Joe Sak

My First Real-World Rails Project, Part II

Thursday, November 20th, 2008 | Code, Custom Development, Programming, Projects, Ruby on Rails, Web Development, Websites | 2 Comments

Continuing my series on my first real-world rails project, I’ve made some great advancements.

Using attachment_fu, following Mike Clark’s Tutorial for Uploading / Resizing images in Ruby on Rails, and Rmagick with ImageMagick, I was able to add Categories functionality with featured images.

I also used lightbox and Coda Slider for Admin & Home presentations, respectively.

Enjoy!

http://screencast.com/t/Jli6m3lzL

Ruby on Rails will Save Web Development

Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 | Code, Programming, Ruby on Rails, Web Development, Work Stuff | No Comments

I’m investing time to learn Ruby on Rails and guess what? I’m becoming happier by the page.

Ruby on Rails is built on, emphasizes and aides developers in working according to the principles of the Agile Manifesto. I’ve never read anything more inspiring than those 12 principles. Rails has made it possible to skip functional specs, comprehensive documents and all the other garbage that stops us from delivering working software to our customers that gives them a competitive advantage.

Rails allows you to respond to change rather than try to avoid it. Face it: clients change their minds. They forget to tell you some detail until the last week of development. They decide they don’t like their original ideas and want to try something new. In order for them to remain competitive, we need to be able to adapt and respond to those changes. So if you can’t control clients and stop this from happening, why would you continue to beat the dead horse? You write pages and pages of functional specs, scope docs and project plans. But I’ve never seen a single project completed without a change to any of those. It just doesn’t happen. Rails makes it easy to work with change, rather than constantly trying to figure out how to avoid it (you can’t).

Rails makes it possible to work and grow in a dynamic and competitive world. As I learn more, I’ll post more. Until then, I suggest you try Rails and see for yourself how much better your work can be.

CFD Smile Goes Live!

Monday, November 12th, 2007 | CSS, Clients, Code, Custom Development, Design, Portfolio, Portfolio - Freelance, Programming, Projects, SEO, Semantic XHTML, Skinning, Web Development, Websites, Work Stuff, XHTML | No Comments

Well, my first side project has finally gone live! After months of hard work, I now unveil www.cfdsmile.com to you. We wanted to bring out the services right up front for best emphasis, and lots of heavy stock photo usage for high impact.

We also worked with a professional web content writer to make the content more effective and search-engine optimized. This, coupled with semantic HTML, CSS, and google web master tools, will help this site rank high in keywords for Texas Dental Services.

So, please visit the site if you get a chance, and enjoy!

Login Usability: Am I in or out?

Wednesday, August 1st, 2007 | CSS, Code, Design, Feedback, Improving Code, Javascript, Programming, Usability, Web Development, Websites | No Comments

UPDATE: After making this post, and refreshing the parallels forums page, I was presented with “Welcome, Joseph Sak” instead of a login prompt. So maybe I got it wrong, or they did, but this post still stands!

The Parallels Forums recently got some redesign and information restructure, which all looks good and is organized quite well. But they’ve missed a couple really easy issues with their login functionality.

› Continue reading

Having my Cake and Coding it Too

Wednesday, April 4th, 2007 | Apache, CakePHP, Code, Marionette, OS X, Open Source, PHP, Programming, Projects, Web Development, Websites | No Comments

1 hour into CakePHP and I’m so enthused. This has re-sparked my love for PHP development. I can’t wait to take Marionette into full swing!

New Project “Marionette” in the works

Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007 | CSS, Code, Design, Life, Marionette, Photoshop, Programming, Projects, Web Development, Websites, Wordpress, XHTML | No Comments

OK, so I know I haven’t worked on the veritas project in a long time, but I promise you it is because my client has been busy working a second job and we just haven’t been in touch on the matter lately. It’s no big deal, I’m not charging money for the project and there is no strict deadline. I will be posting about that soon, though. I just got on him to purchase a domain and hosting solution so I can begin scripting the site. I will use wordpress and convert it into a CMS just like I did for Shirock Photography.

So, I am working on a new project, teaching myself cakePHP, and for now, it is codenamed “Marionette”. I’m very, very excited about this project and I hope to produce something in the coming weeks. Stay posted.

Fix your Javascript Print Style Switcher for Internet Explorer

Monday, February 19th, 2007 | Browsers, CSS, Code, Design, Internet Explorer, Javascript, Programming, Web Development, Websites, Windows | 4 Comments

So you’ve decided to use javascript to swap out a print style css sheet that basically hides a bunch of divs and maybe widens the content area. Perhaps your re-color the links and the text and fix the font sizes.

You try it in Firefox and it prints perfectly, but when you print in IE, you’ll notice IE didn’t really print your printable version.

So you think, ‘Ok I’ll add media=”print” to my stylesheet link!’ and then you refresh your page, try your Print this Page link, and nothing happens! And it still prints the wrong version! What to do?

Well, your old pal Joe here figured it out.

Here’s what you do:

1. Create a separate stylesheet called print.css
2. Add this code to your master stylesheet:
   @media print {

   @import "print.css";

   }

3. Implement your javascript for making the stylesheet override your master stylesheet
4. Test
5. Enjoy!

This allows you to switch to your print style so it is preview-able before printing and also tells IE to use print.css when it prints a page on your site. So incidentally, if a user just clicks print in IE without switching to your style, they will still get your printable version. I suppose this might cause confusion but considering the most reasons for making hard copies of digital information, it probably shouldn’t pose too much of a problem for your average user.

Now if your user wants to have a pretty print out of your website because they can’t access a computer to show it to someone else away from home, they’ll probably get stuck with the fact that IE does not print background images and colors by default any way.

A Web Design Process: Part I

Sunday, February 18th, 2007 | Apple, Code, Design, Macbook Pro, Photoshop, Programming, Web Development, Websites, Wordpress | No Comments

I’m not particularly gifted in web design but I thought I’d like to blog about my process from blank PSD using Photoshop CS3 beta on my Macbook Pro to full on HTML / CSS. So I’ll get right to the meat of my newest project: Veritas Community.

Veritas Community is an emerging church being started in Flint and Owosso by Tom and Rachel Wyatt with the help of the Salvation Army. It’s going to be a faith-based community hell-bent on sharing lives, faith, hope, love, music, art, and the occasional Lebowski references. Tom sent me a list of websites he likes, including Mosaic, which will be the base for my inspiration on the project.

The scope of the project will include a blog, a newsletter sign up, some informational pages (about us, contact us, etc), and an event list for music shows. The gathering place will double as a venue for indie rock bands. My vision is to develop this site using XHTML, CSS, PHP, Javascript, maybe some flash, and host it on Wordpress 2.

So without further ado, here is the preview.

This is Veritas home page, version 1.

Most of my focus was on logo development. I knew right off the bat I wanted a font like Gill Sans. I also knew I wanted to incorporate some sort of leafy symbol, to represent growth. You can see I have taken the greys and blue from mosaic and played with it for my layout and header. I hope they won’t mind. This is obviously not close to being finished but it’s a start and hopefully we’ll see something more as we progress.

Part II of my Design Process is now available

The Beauty of Standard Code

Wednesday, February 14th, 2007 | CSS, Code, Collaboration, Programming, Teamwork, Web Development, Websites, XHTML | 1 Comment

Eric Puidokas used to be a coworker of mine, but now he works in Florida for the New York Times. While he was here, he developed a standard skin and css naming convention for us to use so we could easily jump into each others’ code when need be to fix problems or implement redesigns.

I recently had the opportunity to do just that. I had to put in a new design for a client based on roughly the same layout. Eric’s standard coding made it very simple, and a process that takes 4 to 5 hours from a blank sheet took about 1 hour with Eric’s code.

We use the same names for similar layout elements in every single web page we do. It goes kind of like this: (this list identifies common unique DIV IDs)

• Frame (main container)
• Header
• Nav (main nav bar)
• Sidebar (sub page nav bar)
• Main – or – Content
• Footer

So thanks to Eric for the great code, and let this be an encouragement to other development teams to use standard naming conventions for your CSS and HTML elements.

Download a zipped example of our standard code.

Shirock Photography is live!

Wednesday, February 14th, 2007 | Code, Design, Programming, Websites, Wordpress | 1 Comment

After a couple months of planning, designing, coding, hosting, and blah blah blah, Sarah’s photography portfolio site is now live: http://www.shirockphotography.com I redesigned her site last January, and hosted it on WordPress this past month. I followed a few steps to make WordPress a CMS, and so far it’s been working well. Except instead of fgallery, we’re using Lazyest Gallery.

She is happy with it because now she can log in and easily make edits to her content. I also set up a method for her to easily change the pictures on her front page.

I created a contact page with a form so people can easily contact her for quotes. I utilized the front page to point visitors to important sections of her gallery.

For Phase 2, we’re hoping to make it possible for her clients to log in and view their pictures online. This might be doable with the help of Flickr.