Justin Hayes Consulting blogs

Introducing IPMS Hamilton

Justin — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 23:40:00 -0500

I've put the finishing touches on a website for a local scale modellers club, IPMS Hamilton. The site was setup in about a week with the help of Drupal 6.0, an excellent open-source content management system that I have not used before now. I will certainly be using it again in the future, I am very impressed with it. The site itself is simple. The client was happy with a variation of the default theme so my main job was configuration and training. And yes, I know it's been a very long time since I posted here, but I'm hoping to be posting more now that I'm back into the webdesign business. I had taken a break from bringing on new clients but I am once again open for business!

.com Domain Name Prices Going Up

Justin — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 08:27:00 -0500

Verisign, the company that controls the .com TLD (top-level domain) has announced that they will be increasing the wholesale price to registrars (the companies that sells the domains to consumers) of .com domains from $6.00/year to $6.42/year, a 7% increase.

With their recently renegotiated contract with ICANN, Verisign will be allowed to hike up the price 7% per year pretty much indefinitely. And with roughly 65 million .com domains currently registered, they stand to make about $27 million extra this year.

TechCrunch said it best: "It's good to be a monopoly."

Via TechCrunch

Open-Source Spotlight: Inkscape

Justin — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 22:24:00 -0500

Let this be the beginning of a series of posts I'll be making every now and then to sing the praises of the many great open-source programs I use almost daily to do my job.

To start with, for no reason in particular other than it being the program I was using at the time I got this idea, I'll focus on Inkscape, a vector-image drawing program. Inkscape is similar to Adobe Illustrator.

Inkscape is something I've only been using for a few months now, and I am still learning it. I personally use it mostly for creating website design mock-ups, and various background images for DIV boxes such as those with rounded-corners. It can also be used for creating nice, fancy heading text, but I have not quite reached that level of mastery.

That's about all I can say about it really. If you use linux, chances are your distro of choice has it available in its package manager, so look for it there, or go check out their download page where you'll find compiled packages for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X, as well as source code.

Minimal Template

Justin — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 23:02:00 -0500

The second in my series of downloadable templates, enjoy :)

Download | Demo

Minimal is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License. You are free to use Minimal in any way you like as long as you preserve the license, and link back to me.

New Template: Red 2.0

Justin — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 23:01:00 -0500

I've just created the first of (hopefully) many downloadable templates for anyone to use.

Download | Demo

Red 2.0 is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License. You are free to use Red 2.0 in any way you like as long as you preserve the license, and link back to me.

Are There No Decent PHP Galleries?

Justin — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 15:38:00 -0500

Recent dealings I've had with my most recent client have certainly shown me that what the world lacks right now is a decent PHP gallery system. Seriously, everything out there right now is overly-complicated to use, and difficult to integrate with a website needing more than just a gallery. Why can't there be a gallery as easy to use, integrate, and customize as WordPress?

Let me shed further light on my current dilemma. What I have is a client who wants a website featuring a photo gallery, as well as a way to post news and other content. Simple, you might think at first, just base it all off WordPress and add a plugin or two for the gallery. But no... this client needs a fully-featured gallery with support for multiple users. So my next thought is, why not use one of the many wonderful PHP galleries available: Coppermine, Gallery, Singapore, etc. While each is pretty good in its own right, they all suffer from a few problems when it comes to site integration.

The biggest is that they all have a rather clunky UI; too many options, not enough guidance. All I want to do is upload a photo, why would I want to rename the file, and why oh why can't I make new albums as I upload images? Let's compare to how a similar situation is handled in WordPress: When I write a new post, it's very simple, I write it, and I then select categories for it. There, done. So, in a gallery, what I want is to be able to upload a photo, and then choose a current album, or create a new one to place it in. All on-the-fly. None of this making albums beforehand business that most galleries force you into.

Overly-complex UI aside, what else is wrong with all these galleries? Well... quite simply, theyre all loners. What I mean to say is, they don't integrate well with other platforms, such as forums, or blogs. This problem is two-fold: First, they're often difficult to theme, or skin, so getting a consistent layout can be a challenge. And secondly, backend-level integration, such as merging user databases, and providing an easy means to share content is a real chore. Some galleries are better than others in the second argument, where plugins are provided to add that level of integration, but it is still entirely up to you to create a consistent layout and look. This is also highly dependant on what you are seeking to integrate it with; only popular platforms seem to enjoy such plugins for ease of integration.

Back to my client, and how these problems apply, or don't apply. The target audience for this site is comprised of men, most of whom are 40-50 years of age, or older. For the most part, they are not computer-savvy at all, and getting used to a bad gallery UI will be a major problem for them. And for the client, administering it all will be even more tricky. Luckily for me, the client does not intend to have many people posting to the "blog" portion of the site, so user-integration is not needed. What will be a problem is theming the whole site to look consistent.

This leaves me in a tough spot, because on one hand, I want to create an attractive looking site with a unified look, but on the other hand, it needs to have a fully-featured gallery with all the fixings. I've already decided that I will use a gallery, and tack WordPress on for the site news portion that the client needs. So my task I guess is to create matching themes. If anything it will be a learning experience.

Dell to sell PCs with Linux

Justin — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 18:58:00 -0500

Looks like the wait is finally over, a major vendor is now going to support Linux. That's right, Linux preloaded on a Dell Optiplex, Latitude, or Precision workstation. And it won't even be all that hard for Dell either; I have a Latitude D820 (work-issued), and Ubuntu Linux works very well on it "out of the box". If that's any indication of their other hardware, then they'll have an easy time adapting Linux to their computers.

I know, it is Dell we are talking about here... but honestly, Dell is one of only a few major companies that could pull this off, so I think this is definitely a good thing, despite their shortcomings.

Source: PCWorld via bit-tech.net

Getautomatix.com UP!

Justin — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 19:35:00 -0500

Just an update on yesterday's post, looks like getautomatix.com is back up and running now. The server move will occur soon, but you probably won't notice, if I do my job correctly :)

And to my recent influx of additional visitors: feel free to keep checking back here, I'll be sure to keep posting interesting content.

Getautomatix.com Down

Justin — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 23:02:00 -0500

Seems that the Automatix website is down, and I happen to get a lot of traffic from people looking for it. Arnav and I are currently trying to contact the host to find out why and get it fixed. Soon as we have access to it all again, we're switching hosts. At this time I have no idea when it will be back up, and when we will move it.

UPDATE - 03/10/07: Looks like the site is all back up and running now, forums, wiki, repos and all :) Many thanks to the folks at Invision who restored our forum and upgraded it to the latest version.

OLDER UPDATES:

UPDATE: The host has been reached, and apparently New York (where the server is located) was hit by a nasty ice storm, so it might be a few days before the site is back up.

UPDATE (AGAIN): And, we're back up.

UPDATE (WHEN WILL THEY STOP?!) - 03/07/07: Looks like the site went down again, this time I am not sure why at all, and I have yet to make contact with Arnav, or the host.

03/09/07: Well, we now know why it is down, and it's not because of the weather. Apparently someone took advantage of a PHP injection vulnerability in our forum or wiki software and deleted all the files we had on there. I'm told the databases are still intact, and I have backups of the site main index. No idea yet when we will be back up and running, but hopefully it'll be soon.

03/09/07: We now have everything but the forums back up and running. In the future, we plan to have repo mirrors, and Automatix will have the capability to try mirrors if the main site times out.

Site Now Finished!

Justin — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 18:28:00 -0500

Well, I finally got around to finishing off the website. All pages are now complete, and I guess I could say I am open for business.

In other news, I received a rather random windfall from one of my former places of employment, vacation pay! I honestly forgot all about that.

Anyway, random news, and site news over, this concludes this post.

Getautomatix.com Site Update

Justin — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 15:25:00 -0500

One of my earlier clients, Arnav Ghosh of Automatix fame had mentioned that he'd like a lighter theme for his website. Knowing that he did like the dark one as well, but was more concerned for those that did not, I set about providing a means to use both.

My first task was creating a new, lighter theme. At that, I believe I have succeeded. Arnav was very pleased with it.

With a single click to the style selector in the top right corner, you can switch back to the old dark theme.

This is accomplished with a javascript file that grabs the theme you want to use (from the invocation of the style chooser), and then sends it to your browser and saves it in a cookie so that you will see that theme until you choose another. If you'd like to use it, feel free to. Here (right-click and save as to save the file) is the javascript file, and below is a sample of the code for the switcher.

This goes in between your <head> tags:

<link href="css/light/style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" title="Light" />
<link href="css/dark/style.css" rel="alternate stylesheet" type="text/css" title="Dark" />
<script src="css/styleswitcher.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

And this goes wherever you want your style switcher to be:

Style: <a href="#" onkeypress="return false;"
onclick="setActiveStyleSheet('Light'); return false;"
title="Light">Light</a> | <a href="#" onkeypress="return false;"
onclick="setActiveStyleSheet('Dark'); return false;"
title="Dark">Dark</a>

Should be easy enough to convert that to your own needs. You can use dropdown lists as well if you have many themes.

For a full (and much for informative) tutorial, go see A List Apart.

Still Procrastinating

Justin — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 21:05:00 -0500

Ya, the site still isn’t done, but I promise, it will be soon! What still needs to be done? There’s still some issues with the stylesheet in regards to Internet Explorer compatibility, but I dont expect any problems with getting that fixed up. Second is the actual content of the site. I have been writing stuff down on scrap pieces of paper when I’m bored in my classes, but I have as yet not put fingers to keyboard so to speak. I will eventually, and once I start, the rest of the content will probably find its way onto the site too :) Anyway, besides that… the design of the site is mostly complete, but I’ll probably keep adding more stuff, as I usually do.

Hello World!

Justin — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 19:02:00 -0500

Hello, and welcome to my blog :) So, this is my first post obviously, I suppose I should introduce myself, and the site.

I am Justin Hayes, and I am a geek (this sounds like an AA meeting), a computer geek to be specific. I have been interested in technology and computers for a long time now, and have worked in various jobs in the field. I have a lot of experience in these areas acquired from years of curiousity and learning. It seemed naturally fitting that since I know so much about computers, I should spread my knowledge to others. It also seemed natural that I try to profit from it. Thus, I am a Computing Consultant. I also do webdesign, and this business will be a sort of catch-all for my services. I have made this website to promote and market my skills, and provide a means for customers and potential costumers to contact me. It also gave me a good excuse to design a new website :P

So that’s me, and this website in a nutshell I guess. Enjoy the site, the blog, and maybe my professional services in the future :)