Jeremy Roberts. A Blog

I’ve just started developing a brand new Joomla! component. This component compliments the jTips component to provide the complete tipping solution for any type of competition.

jTips is based on versus style competitions. This means you have a team playing against another team. This provides tipping functionality for most, but not all types of competitions. Tipping on races and the like is not really possible. Not to say it is impossible, but it’s certainly a bit more diffucult and abstract.

Enter jRace!

jRace will be a completely extensible Joomla! component which handles tipping of race style events. Let’s say you want to pick the top three runners in a marathon… jRace will let you!

This product will be heavily plugin based so that new scoring algorthms can be added and prioritized at any stage, making the system completely customisable.

Many of the features that exist in jTips will also exist in jRace. Features such as customisable layouts, time zone selections and user preferences, language packs, as well as having the ability to create menu links to various areas of the component.

jRace will be completely developed within the Joomla! 1.5 framework. There will however, be times when additional utility classes will need to be created.

It’s still very early days for this project, and with my first child on the way very soon, I can’t put a timeframe on it right now. The sooner the better though, of course.

Any ideas, questions, comments? Leave me a comment below.

Phew! What an effort! I’ve just released the jTips 2.1.5 update publicly. This update was a big one with over 30 (yes thirty) bug fixes and features.

I’ve had my head down over the last few weeks preparing and developing this update, which, should be the last update to the jTips 2.1 series… though I have said that before. No doubt, someone, soon enough, will find something amiss. It’s difficult enough to develop a web application using the latest technologies that is compatible with a most web server stacks. I know this might sound trivial at first, but there are subtlties in the way different versions of PHP operate on different Operating Systems.

And I won’t even get started on Internet Explorer! What a lame excuse for a web browser, and what a nightmare to do debugging in! I hear good things about Internet Explorer 8. Let’s hope M$ can get it a little better this time, and hopefully people might start to upgrade from Internet Explorer 6!

Anyway, enough of my rant.  Welcome the jTips (and other things) blog!

There will be a dedicated jTips page available soon that will provide a good description of just what exactly is jTips.

I’ve just launched this brand new shiny blog site. The aim of this site is to be a place for me to vent whatever is on my mind. At the moment, there will be plenty of blogs about jTips, my life, and my work.

jTips is my own webware project that I have developed for the Joomla! CMS framework. I won’t go into it in too much detail here since it will get its own dedicated page soon enough. However, I better present the gist. jTips is a sports tipping solution that is installed and run by you, on your website. You control what sport(s) you want to run, you control how the points are allocated, you control how it looks. Basically, “your rules, your website, your way” – that’s the tag line

My life is changing, and quickly! I am recently married, and my wife, Rhiannon, is the lovliest person there is, and, she is pregnant with our child! We’re due to be first-time parents at the end of March this year, so things will get very hectic, very quickly. This part of my blog will serve kind of as a diary I guess. Outlining my day-to-day challenges and triumphs about everything a married dad faces… should be fun.

My work. This blog will serve two purposes with respect to my working life. 1 – if something happens at work that I feel like blogging about, or I get bored one day, I will blog. 2 – this blog will act as a portfolio. It will be linked to from other profiles like facebook, LinkedIn and maybe other things like twitter, and will showcase my achievements in the working world (though jTips is a massive achievement in itself).

So that’s it. That’s my goal with this blog. I am Jeremy Roberts. Husband, Dad, Developer, Entrepreneur. This is my blog.

Where you go from here, is a choice I leave to you.