Come Out, Come Out Where Ever You Are

I made an update to the helper classes and comitted them to the changes in subversion and download version.  If a photo has been tagged with a location then the GeoWhere node is returned as a property.

Mi Picasa Framework, es su Picasa Framework

One of the best features that the Zend Framework offers is it's interface utilities to many of Google's webservices. Namely Picasa and YouTube. However, in my ever continuing effort to simplify my development tasks I started writing some helper classes that would make it more intuitive to retrieve some basic information. For example, give me all the Picasa galleries for the user kwylez or give me the first 15 YouTube videos in the entertainment category.

While this task is fairly easy with the ZF APIs the method names aren't always intuitive. This is where my little project began, as most do. Having a task that one would like to accomplish easily.
I have committed the first version of the helper class framework to subversion as well as a file download.

When prompted for a username/password when checking out of subversion the username is anonymous and password is empty.

The zip file/repository includes:

1. Custom helper classes
2. Usage examples

Class features:

1. Zend Framework style directory structure for easy autoloading
2. Picasa interface that retrieves meta information on author, galleries, and images
3. YouTube interface that retrieves information based upon a user or category

Dependencies

1. Zend Framework 1.5

CMS(pring) Cleaning

It seems that Joomla has won over the hearts and content management needs of two of my clients. I am currently converting over two static sites over to Joomla 1.5. Though Joomla is definitely my CMS flavor of choice it doesn't always fit an organization or person's web needs so I would recommend Drupal and Wordpress. I have had experience working with both and can't say enough praises about both of them. Not only are they FREE, but provide a flexible framework that satisfies 80% of a user's or organizations needs out of the box. The remaining 20% is fulfilled by a large online development community as well as their tried-and-true API.

So before someone tries to sell you on a monolithic, bloated CMS that constantly needs paid support, and costly upgrades see what an open source CMS can do for you.

Search and You Shall Find

Development has begun on a customizeable, portable search application for my clients. The main benefit of the application is that it can be tuned to many kinds of domain-specific search applications (e.g., corporate, personal, internet, vertical search, general search) as well as containing search engine tools such as a crawler. The application will be utilizing the recently released Zend Lucene Search component and Lucene.

Though there will be many out of the box features, the goal is to keep it as simple as possible so if customizations are required, which almost always are, then the code can be extended easily to fit a clients needs.

Turn That 404 Into a WOW

We have all seem them. Either the page has been moved, never been there or a weary developer has "fat-fingered" the text to their myspace page, but that is no reason to have a bad experience to go along with your request.

Worth A Read

Most industries have journals/periodicals that deal with the current trends in that particular industry. Unfortunately, I have been hard pressed to find the quanity of quality reading material that other industry professionals enjoy, i.e. Health, Financial, and Fashion. However, the few gems of literary noting are AIGA, php|arch and Practical WebDesign (from the makers of .net magazine). In the summer issue of Practical WebDesign(issue 166) some of the most note worth articles are "Build and eBay Empire", "Design Effective Layouts", "Build a Social Network".

Caching On RSS

We hold these truths to be self evident...you WILL pay taxes, you WILL eventually die, and the customer is ALWAYS right. It doesn't matter how strong you are eventually your body will give out, not matter how rich and powerful you are, the IRS just wants (and will get) its cut and finally not matter what business you are if the customer isn't happy then your business will fail.

What makes our customer's happy is having a website that performs well. This usually falls into different categories. It must have good design, usability and backend performance. In corywiles.com's ongoing effort to make the website and our client's webites perform as best as it possibly can I have added a new feature to the RSS feeds at the bottom of the site. (Made possibe by our good friends over at Zend)

Though the concept of caching has been around as long as computing itself, I have seen too many times where frequently requested content/widgets/applications are not cached. Don't be a victim of poor website performance. Insist that your web developer has cache on hand.