Creative Juices 4.0. Bigger, Stronger and Now With Moxie!
If you haven't noticed, the site had gone though it's fourth major revision, since I originally launched back in 2005. It's been a slow and painful process but instead of using some off-the-shelf solution for the site, I decided to write something completely new from the ground up. Why would I ever do this, you ask? Well, sit back and prepare yourself for a little story.
When I first launched, it was a very simple ColdFusion site. It didn't have a blog and it really didn't have any content management methods in place. Everything was hand coded and manually updated. It was time consuming, but it fit better with what I was trying to do. I could spotlight some of my clients, show some examples of my work and to provide some sample code to give back to the community. About 6 months after I launched, I soon realized that the site was taking more time to maintain than I had available. I had to come up with some sort of solution to let me focus on the content and not the code.
Well, he didn't resign from Washington, but he did from Missouri. For those of you not familiar with the situation, I worked on a documentary project awhile back that followed a 2004 congressional race between Jeff Smith and Russ Carnahan in Missouri. I handled all the graphics and design for the marketing material as well as some other stuff. Jeff wound up losing this race with Carnahan, but eventually went on to win a seat in the Missouri state senate. This was largely possible because of the success of the "Can Mr. Smith Get To Washington Anymore?" documentary. After the movie, there wasn't to many people that didn't know who Jeff Smith was.
The movie portrayed Jeff as a very charismatic, for-the-people type of guy. You couldn't resist liking him after you met him. Unfortunately, looks can be a little deceiving, because apparently Jeff was a very bad guy.
I drew this picture on the left years ago in college. It always bugged me that I never finished it. Today I decided to scan it in a see what I could do to it in Photoshop. If I was smart, I would have made it into one of those photoshop speed painting movies, but I didn't think of that until I was almost done. Sorry. Hope you enjoy it though.
Rarely do I link to news articles, but this is the best news I've heard in 5-6 years...
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/14/youtube-will-be-next-to-kiss-ie6-support-goodbye/
WP-eCommerce Gold Cart Plug-In Hack
A friend of mine asked if I could help him out with a project he was working on. He had a client who was trying to sell some products online and the previous developers gave him exactly what he asked for. And unfortunately all they asked for was a way that their visitors could fill out a form to purchase a product. They didn't ask for the ability to view orders, update products, customer data retention, etc.
The problem was that the client really wanted a shopping cart. Something that he could use to manage his business, but because my friend and his client are a little new to the online world, they didn't specify what they wanted to the developer. And unfortunately this developer didn't take any initiative to offer additional options and suggestions.
So I took a look at the website and I realized what the developer had done, which to say the least, wasn't a lot. They basically had a form, and a PHP page that processed the form data. They didn't even take the time to e-mail the customer a receipt. Sheesh. Oh well, I told my friend that I'd look around and see if there was an off-the-shelf PHP solution that could help them out. I'll be the first to tell you that I do not specialize in coding in PHP. My background is ColdFusion, but I've done a few little PHP sites in the past and to be quite honest, I'm not scared to dive into PHP and figure something out. I have a theory, and that is if you know programming logic, you can pretty much program in any language as long as you have good reference material. Hello Google!
