The how and why of my programming
Dark-Ape
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Homepage: http://www.dark-ape.com/
Posts by Dark-Ape
Two Freelance Projects I’ll Admit To
Feb 20th
AggieWomen.org
Earlier this month I completed a freelance project and launched a new website, AggieWomen.org. I’ll confess right now that this was one of my hardest projects to date. Why? Because I was not consulted in the initial development and had to pick it up after another developer quit in the middle of the promised work. Normally that might not be an issue, since I could just start from scratch or use modules I trust, but there were three problems from the client: 1) they was already expecting it ready soon, 2) they had already seen the WordPress back-end & liked of it, and 2) my client had been told that it could be made to do all their client wanted. No, I haven’t hunt the developer down yet, but they’re on my list…
Starting from where the other developer left off, I took 49 plugins down to 14 and 148 database tables down to 43. Why they felt the need to have four e-commerce plugins installed, I will never know nor feel the need to ask.
HHIBuckeyes.com
Although not a new release, I finished this mid-2011, I launched HHIBuckeyes.com for the Ohio State Buckeyes fans of Hilton Head Island, SC. The client did not want a graphic designer to do the template, so I presented several pre-made themes and had them pick one, then customized it to their taste and need. The homepage is content is completely controlled by the custom CMS, except for the bottom left graphic, with the image slider and all three text areas being editable. The newest feature for me, and my most liked feature, was the Schedule that shows the teams, kick-off times and scores for the season. For this I had to collect all of the logos and assign the teams to their divisions, but it was a custom module for the admin.
Yes, the headline is a joke! 
Monthly Book Review – January
Feb 1st
Last April I joined the Goodreads website as a way to get suggestions based off authors and series I like and have enjoyed previously. Since then I have added approx. 400 books to my “read” collection, added another 130 that I still want to read, and actually read 140 books. This year I set my reading goal at 150 books for the year, but it looks like I’ll go way over it as I read 38 books last monthly alone, with the really nice part being that nearly all of those books were recommendations from Goodreads!
Why am I mentioning Goodreads so much? Well, since I am reading all of these books, I want to share some of the better books and series that I’ve found, and since I rarely can explain the benefits of a book well, I’ll leave that responsibility up to Goodreads’ descriptions, covers, user reviews, and related books! I won’t be reviewing the books myself, though I may make the occasional connection to another series or author, but instead I’ll post some specific books or series each month that I really enjoyed from the previous month.
Enjoy! 
- The Quantum Thief (The Quantum Thief #1) by Hannu Rajaniemi
- This series reminds me a lot of Justina Robson‘s Quantum Gravity series.
- Staying Dead (Retrievers #1) by Laura Anne Gilman
- Hard Magic (Paranormal Scene Investigations #1) by Laura Anne Gilman
- This series is a part of the same city and storyline as Retrievers.
- The Pearl Wars (Skyship Academy #1) by Nick James
- Unshapely Things (Connor Grey #1) by Mark Del Franco
- Skin Deep (Laura Blackstone #1) by Mark Del Franco
- This series is part of the same world as Connor Grey.
- Fever Crumb (The Hungry City Chronicles Prequel #1) by Phillip Reeve
- Cinder (Lunar Chronicles #1) by Marissa Meyer
- Blood of Eden (Sloane Skye #1) by Tami Dane
- Dragon’s Ring by David Freer
- A followup novel, Dog and Dragon, is expected out this April.
- Tinker (Elfhome #1) by Wen Spencer
- Tiger’s Curse (The Tiger Saga #1) by Colleen Houck
Book of the Month: Cinder by Marissa Meyer
Cinder (Lunar Chronicles #1) by Marissa Meyer
Humans and androids crowd the raucous streets of New Beijing. A deadly plague ravages the population. From space, a ruthless lunar people watch, waiting to make their move. No one knows that Earth’s fate hinges on one girl…
Cinder, a gifted mechanic, is a cyborg. She’s a second-class citizen with a mysterious past, reviled by her stepmother and blamed for her stepsister’s illness. But when her life becomes intertwined with the handsome Prince Kai’s, she suddenly finds herself at the center of an intergalactic struggle, and a forbidden attraction. Caught between duty and freedom, loyalty and betrayal, she must uncover secrets about her past in order to protect her world’s future.
Geekend 2011 Notes
Nov 17th
Last Thursday night I received a call from my father telling me he was at this conference called Geekend, something I had never heard of before and had to get him to spell out for me. After about five minutes, of him talking while I was checking out the website, I was sold on it, told my bosses I’d be gone the next day and drove straight to Savannah to arrive around midnight. It was worth it.
Download: Geekend 2011 Session Notes; last updated 2011-11-17.
More >
Hello Ferengi, a WordPress Plugin
Nov 10th
In the time honored tradition of reusing other people’s hard work, I have combined the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition with ever-fun concept from Hello Dolly to create a new quote plugin…
For fans of Star Trek, or any Ferengi out there, I present Hello Ferengi, a Ferengi’s slave to teaching non-Ferengi the proper rules of business and profit! Hello Ferengi is a small, fun plugin which will display a random Rule of Acquisition on the top-right of every administration page… but is that all?
Of course not, because I know the two-hundred and forty-second Rule of Acquisition…
Shortcode and Rules
[ferengi num="7" tag="0"] ## "Keep your ears open."
- num: defaults to 0; accepts 81 values (see below) that will return a Rule
- 0: a random Rule from the 80 known Rules of Acquisition
- 6R: the Sixth Rule according to Enterprise canon
- … and 79 misc., non-sequential numbers ranging from 1-286
- tag: defaults to -1; defines if you want the ROA Number tag returned or not
- 1: always show the tag
- 0: never show the tag
- -1: only show the tag if getting a random Rule
For the avid Star Trek fans…
But there are only 285 Official Rules of Acquisition!
Rule #286 may only be an unoffical Rule of Deep Space 9‘s Quark, but it is a very good rule.
What is the difference between 6 and 6R?
The series Enterprise said the Sixth Rule was something different from a previous declartion, so I labeled it as 6 Revised, or simply 6R, and left Deep Space 9‘s version of the Sixth Rule as 6.
Oracle Day & Comic Books
Oct 10th
October 18, 2011
Back in 2007 I attended the first SQLSaturday event in Orlando, FL, so it seems fitting to me that on the 18th, just next week, I will be attending the first Oracle Day & Product Fair in Charlotte!
Join us for the inaugural Oracle Day and Product Fair 2011 to discover how the power of simplicity can change your IT from a supporting function to a force that drives business innovation.
Don’t miss this unique opportunity to hear multiple keynotes, attend technical breakout sessions and meet one-on-one with product/solution experts of Oracle’s Technology, Application, and Hardware pillars to discuss how you can transform your datacenter and power your cloud with hardware and software, engineered to work together.
October 29, 2011
After all that hard work and learning, I deserve some personal time, so I will be attending the Heroes Pop Swap event on the 29th! The event is sponsered by Charlotte’s favorite comic shop, Heroes Aren’t Hard To Find, and I will be there as browser, buyer and seller – I’ll have a 4′ table space with comics purchased in lots, typically poor condition, and personal purchases in mint condition. If it is on the table, I’ll probably let it go for anywhere from free to the price of the comic itself; I don’t want to know if the comic is worth $500 unless you’re going to offer me more than the price I paid for it! =P
The Frustrations of Freelance
Sep 27th
I don’t know about most freelance web developers, but I have several peeves when it comes to doing freelance work…
- I am not an artist. This is a personal one, but I am upfront about this prior to accepting a job. I ask for references to what they are looking for in design, functionality, and graphics before I start making the website. I also suggest template websites, artists I’ve worked with, and such as possible sources they may purchase, or that I can reference. The same goes for when they ask me about making a logo for them.
- Ask for a quote, but don’t haggle. I don’t haggle because I am a bad businessman as it is and they are already getting a decent deal. If they want a price quote, okay, but don’t get me going on the work and then try to knock the cost down. I rarely do hourly work; I create most websites as a flat-fee including two sets of minor revisions. I don’t know any other developers who do flat-fees because just tweaking templates can take a long time and revisions are just as timely.
- Deliver on promises timely. It is expected of me, so it should apply to the client as well. Clients need to keep me informed of changes or updates as they happen, not after I’ve done all of the work. Clients should also give requested materials in a timely matter, or keep me updated when they are delayed — a three-week quiet from the client, especially when I’m expecting something and still emailing them asking for it, is unacceptable.
- Professional websites require professional upkeep. This seems like it would make sense, but my greatest annoyance is seeing my time spent on perfecting everything I could be destroyed within a week because the client has thought of “a totally great idea” and modified something without regard to how it destroys the professional look they were going for. Some examples I’ve seen include them bolding, increasing or linking text in ridiculous amounts or places; a content management system is meant for use, but please understand the implications before doing so. Some clients will go as far as tweaking the code themselves, often with some WYSIWYG, with no real HTML knowledge.
These are my major peeves, but what about yours?
Goodbye GoDaddy, Hello CyberWurx!
Sep 13th
For anyone following developments of this blog, I would first like to apologize for the downtime the past week after GoDaddy updated some Apache “security concerns” and the site stopped working. After a couple days of emailing customer support back and forth, it came down to that GoDaddy support said that my .htaccess code was bad and they couldn’t help me because they don’t support non-GoDaddy scripts; which was stupid because some of their own GoDaddy features were in my list of things not working anymore… （╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
Result: Left them for CyberWurx once again! (づ｡◕‿‿◕｡)づ Yay~
I have had an account with Cyber Wurx since February 2005 and I have always been pleased with the service. I’ll confess that I strayed in 2010 to GoDaddy, when I started a new website, for their larger hosting space, but then it was a constant battle to get features working, so I am glad to be back with CyberWurx again. (Though I still maintained my other website with them.)
While GoDaddy‘s hosting is frelled, they are still a great resource for domain purchases and easy maintenance. If you want professional hosting and domain maintenance, you should check out Rackspace.com, though they are more for small to large businesses. A decade ago I was with HostRocket; who’s pricing was getting more outrageous then, yet seems almost desperate now. But overall, I like CyberWurx the best for hosting with reasonable prices, decent systems, excellent bandwidth and customer support that will rock your socks off!
Everything should be back up and running, but I am checking everything over connections and permissions just in case. I hope to have a real In The Works post by the end of the month outlining some of the things I’ll dealing with in Q4 and late into Q1 of 2012, including database administration and NetSuite.
Neeley’s Thirteen Rules
Aug 19th
These rules are courtesy of the StarFist series by David Sherman and Dan Cragg.
Neeley’s Thirteen* Rules for Staying Alive in Combat
- Incoming fire always has the right-of-way.
- Keep it simple, stupid.
- Keeping it simple is the hardest thing in the world.
- Never stand next to anyone braver than you are.
- If things are going too well, it’s an ambush.
- The easiest way is mined.
- The one thing you never run out of is the enemy.
- Infrared works both ways.
- Professionals are always predictable.
- We always wind up fighting amateurs.
- When the enemy’s in range, so are you.
- When in doubt, shoot until your magazine is empty.
- Remember the other twelve.
* I have seen a Fourteen Rules … version as well, which included “Never stand next to anyone dumber than you are,” but haven’t found it yet in the books I’ve read thus far.
iContact API v2.1: “No More Emails”
Aug 9th
I’ve been told that it isn’t proper to call this an API. All I have to say in response is: I don’t care; that is what I see it as, so deal with it. I know I skipped a lot of versions between v1.0 and this 2.1 one, but they were just never published.
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `icontact_errors` ( `varSet` VARCHAR(20) NOT NULL, `list_id` mediumint(3) UNSIGNED NOT NULL, `list_txt` VARCHAR(60) NOT NULL, `email` VARCHAR(120) NOT NULL, `fname` VARCHAR(90) NOT NULL, `lname` VARCHAR(90) NOT NULL, `addedon` TIMESTAMP NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP ) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;
Update: Custom Tags using jQuery 1.4.1
Aug 1st
Remember that pesky IE issue I was having with my Custom Tag for jQuery script? Well, it turns out that Internet Explorer is stuck up and just didn’t like the fact I created my own HTML tag to use… So, if you change the jTag selector to a div with a class of jTag, then everything works fine! Figures, huh?
（╯°□°）╯
$(document).ready( function() { $("div.jTag").each( function(){ var jTag = $(this); jTag.html('<img src="/images/loading.gif" alt="Loading..." />'); var jTagUrl = "http://www.example.com/CustomjQueryTags.php?"; var attrs = ['type', 'src', 'cat', 'rand', 'desc', 'limit', 'more']; $.each(attrs, function(i,a) { if(jTag.attr(a)) jTagUrl += '&'+a+'='+jTag.attr(a); }); jTag.load( jTagUrl, function() { jTag.replaceWith( jTag.html() ); } ); }); });
