mark bakker

Check out this crazy mess!

http://www.vibrant.com/cable-messes.php

I’ve been doing some more drupal developing at work, and I have to say; it sucks. There isn’t nearly enough support, and their help files are awful. What brings me over the top is the lack of community there is as well. People may argue against that, but compare it to wordpress. I’ve done my fair share of wordpress development, and there is a ton of help, examples, and in-depth video tutorials uploaded by independent users online. Drupal? Not so much.

It wasn’t my choice to develop in Drupal, and I really did try my darndest to like it. But as soon as you start, you don’t know where to begin.

The first problem is after downloading drupal and tinkering around for two hours, you find out that you need to download a cornucopia of modules. People may argue that this is a strength, not a weakness, but I’d like to argue for the worse.

Sure it’s ambiguity makes it usable in almost any application, but it has to be custom tuned to work in that facet. Take a blog for example. It is actually a built in module for drupal. So it enables you to write posts, and then displays them on the front page. Want to change where they show up? Or how they show up? BAM. You have to download a module called views, and get into in depth PHP coding using drupal’s API calls. This is not something for the faint of heart – especially with the lack of support.

(It’s not that I don’t like coding – in fact I love it! – it’s just that there is no place online to learn how to do it properly!)

On the other hand wordpress was built with a purpose, and with a target market. Like all successful products, it requires planning and direction. Drupal, it seems missed this point. Wordpress was built as a blogging software, which expanded because of it’s success.

If you compare the amount of help online between the two, there is no contest. Wordpress wins hands down. I’ve given drupal a few chances, but I’m dropping the hammer – drupal is a bad CMS, and I will not use it in the future.

Then there is the actual management(M) part of the CMS. Drupal has content management, site building, site configuration etc. Wordpress has Posts, Media, Links, Pages Comments, etc. Which is far more friendly. Want to edit content? Once you’ve found it in drupal you can’t click on the title – you have to click on edit.

I could go on, but I will stop here. If you are looking to talk to me more about this subject – please contact me. I’m not being a bigot I have many more valid reasons for my opinion.

One last thing. I love the web. I’m passionate about it. The reason I got into webdev is because I want everyone who uses the internet to have a pleasant experience, and find the information they want as easily as possible. Drupal is not usable. It’s not user friendly or intuitive.

Just sitting here at my new job doing some research etc. They use jQuery here, so I’m going to be learning it slowly over the next little while. I found this wicked easy tutorial on getting started!

http://jquery.bassistance.de/jquery-getting-started.html 

You have to play this…..

http://www.nihilogic.dk/labs/mario/mario_large_music.htm

So I have been a little quiet on my blog as of late, but that doesn’t mean that there is nothing going on! Actually, quite the contrary, I have been overwhelmingly busy. I have been working on one major freelance project, and a couple big projects at work as well.

But there’s news! I have officially accepted a new position at a company downtown, called riptown.com. My official title is Interface Developer, and I will be involved in quite a few of their projects working mostly on front-end development. I hope with a little bit of time I’ll be thrown some back-end stuff, and some Flash.

This is all really exciting for me, as I will be working downtown – so no more 10 minute commute. Although, it’s only about 40 minutes on the skytrain…

With all the new and exciting things considered though, I will be sad to leave Norco. I honestly have enjoyed all the time I have spent there (which is almost two years!). I have made a lot of friends there, and have had countless memories. But I enjoy changes, and the new opportunity that approaches me is a good change, with lots of possibilities for the future.

Source: swissmiss

Using French in flash can be a big pain in the butt. If you are not embedding your content directly into flash, it can be quite a struggle to get it to work. Today I was struggling with exactly this problem. I have an xml file that php writes that flash asks for. This has all the content for the movie. The problem is that Flash wouldn’t recognize the accents. Solution: add all the appropriate glyphs and make sure your xml file is utf-8.

Include all appropriate glyphs. Here are the French ones.

â? ? ùæçéèêëîïôœùûü«»ÜÛÙŒÔÏÎËÊÈÉÇÆÄÂÀ

Make sure xml file is UTF-8

If you have to, use:
System.useCodepage = true;
on the very first frame of your file. Carful though, this might not work on all computers everywhere. It may mess up the English if you use the same swf for both languages.

Google just launched this really cool plugin for gTalk, called chatback. As you can see I have already put it on the side of my blog, so if you want to, you can talk with me. Pretty darn cool. It uses all the code that they wrote to make gTalk in gmail, so almost anyone can use it without downloading any software. So if you really need to talk to me – just check my blog!

The world still turns, but today it has more potential. At least for me. I have been keeping track of Adobe Air since the beginning, and I belive it will certainly change things. No longer will you have to learn the native language of the operating system to develop an application. You won’t have to write three different apps for the same purpose to be used on different platforms. If you know how to make a website, flash, or flex, you’ll be able to create a desktop application! Adobe has officially released AIR out of beta!

I think the world is going to change from having a powerful computer at the users end, and pushing everything back to the server. This is the biggest limitation we have right now. If you write an app, you are limited to the users computer. But if they put all the files and programs on servers – so wherever you go you have access – you just use a device to log in to use those files. It won’t matter about how fast your computer is, it will just be a screen to a supercomputer.

What AIR does, is allow a huge base of knowledgeable developers to take what they’ve created and deploy it on many different platforms – saving a lot of time! This is cool for me ’cause I can take all my flash experience and with a couple hours work have it running on most of the computers around the world. Next stop – world domination.

Toshiba officially announced it will not longer be manufacturing HD DVD equipment. And that’s the end of the story.

Sources: wired.com, reuters.com