This version of the blog (i.e., this look) is about two years old now, which is plenty old enough in blog terms. After months of delay, this week I’ll finally put up the new look. Mostly this post is a heads-up (i.e., if you see anything amiss, please let me know), but I also wanted to explain my thought process in coming up with this new design. As many of you are trying to learn the behind-the-scenes steps and mentality in creating a Web site, I hope this will be of use to you. Continue Reading…
Archives For wordpress
As part of my [intlink id=”2947″ type=”post”]January-February 2012 downtime[/intlink] (which really turned out to be February-March), I’ve been going through a stack of books, and a virtual stack of ebooks, that I’ve had lying around for way too long. One of the first books from that stack that I read was “Technical Blogging“, by Antonio Cangiano. I bought the ebook through Pragmatic Programmer‘s Black Friday sale back in November, and it’s available through Pragmatic Programmer, or Amazon, of course. Overall, I was quite impressed with the book, and I think it’s going to help me a lot. Before I discuss the book in detail, a quick bit of perspective… Continue Reading…
I’ve been contacted a couple of times now by the people behind CodeLobster, a PHP-centric IDE, in the hopes that I’d review/mention CodeLobster on this site. Now, CodeLobster only runs on Windows, which means I haven’t, and probably won’t, use it myself (I primarily use a Mac, only using Windows for testing purposes), but I have no problems mentioning products and sites here that I don’t personally use, because such things may still be of use to you (you, whoever you are, presumably are a separate entity with your own interests, needs, etc., and are statistically more likely to be running Windows). Anyway…
So, CodeLobster is an IDE for PHP that runs on Windows. It’s available in both a free and “professional” version, the professional version costing $100 (US). The free version comes with an HTML editor and inspector, a CSS editor, a JavaScript editor, a PHP editor, and a PHP debugger. This all includes the standard features such as code completion, code collapsing, browser preview, project management, FTP, and so forth. The professional version includes all of those features, plus plug-ins for specific tools and frameworks: CakePHP, CodeIgniter, Drupal, jQuery, Joomla, Smarty, Symfony, WordPress, and Yii. In other words, the professional version gives you code completion, contextual help, and so forth for these additional tools that you may also be programming in.
As I said, I haven’t personally used it, but if you’re looking for a PHP/Web Development IDE, it may be worth checking out.
For some time now I’ve been planning on doing a major overhaul of the DMCInsights.com Web site. I have many goals for the revised site:
- A simpler, cleaner design, better for presenting long blog posts and code
- Integration of the blog into the main site
- Better promotion of my books
Over the past year I’ve flagged designs and designers that appeal to me, in the thought that I’d use a custom design for the site. As a last bit of research, before hiring a designer, I looked at available WordPress themes (WordPress is perfect for me as a content management tool). What I found, and what I’m using, is the Carrington WordPress Framework, and I’m so happy that I did. Continue Reading…
