Raible Designs

San Francisco - here I come!

I'm sitting in Denver's aiport, getting ready to jump on a plane and head to San Francisco for the Ajax Experience. Like most No Fluff shows, this one has 2-3 sessions I'd like to see during each time block. My primary goals are 1) to learn a lot 2) to blog about each session I attend, and 3) to get a good sense of what each Ajax framework does well. Hopefully there will be lots of demos I can link to.

On Friday night, a few AppFuse enthusiasts and I are getting together at the Thirsty Bear. If you'd like to join us, leave a comment and show up around 8:00.

Better client-side validation with Prototype

I'd love to see something like Really easy field validation with Prototype integrated into Commons Validator and other web frameworks' validation engine. The only hard part would be looping through form elements and adding classes with the validation information. Other than that, it doesn't seem like it'd be too hard to implement. Hat tip to Ajaxian.com.

CSS Framework Design Contest Winner and Runoff

I've tallied the votes as posted to the mailing list. Here's the results:

• puzzlewithstyle: 6
• andreas01: 4
• deliciouslyblue: 4
• madeyourcss: 4
• fuseapp001: 4
• simplicity: 4

Congratulations to Mattias Fjellström for his winning Puzzle with style entry! The themes not listed here received 2 votes or less.

Based on these results, it looks like we need to have a runoff vote (for 2nd and 3rd place) between andreas01, deliciouslyblue, madeyourcss, fuseapp001 and simplicity. To place your vote, send an e-mail to [email protected] with "My favorite runoff theme is XXX" in the body. Voting will end at midnight (MDT, GMT-6) tomorrow night.

NOTE: "madeyourcss" had 6 votes sent to the mailing list, but 3 were from the same person. It might have been 4 that were sent from the same person, but since there's a runoff, I decided to add it to the mix.

New Colors (again)

I've just completed another round of re-working the colors and header images on this site. If you click on the different category headings (i.e. Java, Mac OS X or Open Source), you can see the other color schemes. If you like one of the category theme's better than the default one, let me know.

I also did some tweaks to get everything working in IE. What a pain in the ass that browser is. For some reason, if anything in the "main" part of the website (where the blog entries are) is too wide - IE shoves everything down the page, including the top nav bar and the right sidebar. It's so bad that a simple paragraph with "margin-left: 10px" doesn't work. With Firefox and Safari, it moves over properly and overlays the sidebar if that's what it takes. Because of this, there's a potential that wide posts in this site will make the sidebar drop to the bottom of the page. For the nav bar, I changed it to be absolutely positioned, so it should always be present.

Other IE issues include: 1) the calendar icon is a transparent .png (I'll probably have to change it to a .gif) and 2) the nav bar's "selected" items are up a pixel or two and contain a bottom border. While these are minor issues, I would like to figure out how to make IE more tolerant of item width's in the #main section. Let me know if you have any tips or tricks.

Studio7Designs

Andreas Viklund is the original designer of this site's layout. Last night he pointed out a cool new site that showcases another set of open source web design templates.

Aran and Pat, also known as open source template designers Nautica and snop, have launched a new and extremely pretty website: Studio7Designs.com. The site is announced as a "network of professional designers", and it will show off both open source website templates and stock photography. Pat is one of the designers whose work I truly admire (see the Lazy Days template to understand why) and Aran's Nautica-templates are great examples of the simple design style that I like, so the site is well worth a visit.

Like Andreas, I think their Lazy Days template is truly awesome. I wonder how hard it would be to port it to the CSS Framework?

Wireless in NYC

What's worse than staying at a high-priced hotel and having to pay for internet access? Staying at an old NYC hotel where the free (wireless) internet access doesn't work. Even worse, there's a plethora of available networks nearby. 2/3 of them are protected, and the rest simply don't work with my Mac. I'm starting to get pretty frustrated with the wireless on this MacBook Pro - especially since it worked nearly *every time* on my old PowerBook. I should probably take it into the Apple Store next week. The strange part is I can get a connection just fine at my client and Starbucks. It's weird staying in a hotel room and not having internet access - especially when traveling for business.

Update: Strangely enough - when I got back to my room tonight, there was a new wireless connection and I got a full/fast connection. Go figure.

Rebooted

As you can hopefully see, I've rebooted the HTML version of this site. I apologize to anyone using IE - I haven't even looked at the site using IE. Everytime I startup Parallels on my MacBook Pro, it locks up the system and I have to reboot. Installing this new theme was pretty painful, mostly because I had to do it with a 20K connection through my cell phone. I'm staying at The New Yorker Hotel in NYC, and even though they advertise "free wireless", it doesn't work for me.

I hope you like the new theme - clicking on the different categories will give you different variations of it. Clicking the "Roller" category will allow you to see version I'll be contributing back to the Roller project. If you see any issues at all, please let me know. Most of them should be fixable with a bit of CSS. The only thing I still need to do is figure out how to get Roller to use the last entry's title in the <title> tag. Google loves good titles.

Update: OK, so most people don't like the reboot - including folks on the CSS Reboot site. Personally, I like the new layout, but agree that the default colors need work. I do like some of the alternative colors, like The Web category's. I'm open to suggestions - what would you like this site to look like?

Update 2: The colors might suck, but my Sitescore results have gone up significantly. The funny thing is the main thing I'm lacking is different titles on each page.

Update 3: I solved the title problem. You can do this in your Roller templates too if you like.

#set( $xmap = $pageModel.getRecentWeblogEntries(1,'nil') )
#foreach( $day in $xmap.keySet() )
   #set( $recentEntries = $xmap.get($day) )
   #foreach ($var in $recentEntries)
       #set ($title = $var.title)
   #end
#end
    <title>#showWebsiteTitle() | #if ($page.Name == "Weblog") $title #else $page.Name #end</title>

Upgraded to Roller 2.2

I spent some time this afternoon and upgraded this site to the soon-to-be-released Roller 2.2 (release notes). Please let me know if you see any issues.

Upgrading Roller is the first step in preparing for tomorrow's CSS Reboot. I don't know if I'll have time to create a new theme and use it on this site, but I hope to give it a try. I'm on the plane for 4 hours tomorrow, so I should be get something done.

As part of the upgrade, I fixed search for this site. The problem was caused by using $dateFormatter when viewing search results. My guess is that variable is not in Velocity's context after searching.

Heading to the Big Apple

May is shaping up to be quite the travel month. Next week I'm heading to New York City to put on a 5-day seminar for a client. Topics include: Web Frameworks, JSF, Ajax, Spring, Spring Web Flow, Hibernate, Caching and Performance, Deploying to Production, Comparing CMS Applications, eCommerce in Web Applications, Sharing with RSS and Atom, Acegi Security, Storing User Preferences, Source Control with Subversion and Coding Standards/Project Management. Yeah, a whole slew of stuff. There's nothing like doing a customized seminar when the client gets to pick whatever topics they like.

The only things I'm a little light on are Comparing CMS Applications, eCommerce and Storing User Preferences. For Comparing CMS Applications, I'm going to talk about Alfresco, Drupal, Joomla, Magnolia, OpenCMS and Plone. I'll be talking about ease of installation, ease of use, community and support, extensibility and performance. One thing I plan to do is zing CMS providers about eating their own dogood. As far as I can tell, neither Alfresco nor Magnolia use their own CMS for their websites. Of course, they might not be developing a "CMS for the web", but that's what most folks tend to use CMS's for IMO. It should be interesting to see if the Java solutions have decreased their installation times. Drupal, Joomla and Plone all took under a minute to install (on OS X) the last time I tried. If you happen to work on one of these applications and want to point out a kick-ass site developed with your software, please leave a comment.

As far as eCommerce solutions, most of the applications I've worked on recently just hook in with PayPal. This seems like the best solution because you eliminate the headache of credit card processing and in-house security/fraud preventation. If you've recently developed an e-commerce enabled application, what solution did you use? Did it work well for you? I'm also interested in solutions that were utter failures or a pain in the ass to use.

Lastly, as far as storing user preferences - I can only think of 3 ways to do it: cookies, database tables, and using the Java Preferences API. I'm sure I'm missing something. What solutions have worked well for you?

After returning from NYC, I'll be in Denver for 5 days before flying out to San Francisco for The Ajax Experience and JavaOne. In the midst of all the travel, I hope to finish up the CSS Design Contest, release Equinox 1.7/AppFuse 1.9.2 and do some performance tests with the T2000.

6 Years

Today is Julie and I's anniversary. It's hard to believe we got married 6 years ago. Actually, looking at Abbie and Jack, it's easy to believe it's been that long - they grow up awful quick. The fun part about this day is reflecting back on our wedding day. We got married in West Palm Beach, Florida - and had quite the turnout. It was a "destination wedding" as they call it, and we had friends and family fly in from all over the country. We made everyone fly down early (Wednesday) and had a golf tournament, went fishing on Julie's step-dad's boat, and lost money on a gambling cruise before our Saturday wedding. It was so much fun that we've been trying to think of an excuse to do it again.