Life is like a box of chaos and Forrest Gump was/is a descendent of Nathan Bedford Forrest and I’ve never read the Forrest Gump book. It’s always been difficult for me to keep track of what I did. I’m good about managing what’s in progress but once it’s done it fades from memory fairly quickly. […]
Category: Web Development
Recent Work – End of June Edition
Greetings dear reader. I write to you again out of the desperate hope that writing this cements things I’ve learned better in my own head and maybe gives a person out there something that saves them some time or suffering or maybe just provides a kernel of an idea that they can improve on. That’s […]
Recent Work – Start of June Edition
My date titles continue to get blurrier. The range of stuff covered gets wider. VCU is moving any course with over 50 students to the online format. We’re supporting that move in a variety of ways. Our little R&D group is trying to answer the non-standard problems, questions, media desires. To some degree we are […]
More Recent Work
Here is more recent work of a random nature. Some tours, some examples, basically a few highlights from this week that seem like they’d be vaguely interesting to someone. Protein Molecules Talking to one of pharmacy faculty about interactive 3d options led to his sending me a Blender file for a protein molecule. Initially, I […]
Considering Our WordPress Development Patterns
I believe we’ve developed a pretty solid pattern for making WordPress do what faculty want and making that happen pretty quickly. We have high goals in terms of taking on additional challenging work while also supporting a lot of things and a lot of people so we’ve had to be fairly pragmatic in terms of […]
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Two Display Posts Tricks
I’ve been a fan of Display Posts since the days of straight Non-Programistan. Despite the fact that I can write my own stuff from scratch, Display Posts still comes in handy all the time. The following are just two little tricks used in a recent course site. I’m just skimming the surface of the capabilities […]
PHP Middleware for Keeping Your JS API Secrets Secret
Origin Story We were looking to pull in live weather data for a eco-related design contest that VCU Qatar is hosting. I found a free API for weather but wanted a way to use it via javascript and not expose any secrets. That led to the script below. Many APIs have query strings that require […]
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Taming a River Theme
Origin Story Matt worked long hours making an incredible theme for Footprints on the James course.1 It’s in WordPress but a large portion of the site ended up being built by hand as complexity increased and time dwindled.2 That means it’s hard-coded HTML/PHP. Now because the site was so great, we ended up having a […]
H Tags and Auto-Constructing an Anchor Index
Origin Story I got a fairly dense Word document that needed to go online in way that people could more easily navigate. After checking it out, it appeared we had a large number of sections but we were lucky in that they were designated by H tags of various levels. Now I could have gone […]
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Logging in PHP
In javascript, figuring things out is not to bad. For almost everything, I can just use console.log(whatever) and spit out the data I’m trying to figure out right there in the browser. With PHP is more difficult. You can var_dump() many things. You can improve on that using print_r to make those gnarly1 objects and […]