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This is me, what a handsome chapThis is the online home of Chris Taylor, web developer and designer from Yorkshire, U.K.. Please take a look around using the menu below, click here if you have any questions or would like to contact me.

myJournal - it lives!

Thu Jul 3

As promised oh so many weeks ago, myJournal is now live. At the moment it’s in a beta state so membership is by invitation only, however visitors have full access to all the public parts of the site. It’s aimed to be a powerful social networking tool specifically for businesses and is packed with features:

  • Member profiles
  • Multiple sites per member
  • Sites can be company sites or personal sites
  • Company sites have a showroom (an online product brochure, with multiple images per product, product categories and a really powerful management tool)
  • Company sites and personal sites have a gallery where images and videos can be uploaded
  • Members can create and join networks. The administration functions for networks are really extensive:
    • Make networks open membership, or membership by invitation only
    • Make networks private, meaning the network can be seen but all members remain hidden (except to other members of that networks)
    • Network discussions, based on the great bbPress software, with attachments
    • Network administers can revoke network invitations, ban members, and promote/demote members to be administrators
  • Members and companies can choose a number of industries to be in - the list of industries is pretty massive
  • Private messaging feature which handles multiple recipients and attachments
  • Featured members and networks, which appear around the site
  • “Who’s online?” feature

And the entire system is available for organisations that wish to run their own business social networking site. If you’re interested in that please contact us for more details.

The whole thing wouldn’t be possible without the wonderful Wordpress MU platform, which I believe I’ve pushed to the very edge! Also my thanks go to Andy Peatling of BuddyPress fame for many, many hours chatting, helping me with code and generally being a good egg. It’s my pleasure to have offered the entire myJournal codebase to BuddyPress for their open source system, and I know some parts have already made it into builds.

Obviously there’s still a lot to do - how come so many bugs only make themselves visible when a beta version has gone live? - but I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve done so far. Hopefully we’ll end up with a site that will help businesses really get the best out of the web.

Being married to a geek

Thu May 22

Which my wife is, of course. Thanks to Jonathan I have a great joke that I would find hilarious if I ever had the guts it say it. She wouldn’t get it, though, which may be good or bad.

Anyway, the joke:

Geek: Get me a sandwich
Significant other: Aren’t you missing the inportant word?
Geek: Oh yes. sudo get me a sandwich

As you may have guessed this is just a quick update to let you know I’m still alive as I’m still up to my neck in myJournal, which will soon have some little preview screenshots.

Unobtrusive JavaScript password strength checker

Fri Apr 25

I’ve added a couple of new functions to Performer - my easy to use JavaScript library. The two new functions allow you to check the strength of a password as it’s typed into a text box, and also check if a password and its confirmation match. Both update a notification element with a suitable message.

But that’s not all. Some of the older functions, such as the AJAX loader and tabbing functions, have got a little love as well. They now add extra classes to the elements they affect so you can style them easily. This stuff isn’t documented yet, but in a nutshell:

  • When loading some data from a remote page using the Loader function the element which is being updated will have the class ‘loaderloading’ while the loading is happening. Phew, a few too many ‘loader’s there.
  • When using the Tabber function to switch the visibility between different elements in a tag group, the link to the selected tab will have an additional class of ‘tabbercurrent’.
  • UPDATE: the Toggler function adds the class ‘toggleropen’ when the toggled element is being shown. That means you can easily do ‘open’ and ‘close’ CSS styles.

I’ve got lots more ideas for Performer, but time is short at the moment. However this little library - and the fantastic prototype library it’s built on - continue to make my life better.

HTML is still where it’s at

Mon Apr 21

I just read a ridiculous thing at NetworkWorld about the “demise” of HTML skills. It’s in the conext of an article discussing “5 IT skills that won’t boost your salary”. I’ll quote the passage and highlight the relevent parts to save your eyeballs from being assailed by their ad-heavy pages:

Technical skills may never die, but areas of expertise wane in importance as technology advances force companies to evolve and IT staff to forsake yesterday’s craft in favor of tomorrow’s must-have talent …

As companies embrace Web 2.0 technologies such AJAX, demand for skills in HTML programming are taking a back seat. According to Foote Partners, pay for skills in technologies such as Ajax and XML increased by 12.5% in the last six months of 2007, while IT managers say they don’t see a demand for technology predecessors such as HTML. “I’m not seeing requirements for general Web 1.0 skills — HTML programming skills,” says Debbie Joy, lead solution architect for CSC in Phoenix.

Is it just me, or does anyone else find that ridicuous? AJAX requires HTML, just like cars need roads, or boats need water. Without HTML skills all the flashy new AJAX development wouldn’t work.

Tell your managers, we need to keep the plain old semantic HTML skills. Without them the web is dead.

HTML, PHP and JavaScript Experiments

Sun Apr 20

I was browsing through some stats for my website tonight and noticed a few people were visiting for my Automatic Image Replacement Engine (AIRE) which I did a long while ago. So I thought I’d do a quick post about some of the other experiments I’ve worked on which are all free for any use (just credit me as the original author).

3hive player - playing the sharing!

A If nifty Greasemonkey script for Firefox which adds a little player for every track found on the excellent 3hive music sharing website. Keep up the good work, boys.

CSS Gantt chart

Show a Gannt chart with just HTML and CSS, no need for images. There’s even fixed-width and fluid-width versions.

Datatable class

A simple datatable class for PHP which will allow you to pass an array of values which will then be displayed as a table. Format cells almost anyhow you like, add optional alternating CSS classes, and lots more options. There’s also a simple explanation of object-oriented programming on that page in case you’ve found it as difficult as me to understand the concept.

Refresher function

Update a part of your webpage with JavaScript the easy way, so now anyone can do that clever AJAX stuff.

Clean URL Capability Checker

If you want to know if your server supports mod_rewrite, the fantastic way to rewrite URLs, then use this little tool.

Zoom Boxes

An experiment with multiple boxes that zoom in and out when clicked. Not much more I can say about that, really.

AIRE - automatic image replacement engine

Fonts are limited on the web, so I wrote this little PHP function that will render single-line text using any font you want as an image. Before you say “but images aren’t accessible!” it writes the images in as backgrouns, leaving accessible text in the HTML. Hoorah.