AJAX: Not Greek to Me
March 19th, 2008
UPDATE: Finally after switching gears for awhile to catch up on some of my schoolwork (because it would suck to fail my senior year), I had some time to go back and make the Moving Box portfolio work more or less the way I wanted it to. Then I did it all over again for IE (everyone’s favorite part of web design), and now it’s finally live. You can check it out here.
Thanks to Prototype, I went from ideas to having a working page in about an hour. They’ve got a bunch of nifty AJAX objects for most common needs, and even a nice tutorial-style article that helped me get started. I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to learn the technique but doesn’t want to get too bogged down with details.
Since the Moving Box site runs Silk, I did everything as a plugin. I’m working on making it more general-purpose to try and expose pretty much all of the features of the framework via AJAX calls (Silk’s architecture actually makes this pretty easy). Soon it might be possible to run an entire site from one page load.
First thing’s first, though; I need to make things more accessible. A well known problem with AJAX is that it breaks bookmarking, the back button, and history. I’ve found a few useful articles that talk about ways to get around this, but haven’t started implementing anything yet. I’m definitely going to do so before unleashing this beast into the tubes, though.Wedding Video HD
March 3rd, 2008
The guys at Moving Box Studios are getting into the lucrative wedding video business and, being the web intern, it was my job to create a site that they could refer potential customers to. I whipped up a simple design and gave it brains with Silk—sort of overkill for a whole two pages, but I wanted to test out some new features and get more development time in. All content is in Textile so it will be easy to maintain.
This is the first site I’ve ever made where I didn’t have to change a single thing after cross-browser testing. It even worked out of the box in IE5!
Silk
January 26th, 2008
Silk is a simple PHP web framework for small to mid-sized sites that don’t need (or want) a database to store content. Site content is parsed directly from files and the directory hierarchy is massaged into a tree-based data structure called the “content tree.” Arbitrary metadata can be attached to any piece of content (using YAML syntax); this can be used to create complex named relationships between files.
Silk has templating features that separate content from design, allowing easy content management and updates. Other features include caching, object-oriented page design, an extensible plugin system, and many different content types by default (PHP, HTML, Textile, plaintext, Flash, images, etc).
Silk is still in its alpha stage. I generally don’t develop it unless I’m working on a web site that uses it, so I can’t really estimate when it will be “done.” Once I feel it’s ready for general consumption, I’ll post more info here. I’m currently expecting to release Silk under an open license.
Schocharie Ridge Farm
January 9th, 2008
I made this site for my mom's horse farm when I was a senior in high school. This was one of the first sites I did after my dark age of web design (frames, tables, DHTML... yikes). I think I came up with a pretty solid design for my first real shot at CSS. The site was originally built entirely with Notepad and MS Paint, though I later went back and photoshopped the graphics to get some decent anti-aliasing. I recently ported this site to Silk to make the update process easier (even though that happens once every blue moon).
