Last week we launched the newly redesigned usmagazine.com… Has a cool new look and it’s backend is much more structured which should make it easier to create new sections/features down the road as well as keep everything much “cleaner” code-wise. It is now built on a much better framework (IMHO) that uses MVC principals much better than the old site’s framework.

I am pushing to add user registration on the site next… as soon as all the wrinkles have been ironed out of this first iteration of the new site, hopefully.

I feel like there are still some performance issues but no one but me seems to be noticing anything. I’m definitely going to look into it more when I get back from a long deserved (IMHO) vacation…

We’re starting a new Symfony project soon at work (new job since my last post, oh so long ago).  Anyway, I’m pretty excited to start using the framework.

And, as a random little sidenote, here’s a link to a blog post I stumbled upon about clearing session variables in Symfony:

$this->getUser()->getParameterHolder()->clear();
$this->getUser()->getAttributeHolder()->clear();

http://eatmymonkeydust.com/2008/08/symfony-security-sessions-not-cleared-when-logging-out/

Did a little bit of prettification the other day.  added graphics for the ratings on individual album pages.

Given, not every album is rated.  I’d like to make it so that users can rank albums, too, rather than just admins…  We’ll need to implement some sort of registration system, first.  (hopefully coming before next December.

Hey, finally made it so that anyone can leave opinions, remarks, what have you on individual album pages.  It’s just a home-brewed system that I may need to take down if there is abuse.  But check it aht while it’s open for anyone to use!

example page: http://music.ahsodes.com/album.php?album_id=1578

Hey, it’s been a while since I last published…  but, we just revamped Mens Journal and launched it last week.  Nothing fancy functionality-wise but it has some interesting articles…  check it out…

Well, finally… after three months of stressing-out and working super late nights, the new webmonkey has launched! I was mostly leading the on the front-end work, but towards the end, I did get to work a little on the back-end: (spring config additions and minor server configuration issues).

It is pretty cool, though. So many different technologies were used: JSP, JSTL, PHP, Resin, Sitemesh, Mediawiki, Wordpress, Quercus, and a bunch more… (including my bread-and-buttah: XHTML, CSS, Javascript, XML) And some of them were integrated and/or used in new ways (at least for me)… For instance, we already used Sitemesh on Wired, but really just for decorators (page templates, essentially). For webmonkey, not only are there decorators but many of the page layouts are controlled via xml files that determine which page components go where AND aren’t build dependant, which must make Editorial and Business happy . This was especially important because Editorial wanted to be able to control all page content using the wiki but some parts of the page really need to have the additional stability and capability existent in the java layer.

And that’s just one cool thing about the new WM…  new Design – very cool…  Built on mediawiki, thus much more open to discussion – very cool…  Tagging enabled, which makes it easier to search for different things in different ways – trés chic…  ooh la la…

Paul (the tech lead) wanted to write a blog entry about everything that the team accomplished (and went through… ) to launch this project but because we all have so many other things going on right now, might not get a chance to work on anything too soon… Hopefully some of the knowledge gained from the development of this site will turn into a new WM article or two in the near future.

But worry not… There are quite a few top-notch talents writing new content for the site , and a lot of its best content was migrated to the wiki, AND the site is now a wiki so ANYone can write interesting material, so I’m sure that there’ll be no shortage of great, developer-bred material for some time to come…

(And the people say, “Long live Webmonkius Extrordinarius!!!”… Amen…)

Made a favorite artists page. Only uses the number of albums I have of each artist so isn’t completely accurate (many artists are missed).

Added a new page to allow browsing by musical genre (really by tag). Not quite completed but will update you when it’s completely functional. Right now, it just serves to show what the available tags are but hopefully I’ll have some time this week to finish the browse functionality…

Today, I added a bunch of new music my music database and added some functionality to the left and right rails on music.ahsodes.com. The layout is a little bit off but it was a bit of a conceptual design/development process when I did it last year. I never had time to fix it and have since expanded my vision of what the site can become… I need to return to some of my earlier brainstorming sessions and get back to work on it. Hopefully soon…

Last weekend I finally got inspired to sit down at vidbb’s code. (for some reason, I miss being involved with the non-profit world)

Anyway, for the first time in over 8 months I took a look at vidbb’s guts… It took me a little while to figure out why I had done some of it the way that I had… but I did. I got some more of the individual-video page’s form pulling the appropriate data from the db. Also attacked making that form AJAXified and was a little successful. On change, the select boxes contact the DB and 1) insert a new row into the edits table and 2) try to update the appropriate record of the person’s description table.

The first step worked except that the timestamp column isn’t updating. The problems there were 1) I was using MySQL query browser to edit the table and it wouldn’t allow the time_edited column to be not null… I guess I’ll have to brush the cobwebs off my SQL programming and edit the table properties with sql.

Problem 2) was that the query for the table update kept choking on the query. When I first developed vidbb, I was experimenting with various DB layers and settled on PHP ADODB. I don’t think I had ever run into any problems until this weekend for some reason it was adding an ‘LIMIT’ clause onto the insert (update?) query… at least I think that’s what it was choking on.

I also spent a lot of time taking the form out of the formatted string and made it just a regular mixed page (markup with php in it). I had been trying to keep the back-end logic and front-end markup completely separate but it turned out to be more of a hassle than I could justify.

Overall, I’m fairly pleased with what I did. It has been a while since I’ve worked on this… I just need to re-familiarize myself with it. There does seem to be a lot of kruft that I need to prune…