I am killing off the coding dharma blog. I surely recieved more traffic than deserved as I rarely updated it.
From now on you can find my stuff @
www.margyle.com - life/art/travel/project blog
www.ykoan.com - crowd sourced intelligence app
www.komyoon.com - rebuilding the music business infrastructure - currently in dev
www.argyleco.com - not launched but will be the home for my main coding and design projects and apps.
Thanks.
Just a quick post to put a great video out of Gary Vaynerchuk’s thoughts on a hectic day.
Gary’s site corkd.com was hacked and here he goes over his thoughts, and the response of the social and developer community. Now I can see why people like this guy so much.
The main Coding Dharma site is being relaunched to coincide with the release of one of our apps, Komyoon. The new site will be available on Monday 1/26/09.
If you have any questions you can always contact us at info@codingdharma.com or on twitter @matt_ryan.
-Matthew Oswald
There are some things I really love about the Joomla CMS and alot I cant stand. The real benefit I see for non-technical customers is the backend. They need an easy way to edit content as often as needed without having to contact me, or battle non-intuitive controls.
On a recent project for a clients site, I realized that even though Joomla’s admin section is intuitive for developers and fairly tech savy clients, there is an incredible amount of options that can be removed. This can be accomplished with admin templating but I really see a need for an out of box install that is stripped down from the start.
Now most developers will say there are other CMS’, such as Wordpress that might be a better fit. This is absolutely true, but honestly, I’m sick of templating systems. I dont want to change the way I write my code. It slows me down, no matter how intuitive a specific templating system is. Continue reading ‘Do less with Joomla’
Just a quick heads up regarding Project Papillon. The project is now called Komyoon and a sign up page for the coming beta test will be up shortly. Bookmark that baby and sign up for the beta once we are accepting users.
Sorry for the quick post, but deadlines await!
-Matthew Oswald
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Now playing: against me! - Miami
via FoxyTunes
Thanks for all the hits from far off places. The new Google Analytics AIR app kicks by the way. ( This map comes from it, check it out.)
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Now playing: Jeff Buckley - Jeff Buckley Mojo Pin
via FoxyTunes
-Matthew Oswald
So I am currently working on an e-commerce site for which my client requires a very specific admin system. I prefer to write code that fits my client’s needs rather then forcing their needs to fit in with some pre-existing solution. Normal project so far. My client is a great client , and through our discussions I can tell he is wowed by the polish available with already developed turn key solutions. So my back end can be many times more in depth than something like OS commerce (just pulling names here-no specific scripts were considered), but I know he will be really floored if everything is really pretty, even the things the user doesn’t see. I can’t say I disagree with him.
So now I’m wondering what to do. I can rock Photoshop like nobodies business, but its simply not in the budget to create an entire set of admin icons. Well, thankfully there are some great sources for free icons with all sorts of licensing options.
Designmagus.com - They have a few sets of icons of varied quality. Didnt work out for me but I could see them being very useful for other web/app developers. They also provide a design service, and will make any custom icon you require. I could not locate the license info for the free icons.
Some of the available icons:
The back end coding for Project Papillon has started with the new year. The project’s details cant be discussed too much right now, but it aims to take away some of the pain music artists and fans have been feeling over the lack of evolution with current major record label’s promotion and distribution methods.
I have been checking out several AJAX libraries to add some elegant usability to the app. Now, its vital to not over do any of these effects, and only use them if they are truly adding something to your application. Something also needs to be said for learning curve, adding a drag and drop profile editor may sound like a great idea, but if the vast majority of your visitors dont get it, your dead before you have even started.
Its hard to look at a site like craigslist.com, one of the internet’s most succesful with no more than a simple text interface, and justify these actions. It really shows that the only thing that matters is the void you fill. If you cant fill one, nothing will help.
I am currently using the Spry framework that is integrated within Dreamweaver CS3 as well as the Yahoo User Interface Library. Yahoo seems to be on the right track, stable code that you can really tweak and build on top of. Spry, so far, seems usable, but with the burden of now being an Adobe product, I fear for what type of support and documentation is available.
Sorry for the quick post, but I have a deadline tonight, and promised myself I would start writing often with the new year. I guess I shouldn’t complain about being busy right?
-Matthew Oswald
Despite the date of the last post, it has been a long time since I have last written here. I’m working on several concurrent projects with deadlines quickly approaching. For the past couple of weeks I have been working on a massive customization for the Pringo CMS. I am totally impressed with the way it allows intuitive hacking. All functions and call backs can be written in PHP and then wrapped in a Pringo module and added in easily by the sites admin. I plan on doing a full write up on it in the coming week.
The Coding Dharma is also getting ready to release our first Facebook app under our own name. I have worked on some other ones but they have all been for other clients. The app is called The Snobs and is an extremely tongue in cheek proof of concept app that will bring all the music snobs on Facebook together. Maybe. Expect a full write up up next week.
Due to all my current projects I have had no time to make a proper word press theme (I scrapped TextPattern recently due to an issue that was just not a high enough priority to warrant repairing at this time). In my research I have found about K2 for wordpress.
From the site:
K2 is an advanced template for the blogging engine WordPress developed by Michael Heilemann, Chris J Davis, Zeo, Steve Lam and Ben Sherratt.
So it looks like its going to allow me to make a nice theme with minimum effort, which is what I really need this week. I hope to have a proper skin running here by tomorrow evening.
-Matthew Oswald
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