Software Developer, Media Nut, and Proud Father of Two

I don't know where to start, so I'll just go. Work has been pretty crazy over the last few weeks. Couple that with the work I've been doing for BuyFromAChristian.com and life is even busier. Because of how crazy work and life have been, I have absolutely no motivation at the moment to continue with my pet projects. What does that mean for Autotab? It's going to remain at beta 1.1 for quite some time. Is it dead? Not by a long shot. While there are room for improvements, I currently have no itch to continue developing it at this time. As for any type of blog update, I'm finding it more trouble to take the time to post, as this is my fourth or fifth attempt in about four or five months. I've got things I want to say about media stuff, but that'll wait for another post.

I finally got off my butt and added more pictures to my Flickr account. I'm fortunate enough to have a great view of the sunset from my front door, even better from my upstairs bedroom, so I added a new collection of pictures called Sunsets from the Front Door. By no means am I professional photographer, not even a hobbyist, but when I see a beautiful sky, I can't help but shoot. The ones attached to this blog post are the sunset before Hurricane Ike hit Houston. I also took a some time to figure out how I could connect to my Flickr account and place the latest batch of images that we have uploaded on the left side of my site. I had to rely on the Flickr module for Drupal 5 because the Drupal 6 version is a tad slow in being ported... oh the joys of development. I hope you enjoy!

What a crazy, and tiring, night. It started with Becky and I hanging out with some of our neighbors. As the night went on, the wind grew strong and the rain more drenching. They both beat against my house ferociously, and the power finally went out at 4AM. It was rough going to sleep with all that wind hitting my house constantly, and I don't remember any storm being that violent that I sat through. I didn't get much sleep during the early morning hours because of the storm, so I frequently looked outside and checked the radio to see what was going on. By noon time, the worst of the storm was long gone and we had remnants of the storm's tail end giving us rain and wind.

After receiving some great feedback, I have finally worked my way into updating Autotab with some key fixes and handy new features. Before I release this as a final version, I'd like additional testing and critiques to be done to make v1.1 final and release it to the masses, so please download, test, and critique! Detailed descriptions can be found in the source file.

Several of my client's sites, as well as my own, have been moved to my new VPS with Slicehost.com, which I think has provided me with the best bang for my buck. I appreciate the service that Dreamhost has offered in the last 18 months, but enough is enough. Performance and reliability have become an issue with disks failures, random MySQL downtimes, and utter slowness. This is to be expected when you're on shared hosting... or is it? I can't help but sense that Dreamhost has started over-hosting, taking in more and more sites that have affected how well my sites run. I've been developing on CakePHP for the last few months, and even a barebone install has yielded in slower than desired results. I may be more sympathetic to the slowness if the site were running a CMS that had a large number of modules, but a fresh install of CakePHP? This isn't a diss on CMS' though, because some are well optimized, such as this site running Drupal.

I've come to a point with my employer where it is no longer necessary to work full time on my current project. I anticipated that this would happen a few months ago, and my employer has caught on. The wonderful decision making by higher up in the company led to two development teams working on essentially the same product, but two versions of said product (it really baffles me, but it is what it is). So I'm on the second team, the one creating the product from scratch using PHP instead of classic ASP. The project lead decided to use a PHP Framework called CakePHP. After tinkering with it for a few hours, I'm impressed and inspired.

Update:

Autotab has a new beta release. Read more here. Documentation changes will be forthcoming to this page once 1.1 has been tested and approved, but until I'm happy with the performance, this page will use 1.1b but contain 1.0 documentation.

Autotab is a jQuery plugin that provides auto-tabbing and filtering on text fields in a form. Once the maximum number of characters has been reached within a defined text fields, the focus is automatically set to the defined target of the element. Likewise, clearing out the text field's content by pressing backspace eventually places the focus on the elements previous target.

I consider myself to be a competent PHP, CSS, HTML, and JS developer as well as a perfectionist. To quote Adrian Monk: It's gift.... and a curse. This perfectionist gift/curse has helped and hindered me in the several years that I have coded in the mentioned languages. The gifts has brought about great results in the work that I have performed in the past that has made my clients happy with those results. The curse, however, has slowed down progress. Within the last year, I have started making a new framework or CMS at least three times and there is no end in sight for a number of reasons.

Rotating banners are commonly used throughout the web and can have an unlimited variation to their layout and design. My example illustrates how you can easily and effectively have animation like capabilities without having to incorporate Flash. Off course, having Flash offers benefits that jQuery, or JavaScript for that matter, can compare with without suffering some kind of a performance hit.

The example below used to be on Computrols' homepage until they replaced it with a Flash version that now has more involved animation. The JavaScript could likely be optimized, but it gets the job done.

CBAS-Web Demo User Manuals Product Datasheets Automate Newsletter Download Computrols Brochure

Computrols Building Automation Systems

A simple, yet attractive sliding menu. With jQuery, the menu can slide, fade, grow and simply appear, which is where the true beauty of this script lies. There is an issue with Internet Explorer and the CSS used for this menu (there is a large gap between some links), but I'm just a tad lazy at the moment to make it compatible with the Garland theme in Drupal.

Update: As requested, another example has been added that will allow only one section be remain expanded, while automatically closing another section. Whatever section is opened can be closed.