Thoughts

Life, the Internet and everything.

[colbyrabideau]

Politics, Voting and Democratic Engagement

Git in Government

Could the government use a distributed version control system, like Git, to establish a new level of political engagement and transparency?

Narwhal: Harnessing Big Data for Smarter Campaigning

Ars Technica reports on how the Obama’s tech team harnessed “the cloud” to unify massive and desperate databases of campaign and voter information to run a more intelligent political campaign.

Crowdfunding Political Movements

Checkout online campaigning/crowdfunding sites like ActBlue and Rally (kind of like Kickstarter or Indiegogo).

[colbyrabideau]

Fixing iLearn

Hey Marist! Ever notice that the navigation on iLearn is basically broken:

I was tired of it so I whipped up a quick fix. After you get it working it should look something like this:

Much better right? You can check out the guide on Github.

At the moment I've only posted directions for Google Chrome, but I'm planning on getting a guide for firefox as well. You should be able to use any per-site css extension.

[colbyrabideau]

Aware: Self-validating Models for Laravel

Last night, I submitted a brand new bundle for Laravel PHP! Aware is an extension of Taylor Otwell's Eloquent ORM, which allows you to define models with built-in validation.

Aware use's Laravel's Validator class so it's easy to define validation rules:

class User extends Aware { /** * Aware validation rules */ public static $rules = array( 'name' => 'required', 'email' => 'required|email' ); ... }

Aware models validate automatically when the save method is called:

$user = new User(); $user->name = 'Colby'; $user->email = 'crabideau5691'; $user->save(); // returns false $user->email = '[email protected]'; $user->save(); // returns true

If a model is invalid, you can access the errors from the validator like so:

$user->errors->all()

For more detailed documentation and to browse the source check out the github repo.

[colbyrabideau]

RE:discover

We just launched the RE:discover website! 

RE:discover sports an eclectic mix of artwork and crafts from artists in all walks of life. The store boasts watercolors, mixed media art, photography, and antique pieces. Among displays are bags, jewelry, scarves, hats, and baby clothes. Some products that are customer favorites include: hand soaps and lotions, wind chimes, stained glass, wood work, and pottery.

The new site is alright, but it's got nothing on the actual store! It's definitely worth a visit!

DISCLAIMER: my Mom is the owner so I may or may not have some personal bias on the subject...

[colbyrabideau]

On Muse and Markup

After Monday's headlines on Adobe Muse, I decided to check out the free beta for myself. For those of you who may not know, Muse is a new tool from Adobe to "design and publish HTML websites without writing code." The interface will be quite familiar to those of you who have used Flash, Fireworks, Indesign, etc.

So let me make sure I got this right:

design and publish HTML websites without writing code

Herein lies the problem with WYSIWYG editors of all shapes and sizes. The rendered web page is just the tip of the iceberg. Without a rudimentary understanding of the way the code works, it's harder to grasp the how, when and why of the rendered HTML document.

Yes it's true that many print design principles are easily, and quite effectively, applied to web design, but the differences lie in their respective implementations. There's no scenario in which a newspaper column would need to respond to a change in the size of the paper itself. Print design is static. Web design is not...

There's a reason that fantastically talented individuals, like Harry Williams of CSS Wizardry, spend time writing on the intricacies of clean and semantic HTML:

markup is important

Cleaner markup means faster load times and a readable document for humans outside the confines of the browser window. I'm not saying a write perfect HTML, not by a longshot, but I'm damn sure it looks better than this:

<ul class="MenuBar widget_invisible colelem" id="n5"><!-- row --> <li class="MenuItemContainer grpelem" id="n6"><!-- vertical box --> <div class="pointer_cursor MenuItem MenuItemWithSubMenu MuseMenuActive colelem" id="n7"><!-- horizontal box --> <a class="block" href="index.html"></a> <div class="MenuItemLabel NoWrap grpelem" id="n8"><!-- content --> <p id="n10">Home</p> <div class="wrap"></div> </div> <div class="wrap"></div> </div> </li> <li class="MenuItemContainer grpelem" id="n12"><!-- vertical box --> <div class="pointer_cursor MenuItem MenuItemWithSubMenu colelem" id="n13"><!-- horizontal box --> <a class="block" href="portfolio.html"></a> <div class="MenuItemLabel NoWrap grpelem" id="n14"><!-- content --> <p id="n16">Portfolio</p> <div class="wrap"></div> </div> <div class="wrap"></div> </div> </li> <li class="MenuItemContainer grpelem" id="n18"><!-- vertical box --> <div class="pointer_cursor MenuItem MenuItemWithSubMenu colelem" id="n19"><!-- horizontal box --> <a class="block" href="contact.html"></a> <div class="MenuItemLabel NoWrap grpelem" id="n20"><!-- content --> <p id="n22">Contact</p> <div class="wrap"></div> </div> <div class="wrap"></div> </div> </li> <li class="MenuItemContainer grpelem" id="n24"><!-- vertical box --> <div class="pointer_cursor MenuItem MenuItemWithSubMenu colelem" id="n25"><!-- horizontal box --> <a class="block" href="blog.html"></a> <div class="MenuItemLabel NoWrap grpelem" id="n26"><!-- content --> <p id="n28">Blog</p> <div class="wrap"></div> </div> <div class="wrap"></div> </div> </li> <li class="wrap"></li> </ul>

That's Muse output of a simple, 4-item navigation menu. Sure it works... but I can accomplish the same thing with a fraction of the code:

<ul class="MenuBar"> <li><a href="#home">Home</a></li> <li><a href="#portfolio">Portfolio</a></li> <li><a href="#contact">Contact</a></li> <li><a href="#blog">Blog</a></li> </ul>

It took Muse 43 lines to do 6 lines of work. I think the result speaks for itself. If your objective is a professional HTML websites, you will not reach it without writing markup. No matter how simple the site.

Desktop programs don't make good websites, us web folk make good websites.

[colbyrabideau]

I don't know how to IE6

It's time to stop supporting IE6. No not because it isn't standards compliant, or because the biggest companies on the web don't think it's economically feasible to continue to support archaic technology, or even because we would be doing our users a favor by forcing them to upgrade. No, it's time because I don't know how to build a web page that displays properly in IE6. I just don't know how to IE6.

I'm a 20-year-old web developer/designer/enthusiast. I'm an intern at a company where the social web and Facebook development is the name of the game. In the final week of wrapping up my first legitimate project, my boss dropped the bomb I was hoping to avoid. "Hey, Colby", he said, "make sure it works in IE6 and up." I grumbled a bit but I figured, how bad could it possibly be. IE7 wasn't too terrible, sure it's inconvenient but after an hour or so of CSS tweaks the layout was spot on. Boy, was I wrong.

I'm a rising Junior with top marks in my computer science program and I've spent the last two and a half years buried in CSS. Though I may be short on experience, I consider myself extremely well versed in CSS. I was in no way prepared for IE6. Turns out I wasn't in Kansas anymore. I was in a bizarre and at times terrifying world where conditional JavaScript fragments can be embedded in external style sheets and block level elements are affected by text alignment. I haven't slacked on my school work over the last few years and I've retained enough of it to know that at no point did I ever receive any indications that I might need to worry about any of the issues that were thrown at me this past week. 

It took me two solid days, but I managed to hack together something that vaguely resembled my app and retained most of its functionality. The problem here is that I spent two relearning how to build a web page for an obscure outdated browser.

There's a fine line between supporting older technologies and letting ourselves get dragged down by relics of nearly forgotten era. 

As a student, it's a waste of time that would be better spent enhancing knowledge for building the future.

As a developer, it's a deadline stretching, week of hell.

As a client, it's money sucking vortex.

Now's the time. Someone needs to start the ball rolling and just say no.

[colbyrabideau]

Alexandra Nunes Photography

So as it turns out, my cousin, Allie, is a rather good photographer and knowing that I'm a rather good web developer she asked if I could build her a website. I think the answer to that question is apparent. 

Check out her awesome photos!!!

[colbyrabideau]

And so it begins!

Welcome to my new site. I've decided to try my hand at blogging from time to, so if you're interested here's where you'll find my posts.

I would like to extend a very large thank-you to Harry Roberts of CSS Wizardry. Without Inuit CSS, his amazing CSS framework, this site would not have turn out nearly as pretty as it did :)

And for now I leave you to continue wandering the Interwebs.

Come back soon!!!