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 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.

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!

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.

When you log into the Parallels Forums, it takes you to a “logging in” screen and redirects you back to where you were, which is fine, but what is this?!

Am I logged in or out?

This is what you see in the top right of the forums after logging in. Apparantly, I’m logged in because I can start threads, but unless I click on the “+” symbol in the top left and opening a post-thread page, I have no visual cue that I am logged in.

Originally, with the old design, you saw your name and a “logout” link next to it. Or you could click your name to edit your profile. This was highly usable and gave immediate feedback to the user that yes, John Smith, you are logged in.

Now, Parallels, if you’re not willing to clean up that little mess, why are you making me erase “Login” from your textbox before typing my user name?

You can solve this with a simple function.


onclick="eraseInput();"

Pretty simple usability points, and I can’t believe Parallels just got rid of them with their new design.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.