Archive for the ‘Listy’ Category
Wednesday, October 27th, 2010
First, phpScenario has been updated to 0.1.1 (change log here), so that’s cool. It helps when the library you release actually works, right?
Second, I’ve been posting some related tutorials in the project’s forums:
So, if you’re interested in split testing via php, I’d recommend checking the project and tutorials out.
Third, I’m finally getting started on the rewrite of Listy.us’s editor. Where the old editor was a single, sparsely-commented 1400-line javascript file, the new one is spread across several files using RequireJS, and uses QUnit for unit testing. It is, essentially, a project in itself, and I’m finding it much, much nicer to work with.
Tags: changelog, listy.us, phpScenario, qunit, requirejs, tutorials
Posted in Listy, phpScenario, web development | No Comments »
Sunday, April 25th, 2010
Today, in the never-ending quest to tweak server performance by a few milliseconds, I decided to do a bit of testing of various php hashing methods. I therefore wrote a quick script under php (5.2.11 currently, I need to update), which ran each test case 10,000 times to achieve a decent min/avg/max for each case, on strings of 10KB, 100KB, and 1,000KB in size.
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Tags: hash, optimization, performance, php
Posted in Listy, php, web development | No Comments »
Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010
Today marks the first “Huge” update to Listy.us. It is now a paid service, handles uploaded files, and allows public lists to be embedded on any page. Like so:
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Posted in Listy, web development | No Comments »
Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009
This is a solution that I came up with for sending out welcome emails, comment notifications, etc, with nice standardized HTML & text layouts, using a few components of the Zend Framework.
Basically you create a view (here called $renderer) and a layout ($layout), then render your views and layouts for both HTML and text versions. My file tree looks like this:
application/
emails/
welcome.html.phtml
welcome.text.phtml
layouts/
layout.html.phtml
layout.text.phtml
So, ‘welcome’ would be your template name, with html and text versions. The layout is what you want wrapped around either version of every email you send out (header graphics, font settings, contact info, etc).
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Tags: code, email, php, tutorial, zend framework
Posted in Listy, php, Projects, web development | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, November 24th, 2009
For those that have been following my work by means other than my blog (twitter, facebook), you already know that my big project, www.listy.us, is alive and kicking. I’ve been meaning to write an actual blog post about it for some time, since it would seem I forgot to do that back in September when the site actually launched. It’s improved a lot since then, I think.
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Tags: creative process, design, listy.us, web applications, web development
Posted in Listy, Projects, Web Design | No Comments »
Thursday, October 1st, 2009
With a ton of users being granted access to Google Wave, and Wave suggesting the installation of Chrome Frame, there’s been a bit of griping from Microsoft (and others, but I suspect mostly Microsoft) about not liking the ability for the content to choose the browser agent. I can understand why folks would be irked by this, I really can. It messes with their software.
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Tags: chrome frame, design, google fanboy, listy.us, thoughts, web development
Posted in Listy, Web Design | 3 Comments »
Saturday, July 11th, 2009
The revelation that a web application meshes well with the design pattern of a Finite-State Machine (wikipedia link) isn’t really new. It’s discussed in a few other places on the web, usually in a scholarly capacity – the google search returns a lot of articles and research papers. Still, this struck me as something that really should be taught to every fledgeling web developer.
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Tags: design, listy.us, patterns, software design, web applications, web development
Posted in Listy, Projects, Web Design | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009
I’d like to share an experience I had a few years ago: I was at the supermarket, making smalltalk with the cashier, and she asked what I do for a living. I answered truthfully: “I work in marketing.” (which is just a broad brush for “i’m a web developer & designer, as well as graphic artist and designer, and I create all advertising and promotional materials for X company”)
I’ve never seen someone go from friendly and cheerful to all business so quickly. From the reaction, you’d think I’d said “I vivisect puppies.” I haven’t told someone “I work in marketing” since – at least not out of context.
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Tags: listy.us, management, social networking, web applications
Posted in Business, Listy, Marketing, TK Studios | No Comments »
Sunday, April 19th, 2009
Here’s a monetization idea I’ve been playing with since participating in post-GDC “Idea Exchange: Emerging Trends in Game Development,” a sort of virtual conference that was held in both Metaplace and Second Life via a chat bridge between the two (pretty cool in itself). You can see a side-by-side screen comparison here.
During that chat, a lot of ideas were covered, and Raph briefly touched on how he thought offer-based marketing was a big new trend at GDC. Here’s the chat log, edited for relevance:
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Tags: freemium, GDC, metaplace, offer-based marketing, virtual currency
Posted in Business, Listy, Marketing, Projects, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Tuesday, April 7th, 2009
The new blog theme has been live for a couple days now. It still has a few tweaks to be done (single post page lacks styles for the next/previous links, for example), possibly some component rearranging, but it’s okay for now. The look and feel now matches the background on my twitter page, or you could say the background on the twitter page now matches the blog, as it was the blog that was designed first.
This is probably my first real attempt at a grid-based layout. Vertically it falls short of perfect baseline alignment, simply because I didn’t feel it was worth the effort to get it perfect. This is a blog. If it were a corporate product page, then yes, it would be worth the trouble to get everything in a perfect rhythm, but it’s not.
Also, I have not tested this in IE 6 or 7. Out of curiosity, I tested it in 8 a few seconds ago and it looks fine. Obviously, ignoring IE isn’t a luxury I can afford in the future, but in the current “I just want to get this WP theme done so I’m using something more appropriate than a public theme” context, it works.
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Tags: code samples, design, fun, layout, listy.us, web development
Posted in Listy, Projects, TK Studios, Web Design | No Comments »
