Category Archives: DC PHP Developers

It’s Been a Month and a Half

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I can’t believe life has been so busy that I have not blogged in over a month and a half. Okay, some it was procrastinating on getting things done.

First it was work being busy trying to get a bunch of stuff done and into production, then it was preparing slides for the 2008 DC PHP Conference. After that it was helping get ready for my friends 28th annual pig roast in Cabin John the same week that I was speaking at the DC PHP conference.

I worked Saturday (May 31) doing yard work for pig roast, then Sunday was getting a few things done around the house before meeting about a dozen DC PHP conference goers out for drinks and food Sunday night. Monday, Tuesday (day of my talk), and Wednesday I was at the conference and then the after conference gatherings. You would think not being in the office would be less tiring.

While at the DC PHP conference I talked about tips, tricks, and practical ways to make your website more accessible. I met a bunch of really cool people such as Tony Bibbs, Mike Tutty, Eli White, Ben Ramsey, and many others.

Thursday was my one day back at the office to catch up on e-mail and anything that needed being done. Friday I was off doing more work for the pig roast.Saturday was the big day at pig roast and it felt like a million degrees that day. That was probably do to the fact that even though I was at the party, a few of us including myself still had to work by picking up trash bag etc. during the day.

One of the hardest parts of pig roast is getting myself and others back to friends early Sunday morning (to beat heat and get it over with) to do all clean-up and putting away of all the stuff needed to put on a party for 500 -600 (only 300 – 400 this year because of the extreme heat).

It took a few days to recover from the heat and work related to the pig roast. Now it’s time to get back on track and work on finishing up my couple of web applications in ASP (current language I know to prototype in), start learning PHP so I can convert them into something my web host allows.

It’s off to do house cleaning, laundry, sorting and dumping (Goodwill and trash) and then yard work once it gets cooler, sometime around dinner time. This might take a few days to get done, but it needs to be completed.

Hope to do more blogging, since I have about a dozen different posts started, in need of just a bit of editing, or just titles listed for subjects I want to talk about.

Is it just me or are others blogging less, since using twitter? I feel by using twitter I can get my points across on some subjects but others require a full post to explain all the technical stuff required.

DC PHP Developers Meeting

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Last evening I went to the DC PHP Developers meeting. I had originally gone to the DC Tech Events website which is run by Ross M Karchner to check what time Thursday night the The DC Technology Network book group was meeting to go over “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell.

I stayed at work late looking over general information about PHP, since I have not yet used the language. It is on my list of languages to learn along with Ruby on Rails.

The DC PHP Developers meeting was about jQuery and was presented by Joseph L. LeBlanc. It was held at the headquarters of Green Peace USA, in Chinatown. Joseph talked about using jQuery to do animations, by using the following effects:

  • fadeIn()
  • fadeOut()
  • hide()
  • show()
  • slideDown()
  • slideUp()
  • toggle()
  • slideToggle()
  • fadeTo()
  • animate()

He showed us a routine to check that the DOM was ready.

$(document).ready(function() {

// start code

});

or something like that. I might have missed something. Joseph has now put his jQuery presentation online and I while link to it when it’s available.

He recommended two different books about jQuery both by Karl Swedberg and Jonathan Chaffer:

He also listed a few website as references:

  1. http://docs.jquery.com
  2. http://visualjquery.com
  3. http://15daysofjquery.com
  4. http://ui.jquery.com

Once his talk was over people started asking general questions to him and to the rest of the group. One set of guys was looking for information about hosting and someone said they had used BlueHosting (for like $7.00 per month) and Simple Storage Service (S3) by Amazon for some of his client stuff. After that we talked about a bunch of things.

I even asked if people had been to either Refresh DC or BarCamp DC, the only person that had heard of either was Joesph and he had been to the BarCamp DC and not yet made a Refresh meeting. Since that was the case I made sure to explain what the events were and where to find them. Finally I talked about the new DC Technology Network and Ross’s DC Tech Events website.

Now it’s time to look over “The Tipping Point” tomorrow evenings meeting.