Because Drupal is just far too slow and I wanted to practice the art of web design, I have decided to completely overhaul my blog. I have ditched Drupal and the theme that I was using and am now in the process of migrating to a new content management system that I am in the process of developing. Currently you are looking at the raw HTML, hand coded, completely static version of my site because the CMS is still in the development stages. So in the next week or so I should have a basic working version running as well as some documentation so that if people want,they can download it and give it a test run.... [More]

Today I have finally my CMS has reached a deployable state. Right now it has all of the functionality that a basic blog CMS will have. And when I say basic I mean extremely basic. Right now I can currently add posts, edit/delete posts, people can leave comments, you can edit the personal settings for the sidebar to the right, and you can upload pictures (even though they just sit in a directory on the server). Some things design wise are not quite done, but they are independent of the CMS. The system down the road will support templates and you'll be able to switch to a different one by simply clicking a button. TONS more to come...so stay tuned!!! Google... [More]

When it comes to web development on the Mac, there is a very wide selection tools available all the way from a full fledged IDE to simple plain text editors. Lately we have begun to see these ?one window development? suites cropping up. Mac app developer Painc decided to build Coda, an all in one app that combined a web development environment complete with the tools that would normally occupy 4-6 separate applications dedicated to everything from CSS, to previewing your page, syncing with your server, and even providing terminal access all in a single application. As much as I love Coda, sometimes you just need a simple text editor. TextMate is a powerful, multifaceted plain-text editor that will be able to provide syntax highlighting and functionality for web languages like PHP, XHTML, and CSS all the way to C and C++. But with TextMate I stil... [More]

A spinoff of O'Reilly's FooCamp, an annual invitation-only participant driven conference, BarCamp is an Ad-hoc conference born of the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. Participants prepare ahead of time, but all presentations are scheduled the day of the conference on a giant white board schedule. This year will be the fourth consecutive year for Barcamp Rochester and promises to be the largest yet and is still growing in size. As of now, over 90 people have signed up to share their interests with topics ranging from "Getting to know the Itanium Architecture" to "The Zombie Apocalypse" to "Lady Parts and You" with a wide variety of other topics thrown in. I personally plan on co-presenting on the PHP framework Codeigniter as well as providing live cove... [More]