California Bonzing

Just wanted to shout out on behalf of California Bonzing. A friend of mine and ex-roomie, Austin, is a videographer and puts together clips of skateboarding and scenic California backdrops. His style is quite a bit different than your typical skate video. The analogy would go something like this.

California Bonzing's style to skateboard culture is like longboarding to surfing. It's about the style. It's about the lifestyle.

So check it out already!

California Bonzing video!

Oh, by the way...recognize the voice? Does anyone sense a career in voice overs?

Scrub it with AJAX

AJAX = Asynchronous Javascript and XML

Not sure if that means anything to you. Have you ever been to a web site, clicked something, and lo and behold the something magically changed right before your eyes? That magic is AJAX (or Flash depending on the site).

I won't get into the technicalities in this post, but rather point you in the direction of some resources I found useful.

Scriptaculous
This is probably the most popular AJAX/Javascript library right now. I'm making this assumption based on the number of people that have bookmarked the site on Del.icio.us. At this moment, there are 26,125 other people who have this site bookmarked. The closest AJAX library (in my bookmarks) is jQuery with 12,476.

Scriptaculous is built on another popular library, Prototype and has a strong following, I believe, because it is native in Ruby on Rails.

It's fairly straight forward to implement. The Scriptaculous site has a bunch of docs and demos on their site, but I'm a really big fan of video tutorials. If you're looking for an easy introduction to AJAX, check out this link.

After watching the video, I found it pretty straight forward to integrate AJAX into my blog

Thanks again!

Count your chips and cache them in!

I was pleasantly surprised to find out that caching wasn't super difficult to implement. I found this article on caching and knew that sooner or later I would have to implement it into my blog page.

What is caching?

To put it simply, caching makes websites perform faster and there are two ways (that I know of) that caching works.

Method 1. This is the caching that most people think of when they think of caching. Our internet browsers will save little snippets of web pages to be used if we return to a page. Because retrieving information from the internet is a lot slower than retrieving information from our hard drive or RAM, saving information locally will speed up sites we often visit.

Method 2. This is the method that I used for speeding up my site. The blog page of my site retrieves information from my Blogger account and then dynamically creates the HTML to be displayed. In plain English, my site was a greedy pig. If two people were to visit the same page, the server could not remember that a page had already been visited, thus it would recreate the page from scratch.

The solution. Caching, obviously. Now the second person that visits the page has the convenience of visiting a page that has already been generated and is less of a wait.

The savings. I was surprised how much time maybe 20 lines of code or so saved. It was taking some pages *gasp* almost 10 seconds to render. After the page has been cached, it's fractions of hundreths of seconds.

Now on to the fun stuff. Look out AJAX!!!

If your page is greedy and you're using PHP, I'd suggest taking a gander at the article.

Poor Scooty!

Hopefully you'll get a kick out of this one...

Last week I lost the only key to my scooter. For those of you that don't know my scooter, it's a beat up black 2001 Vespa with a red heart spray painted on the side. Her name is Weezy and she was the way she is when I bought her used about six months ago.

So the story goes...

Last week after class, I lost the key. And I know for sure it's in the house somewhere. I know this because I rode my scooter home and couldn't find the key before leaving the next day.

So it's been driving me crazy. If I would have lost it while I was out, I would have already come to peace with the key being gone, but since I know it's somewhere in the house I find myself as sort of a obsessive compulsive when doing anything at home.

I sorted through the trash before throwing it out. I shook all of my shoes thinking maybe it had fallen into one. I did a thorough cleaning of my room twice with no luck. I even pulled the washer out of the closet thinking maybe it had fallen through the cracks. Seriously, who pulls their washer out?

I may soon come to the fact that I just need to replace the key and all of the locks, but I know that once I do, that damn key will show up.

XHTML

XHTML = XML + HTML

Today I made my site XHTML compliant using this great validator tool from the World Wide Web Consortium. They're the reason why you can view and use the same site in Windows, Apple, Linux, etc. They call this interoperability, or the ability of a site or program to be cross compatible. This is why web applications have such a bright future.

Because of these standards, developers can focus more of their time on application features as opposed to compatibility with multiple systems. For example, GMail works on pretty much anything. Outlook, doesn't. And I imagine plenty of resources go into the development of Outlook, but since a lot of Microsoft's technology is proprietary as opposed to open source I imagine it's very difficult to create platforms that support their software. (If that's at all what Microsoft wants.)

Of course this really alters the business model, but that can be a topic of a totally different post.

So what does my site being XHTML complaint have to do with anything?

Nothing really. Someone could probably mine the data from my site, and I do get put a cool badge at the bottom of my page!

** Some of my blog pages are not XHTML compliant. This is because I am getting my content from a different site that isn't XHTML complaint. I'll probably get around to writing a script to fix that, but that opens a whole can of worms. I'll probably need to start thinking about caching my pages at some point as the page is slow enough already with all of the data transfer from Blogger to my site.

Flickr Rocks!

Come take a look at my pictures. I've had all these pictures over the years stored on my hard drive and am finally getting around to posting them on flickr. What's really cool about flickr (for the few of you that haven't used it yet) is that it behaves like a program, but is actually a website. This is a lot of the drive behind the Web2.0 movement. You may have heard of things like "web applications" and "software as a service." This is a great example of what that is.

So check out my photos already!

My gallery on my webpage.
My gallery on flickr.

It has definitely been a stroll down memory lane. Some of these pictures I haven't looked at in ages. And they brought a smile to my face.

IE Rant

So I was designing my site in Firefox and on Ubuntu thinking the beautiful things I was creating were universal. Then after hours of design, I went to have dinner with my parents and I was excited to show off my progress...and it looked like crap.

My mom runs Windows XP in 800x600 resolution and at 8-bits of color. It was almost like going back in time to Windows 98, but it really made me realize that I need to consider all configurations when designing my site. Especially since the majority of people surfing the net still use IE.

Things that were supposed to be transparent weren't. Menus were lost. Divs didn't line up. It was a disaster.

So I went home and booted up my old Windows machine (guess it's still good for something). I quickly looked up some fixes, applied them, and used my Windows machine to verify.

I guess the moral of the story is: hang on to your Windows machine...at least until everyone else wises up. :)

I love paisley!

I decided a while back that my site design sucked. I finally had some time where I could really get into the nuts and bolts of my site design. So I had a go.

I really wanted the site to look like a piece of paper on a backdrop, desk, wallpaper, etc. And I also wanted it to have a sort of drop shadow effect to give it an element of depth.

Played around with a few backdrops, but ultimately I decided upon paisley. I love paisley.

Check it out at www.seanchon.com!