Jeremy Roberts. A Blog

Only a few weeks after the launch of Cloud Up, a business, technology and productivity blog, I have decided to move it to from Blogger to a dedicated domain, Cloud Productivity. Why? There are many reasons why a dedicated URL is preferred over a shared service. The more obvious ones being better SEO and, for me, better credibility. It just looks and feels more professional having a specific domain than being part of a shared service. If the blog you’re writing is person, like a life-blog, then the shared services such as Blogger and WordPress are great! They allow you to get up and running with blogging in only minutes and let you focus on actually creating content.

Switching to a self-hosted blog, you need to take responsibility for the domain name, hosting, SEO, etcetera. However, this also brings the ability to have much greater control over how your blog works, right down to the database and code level.

Anyway, please update your bookmarks and RSS feeds to the following:

• Web: http://www.cloudproductivity.net
• RSS: http://feeds.feedburner.com/CloudProductivity

Ever wanted to use a menu item to link to a particular article or component, but don’t actually what that menu item to appear on your site?

First, create a new menu from the Menu Manager in your Joomla! Administrator area and call it something like ‘hiddenmenu’.

Now proceed to add new menu items to this ‘hiddenmenu’ and be sure they are Published. You will likely want them to be publicly accessible too. This allows you to set menu specific parameters for items like content articles, contacts, components and more, without actually showing the menu item on your website.

Basically, that’s it. Using the JCE editor for Joomla!, edit or create an article. To add a link to the ‘hiddenmenu’, select the text to link and click the ‘Add Link’ button. The JCE editor will popup a window allowing you to select an item to link to. Select the ‘Menu’ option to display the available menus. Then, expand the one you created earlier called ‘hiddenmenu’. Finally, select the menu item you created and click on the Insert button.

Save your article and take a look.

During my years as a web developer, I have continued to discover and learn about often unused HTML tags and attributes. I have come to use many of these tags on a day to day basis to achieve more robust, usable, and compliant web sites and systems.

One of my new favourite HTML tags is LABEL. While the LABEL tag does not render anything visual on the page, it greatly assists with improving the usability and accessibility of the page. It is mainly used in conjunction with FORM input controls and essentially focus the cursor on the form field with the LABEL is clicked on. The LABEL tag should be wrapped around the text that represents the content of the form field. Then, when the user clicks on this text, they can immediately change the value of the associated form input. In the following example, with or without the LABEL tag, the text ‘First Name’ would still be visible on the page. Read more…

Life is good. Life is fast.

With a new baby arriving recently my development projects have slowed down a bit. I still manage to find some time to work on them, but no where near as much as before. But that’s OK, I’m perfectly happy to make the sacrifice for my son…. (still sounds weird to say that).

My work with jTips has certainly lead to some interesting opportunities. I have been approached to develop some other Joomla! extensions for clients, which is fantastic. But, my time is limited. This only means that projects take a bit more time.

To help in sourcing additional projects, in an effort to eventually become full self-employed, I have recently started developing a new website for a development business called EvolutionEngin – yes, without an ‘e’ at the end. This new site will be a gateway for projects not related to jTips or my other Joomla! extensions. This is aimed at web development of absolutely any kind – applications, extensions, websites, e-commerce… anything! If you can dream it, me (and my small team) can build it!

The EvolutionEngin website is still very much under construction and has not yet been launched.

Over the last weekend I was asked to develop a quick functional website to be used as an interim site while a more feature rich was being developed. I though this would be the perfect opportunity to get to know the CodeIgniter framework.

Previously, any site I developed was built using Joomla! and extensions. And, while it would have been quite simple to continue using Joomla! and then developing a custom component for the client to perform the desired actions, I decided that such a system was just a bit too feature rich (over-the-top) to be used as a ‘temporary solution’.

Enter CodeIgniter…

Having never used CodeIgniter before, I found the setup incredibly simple and the learning curve more of a slight incline. After having downloaded version 1.7.1 of the framework I was up and running in no time. The built-in ‘Hello World’ example makes it even easier to get started.

While CodeIgniter is a very light-weight framework, it is still very powerful. There are loads of utility classes and helpers that take common complexity out of developing a site.

The best part is the easy to follow, concise documentation. Unlike some other systems and frameworks, CodeIgniter‘s documentation is straight to the point. Explaining how to include the functionality, and what each of the available methods do. I only have one criticism on the documentation – the method signatures are not quite excplicit enough. While it does go on to explain the parameters each method accepts, it is sometimes buried in a descriptive sentence rather than being listed. However, this didn’t really impede my development process.

The site I built was relatively simple, consisting of a couple of forms and file lookups. After further digging around in the documentation I found several HTML helper functions that will produce syntactically correct HTML tags for a variety of form fields, text properties and even DOCTYPE declarations!

I also found the built-in form validation techniques expecially handy. Rather then developing complex rules to validate a form on the client-side using javascript or AJAX, CodeIgniter provides simple and powerful server-side validation and makes it easy to re-populate an errornous form as well as control the look and feel of error messages.

CodeIgniter makes use of the latest development techniques by conforming to the MVC (Model-View-Controller) paradigm. This paradigm provides a great level of abstraction and is recommend for any developer.

Overall, I found the CodeIgniter framework very easy to use and am happy with the level of built-in functionality id provides. I am very happy with the resulting site I have developed and am very proud to announce that it is W3C compliant HTML and CSS as well as passing Accessibility Tests!

Take a look at the site.

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.