Oh and forgot to mention, it’s open source based! This means low expense and good results as usual in the FOSS group. Will be posting some results with my experience on it, now that I’m almost to embrace photography more seriously. If you don’t have the money nor the mad genius to get Photoshop, this is a real good way to start!

Even so, I didn’t have a nice night sleep because of this. I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about how I could do one of my projects. What tools to use, what plugins/modules to install or code manually, there’s a lot of research work to do in these cases.

Well, my conclusion after some time was that current CMS should be named something else. Textpattern, MovableType and Wordpress are blog publishing platforms. Drupal, ExpressionEngine and Joomla can actually generate different types of content and handle them differently. Yet, there are differences that separate each one. Even though I know Drupal very little, I know it the better than the other two. From my experience, Drupal is so solid I can’t break it apart. But neither me nor anyone should blame myself for not knowing how to mess with a CMS. After all, it should be easy to design and develop right out-of-the-box, shouldn’t it?

I’m uploading Joomla as I write to test it out too. It has been awarded and everything, let’s see that award play in my advantage. I just want a free, easy to design and develop CMS. It’s not asking much. Following Jon’s wisdom, I’ll stick with one CMS and blow it apart to my needs.

I met a client a couple days ago. He asked me to retake on a project that used a very strange platform. “Please take a look at the current launch, José”. What do I do? I Browse CSS, accessibility, usability and source code. The apparently awarded CMS was built on a table based layout and it didn’t show the same results over different browsers. And you say: “OK, so what’s the problem with designing on top of a table layout ?” If it works on many browsers and you can’t afford web standards, well… keep it! But if it comes out as a complete junk like this, I would be ashamed of myself. The website looks like this in Internet Explorer (6 & 7 look pretty similar), Firefox and Safari.

Any napoleon with this level of costumer fidelity - yea, the costumers say they have really great products! my gosh… - ought to be better prepared to face the real challenge, when users start to realize there are many browsers to choose from, new technologies improve user experience and designers and developers create the web differently with more care for performance, beauty and usability. Are you a designer reading this? Take a look at web standards and cross-browser experience. I’m sure you’ll like it.

This post is more like an introspection to my progress throughout 2007/2008, regarding web design, development and self development. It has been by far the year that I have learned the most. It has been the year where I have put myself to test the most. It has been the year where I’ve finally met the USA, their culture, their “different” food. There were just so many things that happened! I can’t even remember them all.

This was the last year (until further notice) on my degree.

• I experienced the challenge of being a leader of a pseudo-company. It’s a wonderful experience yet tough if you don’t know how to do it correctly or if you go soft. I met wonderful people, grew on open-source and developed my standardismo during that time.
• In 2008, I had a two month training in one of the biggest banks in Portugal. My first true work experience… boy, was that hard. Faced a bad boss, worked with awful .NET Framework 1.1, coded in Visual Basic and commuted between home, work and college.
• In July, I went to the USA, met lovely people and a lousy house. Won my first true job and my first true money. Learned a lot on web design, web tools and frameworks, productivity, self development and subsistance… everything that turns you into an adult. It really felt like I’ve taken lots of hormones to grow up faster. Try and picture it

It’s September now and I feel wonderful. I know a lot more people, a lot more of my skills, a lot more of how my future should change from now. Well… I know it’ll change a lot!

Thanks for everyone that’s helped me to become a better person, a better designer, a better developer, a better friend. I’m not going to name everybody because I have people I learned from … for what I should do and what I shouldn’t.

I believe this year to come will bring me a lot of knowledge, experience and income so I can fulfill my dreams. Wish me luck!

1. Let’s get that same JPG image I used for the logo (the original is a bit larger I guess). As you see, it has a white background.
   
2. Now let’s get a background. This should do good.
   
3. Now that we have both the jewel and the background, we’ll set the jewel layer to multiply mode. This mode allows us to hide the brightest colors from the layer. We’ll get something like this:
   
4. Create a new layer underneath the jewel and start painting it white. Multiplying something with white equals that something. This way, the jewel returns to its original state before it was multiplied with the background. Paint white in the areas you want to restore. While painting you should get something like this:
   
5. Personally I used the pen tool to simply go around the entire jewel with more accuracy. You should conclude now that all it matters is the final result: a white jewel-shaped area. Finally merge both layers and you’re done! Ready to export to whichever format you want.

Important note: if you want to try this with black, only change the blending mode to screen instead of multiply and paint black instead of white. Hope you learned something new from this example.

This accomplishment has been unveiled to me through three of my favorite websites out there: SimpleBits, Viget and OnWired. I know a lot of other websites that use this but these really caught my special attention. If you see three homepages, all of them use full-range backgrounds and yet they use the the 960px grid. I wanted that richness in my projects and so I gave it a try. Before I deepen into the procedure, i must say it’s always good to have a container/bucket div instead of acting directly over the body element for cross-browser compatibility. I have tried it and IE 6 didn’t like it very much.

We are admitting a simple skeleton here: a simple header, a navigation bar, a main body and a footer should do the trick. So here’s my procedure:

1. Create the container div around the skeleton I referred to. <div id='container'>
→ Skeleton goes here.
</div>This is helpful as I mentioned in order to set its width to 960px right there. #container { width: 960px; margin: X auto; }This is a very basic approach and it’s a good one if you want to implement a 30px padded box like Paul Boag for example. That way you save further implementation and get a clean shot at the grid. However, if you plan to use full-range backgrounds like I did then you’ll have a little more work.
2. Don’t set any width for the skeleton div’s so they default to 100%. Now you’re ready to set each one a background (perhaps you’ll have a repeat-x option or an attached one merging to the background color). Now each div gets it’s own background, which is what we want. For the header, it would be something like: #header { background: #xyz url('path/to/background.png') repeat-x; }
3. Place a single div child inside each skeleton div. All of the content should go inside these child div’s. Then, you can set each div child the 960px width like this: #container > div > div { width: 960px; margin: 0 auto; }This tells us the div’s inside the skeleton div’s get affected. That’s why I’m saying every piece of content should go inside the child div’s, while the background goes outside.

And you ask why not setting the default width to the skeleton div’s itself? Well, you can do that but let me show me the differences.

Again, this is a very simple example. You can try lots of other stuff like positioning only some of the div’s, background different settings, anything. I hope you learned something from this example.

Well, the good thing is I can actually play some old games like Empire Earth and Counter-Strike with the cousins to have some fun. The bad news is my Apache server settings screwed up. Two things happened. Number one: http://localhost/~user was thrown a 403 Forbidden access. This problem is the result of the user configurations for the server whilst the reinstallation / upgrade of the system, they don’t exist now. What you have to do is very simple. Go to /private/etc/apache2/users and create a file yourshortusername.conf and type this:

<Directory "/Users/shortusername/Sites/">
Options Indexes MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

Restart your server and you’re ready to go!

Number two: My virtual hosts blew away. I should have kept a record on how to do this in case I had to a reinstallation, I guess I can kick myself now. (I’m solving this as I write this post :P) Three steps:

1. Go to /private/etc/hosts and say you want to assign 127.0.0.1 to your alias, like this: 127.0.0.1 youralias
2. Go to /private/etc/apache2 and uncomment the line that includes the virtual hosts configuration file. If you want to use PHP, you might want to uncomment the line that includes it as well.
3. Finally, go to /private/etc/apache2/extra and edit the httpd-vhosts.conf mentioned on 2. and add this chunk of code:

<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1>
DocumentRoot "/path/to/your/site/"
ServerAlias yoursitename
ServerName yoursitename
</VirtualHost>

Restart your server and virtual hosts are up and running.

The library consists of three functions for now: assert, get and kill. These three act, obviously, as flash message conditions throughout the entire application. The first one inserts, the second one fetches the message for actually showing the message and kill to delete what’s stored in memory. For now, I use three kinds: notice, warning and error. Later on I will be able to assert any kind of flash messaging that you’d like.

Important: This classes uses the sessions library. If you don’t have the sessions library turned on, you must do so.

1. function assert ( $kind, $data ) — inserts into memory the message $data of the kind $kind.
2. function get ( $kind ) — returns the message of the kind $kind. if there is no such kind asserted, it returns false. This is particularly important for designing purposes, in the way that you can fill the message within a <div> and you only generate it if there is such message of that kind in memory.
3. function kill ( $kind = null ) — deletes the message of kind $kind stored in memory. Notice the null; this means you can delete all three messages stored in memory.

Flash messaging is supposed to be dead by itself after an action is performed. I’ll find that out and talk about it in further posting but for now there is actually one simple way to simulate it. Simply type $this->flash->kill() after the view is loaded. This way the view can display the flash message(s) and then you can eliminate it/them. Pretty cool huh?

I got in the plain Saturday, July 19th 2008, 9h30am. Everything was still an exciting mistery. Arrived at Newark, New Jersey at 3pm. Jim Starace picked me up to show me the town of Hauppauge, New York. He showed me my office, my home and some parts of town. For two days we drove to various spots like some stores for me to get some stuff to eat, sleep and fill the house. It was an interesting weekend, we could actually chat a little and hang out so me and Jim could get along as friends and colleagues at work.

Monday came. Jim picked me from the hotel on our way to start my first day of work. A wonderful day that was. I met the boss, Keith, a wonderful guy indeed. Everyone at Agency Access is just lovely people! I started my role as the in-house PHP developer in order to start the project I applied to. The whole day went just great. I had the perfect work day. I wish these days could exist where I live.

Then another major event came upon: my moving in. When I first saw the house and said to me: “I won’t be staying here too long, I can tell…”. The house «looked» kinda nice but it was only that. The house smelled bad and it had no lights in the living room nor the bedroom. The floor was carpeted - I am not used to it - and the couch was dirty. I would get a new couch cover and the problem would be settled. I was so excited with all the adventure that I didn’t even think about that whole mess. I just wanted to experience all of it; unfortunately it turned out the other way around.

The first night at the place was … peaceful. Until… the landlord turned the TV out loud till after bed time. I had the whole bedroom lit up by the moonlight so I just couldn’t get no sleep because of these two incidents. I managed to get some sleep.

Next day I wake up with pain in my back from the lousy night I had. I get up, I have breakfast and go to work. A lovely 20 minute walk in the midst of the trees that fill New York’s suburbs. The whole work day was very pleasant and productive. I was actually enjoying working there very much, no doubt on that.

When I came home, I felt this deep voidness inside. I was looking at my still unpacked case, my dirty couch, my TV set and decided to chill out a little bit. I laid on the couch with my laptop trying to chat with my friends at Portugal. A nice time that was. When all of them were off I decided to get something to eat. I had previously got those add-water meals so I could easily start off with something rather than milk & cereals. So I put turn the oven on and it didn’t last 5 minutes until the fire alarm went off…! I had to turn it off so the house wouldn’t go nuts because of that. So milk & cereals it was for dinner.

I tried to listen to some of my music to see if I could relax but the moment I turned the music on I felt like I wanted to dance it with some girl. Guess what? There were no girls! Turn it off so I won’t be crying. What could I possibly do at that time (it was like 9pm) ? Nothing but go to bed. And so I did. What happened? Landlord’s TV out loud. Moonlight. I was trembling for so much disaster. I started crying in despair. That’s where I found I was having no peace. The next morning I got the tickets and went back home.

Life lesson: never face something that unknown. I lost a lot of money on this adventure and I must get them back no matter what. If you are reading this and want to do something alike this, be careful! I learned a lot in this week concerning risk taking, investing and inner joy, peace and happiness.

I appreciate everyone’s help and support. But there are three people I want to thank with kind attention: Jim Starace, for all the incomparable support during this week, my deepest thank you goes to you; my mother because she is my mother and there is no one like her, period; Tony Chester, leader of the OnWired team that first offered me a job but it didn’t work. However, his concern has always meant a lot to me. My regards to you, Tony.

From the day I joined a company based on Microsoft, my technological values grew and became rock solid. But I’m feeling sort of a whirlwind deep inside the social, emotional and psychological values as well.

I see my country falling apart because of all the speculation on fuel. I see a blind society that doesn’t want to evolve and reacts harshly over technological evolution and over change. I see the government spending a lot, I see the people rioting for everything, I see heavy taxes, I see professional disappointment and I see myself in a reckless anxiety, fearing for my professional success and my happiness. I don’t want to live in Portugal because I strongly feel I wouldn’t be happy here. I want a place where I can live without such feelings of fear, no reliability and lack of vision.

I need a place to express my joy for life, work, friends, love and most of all, freedom. I need a place where I can grow as a designer and as a developer. I need scones. I need my own home, my own salary.

I am changing inside. I am becoming a whole different person; a person who needs to be independent and have his own story to tell. I am feeling a different energy. After all, I’m becoming an adult full speed and I’m having a different kind of needs from the ones I had when a teenager. Yet, my strongest desire is to be free and tremendously happy and make other people feel free and happy as well.

I feel better already