Sexy Web Design
Elliot Jay Stocks
SitePoint, 172 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-0980455236
Reviewed by Brandon Ching

I do not have a single creative bone in my body! OK, that’s probably an exaggeration but when it comes to designing an innovative, attractive, and useable web site, I definitely could use a helping hand. As a web developer, I am generally responsible for the data in our sites rather than the look & feel; that’s the UI team’s domain!

However, not all developers have access to professional UI resources and, depending on the situation, many of us often wear a number of different hats. As such, Sexy Web Design by Elliot Jay Stocks is a book that seems made for folks like me who know a little something about the basics of web design, but are nowhere near creative experts. Read the rest of this entry »

Who’s watching you from The Media Collective on Vimeo.

The e-government movement concerns the use of information technology to exchange information and provide services from government organizations to citizens, businesses, and other branches of government. While initially used as a means of information dissemination, many government organizations at all levels are capitalizing on the use of technology to make interaction with government easier. The aim of e-government is to increase government efficiency, effectiveness, transparency, and to improve citizen-government interactions. Read the rest of this entry »

This has to be the dumbest thing about blogs and posting comments in Drupal; it does not give you the option to send an email notification when someone has left a comment. This becomes especially troublesome when you have comment moderation on, as it requires that you frequently login and check your moderation queue to approve or deny a comment. I finally got sick of it and decided to do something about it. The last time I checked, the module that allows for this sort of thing was not yet operational with 6.x so here is a quick mail hack to get drupal to send an email notification whenever a comment is send to the approval queue.

1. Open the file: YOUR_DRUPAL_DIRECTORY/modules/comment/comment.module

2. Go to about line 762 (this is for v6.3) where you should see a db_query(”INSERT…”) statement.

3. Enter a new line right under that line with the following:

mail(’youremail@here.com’, ‘New comment!’, $edit['comment']);

Now, whenever a comment is left, you will get an email! Obviously, you will need to replace “youremail@here.com” with the destination email you want. The second field is the email subject, and the third is the actual email content.

Rails for PHP Developers
Derek DeVires, Mike Naberezny
The Pragmatic Bookshelf, 406 pp.
ISBN 978-1-934356-04-3
Reviewed by Brandon Ching

As a long time PHP developer, the advent of Ruby on Rails as a mainstream web development platform never quite peaked my interests; nor the interest of the majority of developers I have worked with over the years. The running joke being that if we simply used Ruby instead of PHP, there would most certainly be a buildEntireProject() method that would do all of our work for us. However, times change, and as developers it is our responsibility to explore new and different methods of getting work done; no matter how fruitless our initial expectations are. Read the rest of this entry »

Today I decided to reflect upon some of my experiences as a web developer. Not really code experiences per say, but something that most developers don’t really think about until a few years into their careers; project management (PM). Now, I’m not all that old and I haven’t been a web developer for all that long (about 6 years in total, 3 actually getting paid but I have had the opportunity of working for a medium sized media company with a development team of about 25 developers, a small 5-6 person development company (3 developers), and as an independent contractor. Read the rest of this entry »