating with Ruby on Rails, and is already used by some of the biggest names on the net (Digg, and Apple for starters). This library has saved my ass a few times already, and its worth checking out.
• ASP.Net Ajax, by Microsoft:
  • So, if you are doing .Net work, then this is for you. Microsoft has a excellent Ajax library, that like Adobes, links in to there too (Visual Studio) and allows for drag and drop insertion of there fun toys. I haven’t used this in over a year, but from what I read, it has gotten much better, and it wasn’t that bad when I used it. What I loved about this, is how it allows you to link in back end code to the functions, so you can code a very slick Ajax app, without much js knowledge, or knowledge of how data goes back and forth between a server side and client side language.
• Lightbox 2:
  • This is a very small,1 purpose library. It is also very very cool. Basically, it allows you to load and view a full image, and overlay it on the screen. It makes slide shows, gallery’s and image previews a piece of cake.

Now, I have a few more links here that are based on the stuff above mostly. They are small additions or libraries, but expand these a lot.

Sortable Tables
Script.aculo.us Two Handle Slider

So,this morning I made some big changes to this site. I added a tag cloud, social networking links at the bottom of each post, google ads, and some more suttle things. There is a much larger ajax prescense now, and your posts are automatically checked for spam than approved. Also, I am tracking statictics. Just how many people view the site, and what pages they went to. Nothing personal. I am using a plugin for wordpress that records statistics from the blog.

Also, here is my current flickr stats

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