Thinkcage

Another year goes by and I still haven’t redesigned my personal website. What’s the saying about the cobbler’s shoes? But inactivity here doesn’t mean that nothing is happening. I’m blogging much more regularly (and interestingly at Element Fusion) if you’re interested in that whole design/web thing. In fact, lots of cool things are happening. Here are just a few:

• I was recently interviewed on our company blog about my role as Creative Director. You can read it in two parts: Part 1, Part 2. As an added bonus, our talented photographer and CTO, Ryan Whitaker, made the great portraits you’ll see in the article and in this post.
• I’m fortunate enough to be heading back to Austin, Texas for the 2008 SXSW Interactive Festival. It’s a great opportunity to learn and grow in the profession as well and meet and listen to the top minds in the field. Always a creatively invigorating trip.
• Family can catch pictures of the kids on our Flickr page.
• Holly finally scored her dream car – a 2006 Mazda 5. I’m the anti-minivan but have to admit this is a pretty cool car – especially since it’s not a van. But despite being small, relatively efficient, and fun to drive, it also seats six, or seat four with tons of cargo space. Can’t wait to get this out on a vacation. It’s a great car/van/suv/wagon thing.
• I had the flu and Brett Favre retired on the same day. It doesn’t get much worse than that.

So that’s what’s new with me. How about you?

A friend is just getting started with PHP. Like me, he’s not a coder by nature so I thought giving him the benefits of what I’d learned might help. I also thought it might help other people out there so I’m offering it here as a free download.

The PHP sites that I have built in the past – it’s been awhile – all were of the simple database read/write variety. So once I had cobbled together a simple set of db connection, add, edit, remove, list, view scripts I had a quick framework to start my projects. That’s what this set is. It has all the basic scripts you need to make a simple site with fairly verbose comments indicating what the various parts do. I left the SQL queries in there, but you’ll have to make your own based upon your application. Maybe in the future I’ll add a MySql script and instructions for setting this up as a working app – that might make a more valid example. Still if you’re reasonably experience in some other scripting language, this should be enough for you to figure out what it’s doing and how to make it do what you want. I’m primarily a designer, so “coding” for me often consists of finding basic scripts, putting them together, and hacking together an application. If you work that way, this is the file for you.

Happy coding!

Download my PHP Starter Kit.

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Kind of a fun little quiz. I don’t feel too badly about the elements I missed for the most part. Although in my XHTML vigor, I forgot a whole set that I should have known – I won’t spoil it for you, though.

Thanks to News Goat for the link.

• Started putting Christmas lights on the house. It’s a little early, but it sure beats 40º and windy like it normally is when I do it. #

I’ve been a Blockbuster Online subscriber since the early days of the service. It hasn’t been perfect but does offer a good value and decent selection. The recently added in-store exchange was a nice touch, adding a lot of new value without raising prices. That’s almost unheard of these days.

For those of you unaware, Blockbuster has a variety of plans that offer x number of movies out at a time for one monthly fee. Much like Netflix, you choose movies using web app, creating a queue of movies you’d like to see. They ship you 2 or 3, you watch them and mail them back and they ship you more. About a year ago they added the ability to return the movies in one of their retail store AND take an equal number of movies home with you right then. Not only did this save time in mailing the movies back, but it also did not count against your online plan so you still got your 3 movies in the mail a couple of days later. Free movie rentals. Awesome!

A few days ago as I browsed my queue, a lightbox-style modal dialog popped up in my browser. It seems the online system was now more tightly integrated with the retail stores which noticed that I had already rented a movie that was in my queue and offered to automatically remove it. Nice touch. It’s nice to see a web app with such a helpful feature.

• Went to bed at 9:30 last night after falling asleep on the couch. I think I’m getting a cold. #
• @remrah – welcome back! Hope everything went well. #
• Off to the AIGA Portfolio review. #
• Reviewing portfolios. #