Alan Coleman's

I have a couple of great additions to my world of web development that are worthy of a mention.

The first is the discovery of WebDevRadio, a site based around a set of regularly updated podcasts on web development issues. The podcasts themselves are hosted by Michael Kimsal, an genuinely friendly bloke who discusses anything from the weather in his part of the world to the finer points of his favourite PHP class of the moment. It’s all very listenable and down to earth, in fact he comes across like he’s talking it over with a few mates down the pub. On the back of listening to the latest podcast whilst doing my ironing (2 shirts, that was it) I tried to find some UK based podcasts and came across Fresh Egg, a design and marketing agency who I think are based out of Reading in Berkshire (shit county). If it’s not Reading then I apologise, but not to the people of Berkshire (shit county). Their podcasts stand in complete contrast to those of Michael Kimsal, both in terms of delivery and content. For a start, their overwhelming self importance gives listeners the feeling of being spoken down to, not good. Then there’s the intensely annoying accents, that middle England sixth form slur copied from daytime Radio 1. The content isn’t much better, instead of insightful discussion the podcasts contain a series know it all sound bites designed to fool potential clients into thinking that ‘These guys really know their stuff’. A truly awful listening experience.

Americans? Best music, best literature and best web development podcasts.

The second point I’d like to talk about is my new Whiteboard. It sits on the wall next to my desk and came complete with a set of coloured pens and accessories. It’s a really good way of visualising concepts, brainstorming ideas or even just a large area to design schemas or normalise database tables. Big, long sweeping coloured arrows make for a great environment to refer back to at the turn of the head. It’s a bit like being at school but without getting laughed at in the showers after cross country. The thing is, all of the above is just a way of avoiding what I’m stuck on at work, ISAPI_rewrite. Oh joy.

Hello everyone, and a happy New Year to you all. This year starts quite busy for me, as a flip side to the inconvenience of a full time development job, I’ve a load of great sideline projects to be getting on with. Stuff the latest celebrity show on the shit pump, the real winters entertainment for the dark evenings involves playing around with PHP on a local server, great fun.

I’ve been looking for an open source CMS (Content Management System) for a friends football club website for ages, but everything was either too vague or complicated. So in the end I’ve decided to make my own CMS, which will be a simple but functional. I anticipate it to be a few weeks worth of evenings, with the News section almost there. After the News I’ll be moving onto Fixtures, then Match Reports and finally Teams.

So I get to play around building the CMS, and Arron, the First team manager, gets to spend more time on the touchline screaming at people (probably whilst making a circular motion with one hand, and holding four fingers up on the other). Which he’d much rather be doing than arsing around with HTML and FTP.

Recently I’ve been using PHP include function to present a common menu to a set of pages. As you’d expect it all works fine, the only problem being that the user can’t tell what page is currently being browsed from looking at the navigation.

After posting a message on the Textdrive forum, ruiling from the US sent me a link to this tutorial on Alistapart:

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/keepingcurrent/

This uses the same include function but with a unique page identifier that is read by the menu.

So easy even I could understand it.