Kodiak's Korner

I generally consider myself a back-end guy, preferring to program in languages like PHP to generate dynamic web pages. The front end and the user experience is still important, but that is the area that I, admittedly, give the least thought. I do make every effort on the server side to ensure usability and accessibility of my pages, but that’s generally where I stop. I’ve never been a fan of using JavaScript simply because a) you can never be sure that it will work in the user’s browser, b) every browser does it differently, and c) having JavaScript “widgets” on a page in a non-JavaScript browser generally means that there are things on the page that are not accessible–a big no no in my book.

My thoughts, however, are starting to change. Several months ago I discovered the YAHOO! User Interface library (or YUI for short), the same JavaScript library that adds all the dynamic eye candy you find on YAHOO! owned sites like Flickr and Upcoming.org. Like so many others probably have, I downloaded a copy of the YUI library, extracted the files, and played with the examples. Then, of course, I stopped and moved on to other things.

Last week I had a sudden renewed interest in the YUI. I downloaded a new copy and started playing with the examples again. This time I actually started looking at the code and the docs and started doing stuff with it. In my experimentation I discovered that the YAHOO.util.Event object is a really powerful piece of code, giving developers consistent event handling across browser platforms. In addition its onAvailable() and onContentReady() methods allow you to register event handlers that will fire as soon as an element is detected in the DOM, but before the page loads. This gives you the ability to add content to a page dynamically AFTER the page has left the server, but before the page’s onload event fires, making it possible to add JavaScript-required features to a page once you’ve determined that the browser supports them. Non-JS users will just get the page as is from the server–they’ll miss out on the “bells and whistles,” but they won’t lose any accessibility either (assuming the page coming from the server is accessible, of course).

So far I have created one custom widget: a popup date picker object based on YUI’s calendar component. It exists in a custom namespace (IB.datepicker) so that it can be dropped in to most any page without worry of naming conflicts. All you need to do is call its initialize() method to set it up on the page and attach() it to as many text input objects as you’d like. I plan to release it (under BSD license) once I do some more testing, but if anyone is interested in beta testing it, just leave me a comment and I’ll hook you up.

I discovered a cool new browser while browsing through the March issue of Computer Link magazine: Flock. Flock is built on the Firefox core and is designed to allow easy posting to blogs. It isn’t even in beta yet, but I decided to download it to see what its all about.

So far, so good. All I had to do was run Flock then choose “My Blogs” from a menu. Then I entered the URL to my site and clicked a button. The browser did some thinking and then prompted me for a login. Next I was looking at a list of all of my articles and a big fat “+” button that I clicked to start writing this post.

Flock has a clean interface with a WYSIWYG interface (apparently powered by TinyMCE), the option to edit raw HTML, the ability to add my post to categories or tag it on Technorati, and the ability to save a draft or post outright. Perhaps the nicest feature for me is the spell check, since I am notorious for hitting “Post” and then finding my mistakes.

Flock is NOT stable yet. It isn’t even in beta yet. There will be bugs. Nonetheless, it looked cool, so I downloaded it. Personally, I like being on the cutting edge and I’m not so serious a blogger that I can’t live with a lost post now and then. But if you aren’t like me, you’ve been warned.

Edit (04/13/2006): My first impression of Flock was that it didn’t work–my message never showed up on the blog. I finally noticed, however, that it’s been here all the time. It just had a post date of December 31, 1969. Wow, I’ve been blogging since before I was born! (The current April 1 time stamp is an estimate–I don’t recall exactly when I posted this, but that has to be close.)

Well, its is finally done: the transition to WordPress is complete. Getting WordPress installed and running on my test site was a snap, and moving the posts was easy (since I only had about 20 of them to move, I basically just copied from phpMyAdmin and pased into WordPress). The most difficult part by far was getting my WordPress site to look like my original.

To make it “easy” for developers to build WordPress-powered sites, the WordPress team implemented a bunch of PHP functions to add specific items to a page. For example, to insert a post’s title, you’d just insert
< ?php the_title(); ?>
into your page and at runtime WordPress would replace that with the title of a post. Unfortunately, my original site was built to utilize PHP Application Tools’ patTemplate. patTemplate allows you to totally separate page design from backend code, but with the way the WordPress functions work, the two tools don’t play nice together. I could have hacked the hell out of WordPress to get what I wanted, but I’m not ready for that yet and I wanted to get the site running sooner rather than later. So I ended up reworking the template files into a format that WordPress liked and I’m finally happy with the result.

That minor setup headache aside, I think I’m going to like running WordPress. First, the posting interface is 110 times better than the one I had written before. Second, the bookmarklet that I’ve added to my browsers’ link bars will make it easy for me to make posts whenever I come across interesting things as I’m surfing (read: the site might get posted to more than twice a year now). Third, I have working comments features (so please post some!). I also like the ping features of WordPress–whenever I post something a ping about the post is sent to several blog directories, which in turn add links back to my post and hopefully will bring new visitors to my site. It seems nerdy, but posting has become strangly addictive now.

The next steps for the site are to improve on some of the CSS settngs and to build in my photo gallery. I plan to keep my digital camera on me more often now too, since lately I’ve been missing a lot of great “Kodak Moments,” and as I snap pictures, I’d like to share them with my fans. I also plan to redo the links page to pull links from WordPress (since it has very nice link management features) and update my personal info, adding my resume and whatnot.

So welcome to Kodiak’s Korner. I’m glad you found “my little place on the net.” Feel free to stay as long as you’d like and please come back often.

In an effort to keep my site updated more often, I’m starting to move Kodiak’s Korner posts to WordPress. Up to now I had been using/developing my own weblog software, but my time is so limited (or I’m so lazy, depending on how you wnat to look at it) that I hadn’t been able to build in all of the functionality that I wanted. I’ve heard good things about WordPress and decided that it was time to stop reinventing the wheel.

So far things are looking pretty good. I can do just about everything that I wanted to do with my homegrown system and WordPress has some features built into it that might come in handy, like PingBacks and TrackBacks.

I’m not entirely giving up on my own system, however. I figure I’ll spend some time getting my feet wet with WordPad and maybe later go back to my own system, taking the nice features with me. I envision my system being more than just a weblog—with built in photo galleries and an intricate way to link all of the separate elements together automatically.

I've had this site up and running for nearly two years. In that time I've made fewer than 20 posts. Part of that is because I am so busy with so many things that its hard to find time to post, but up until now it has been a royal PITA to make postings as well. You see, up until tonight, there was no easy way for me to post. When I designed the site, my goal was to get a site up and running, which I did. I didn't, however, write the back end posting manager until tonight. Up until now I was using phpMyAdmin to manually insert new posts–but not anymore. Now maybe, just maybe, I'll start posting more often.

In addition to the backend processor, I've also added an RSS feed to the site. Now you can use your favorite RSS reader or web portal to keep an eye on my site. Enjoy!