Warren Shea - World of Warren

Archive for the ‘warrenshea.com’ Category

warrenshea.com – Updates

Tuesday, November 6th, 2012 at 3:20 am

I can’t believe it’s been 6 months since I updated this site and effectively left it (it doesn’t really require regular maintenance).

I need to update it with some of the things I’ve learned in the past 6 months. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy with the help of my accomplishments posts (which is at 49 now – at 2 a month, I’ve done 2 years worth of these damn things!)

I installed WampServer and MediaWiki onto my work sandbox server. Had to uninstall a previously installed PHP that was stand-alone installed (not through Wamp) and had no uninstaller. Ugh.
Had to go into the Registry Editor and change PHP’s php.ini location.

Re-learned a bit about Regular Expressions. Learned stuff in school but mostly forgot it all. Was able to remove all HTML comments from a thousand page site in a few minutes (don’t ask why). Hand to remove things like “Comments (142)” and “Comment (0)” and items of that nature. Probably thousands of instances, removed in seconds with Regular Expressions, prompting me to want to know them better. Seems like it’ll come in handy :)

Facebook API – JavaScript SDK/PHP SDK for various aspects like: Like Gate Code and functionality, Share Dialog
Facebook App Creation
Twitter API – Share Dialog for Twitter

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Uh oh, that’s it. Man, time flies. I learned quite a few new things in recent months but I had a bit of a dry spell while I was working on Photography and my Secret Project.

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I also need to add my GitHub and Cloud9 accounts to my warrenshea.com site’s MORE section.

Also. No one has EVER used my warrenshea.com contact page. That makes me sad. Very sad. T_T

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Damn, was planning to update the site, but started chatting and now i’m too damn tired. will do it tomorrow. along with review many things i’ve forgotten in the last year. it sucks to know something very well but simply forget it due to lack of use. Ah well, at least it’s easy to relearn and recall.

Update: Looks like my contact form was broken which is weird cuz the last time I tested it, it was okay…and I haven’t made any code updates to it. After recompiling the page (no code change), it works fine. Weird.

Posted in All Posts, Development, warrenshea.com | No Comments »

I grow weary….

Thursday, October 25th, 2012 at 12:48 am

…of my Secret Project KB.

There’s just SO MUCH content to create/pour. I knew it’d be a long project but I underestimated my need for perfection and thus, how long I’d spend re-doing something (like photographs) that are 90% perfect.

I’ve only been working on this project since June…5 months (though I took a month break).
In a previous post, I budgeted 2 months. (I often underestimate projects as I too strongly believe in my abilities, especially the one that says I won’t procrastinate).

In that previous post, I also said 1 more month for warrenshea.com and it took 5 more months. Looking back at my posts, warrenshea.com was being on and off worked on for about a year. >_< Though technically decently complicated, I know the reason was that it took a long time to compile the portfolio section and that I really struggled with the writing. Geez. Worldofwarren took no time to set up. Anyways, I'm going to try to continue and finish my Secret Project KB. The key is eternal vigilance: consistently working on it every day, until it's finished. Taking a day break turns into 2 turns into 5. Once Secret Project KB is done, I've decided to take a break from my projects (plan subject to change) and take some time to study/re-learn regular expressions, read that clean code book, get better with jQuery, and learn Backbone and Node JS. These projects I’ve had are too time consuming with very little payoff in terms of learning new things. I need to change it around: quick projects where I learn a lot. How will I do that? I’ll have to think about it ;)

I also want to rewrite some of my code given that I’ve learned new things. I think that’s a really good idea.

I was also thinking about taking my javascript files, turning them into PHP with a JavaScript MIME type, and loading them with a querystring that tells it to minify.
So I would work with a PHP (that renders in Javascript) that’s heavily commented and organized and all that.
But when I load the script, it’ll be something like
<script src=”javascript.php?minify”> and it’ll output the JavaScript file without comments, which I can remove with PHP and regular expressions.

The purpose of this is to serve up a minified, very short (and thus, small) javascript file when used to load the page. However, when editing the file, I can add as many comments as I want. That way, anyone who wants to read/learn the code, can understand it (by going to javascript.php) whilst I still serve up a small file (by loading javascript.php?minify). WIN WIN.

I might do this with my CSS too.

Anyways, that’s what I have in my head. SOUNDS LIKE FUN. And isn’t that the real goal? :)

Posted in All Posts, My Life, Secret Project KB, warrenshea.com, Web Development | No Comments »

A busy day for warrenshea…that rhymes…

Tuesday, June 19th, 2012 at 1:52 am

Came home today and worked all night making my PDF resume.

I had finished my warrenshea.com site (4?) weeks ago now, but never finished my PDF resume.
“With all the content done, I can make my resume whenever I want” I thought.

Well…it was true. I’ve been working for like, 6 hours but it’s done.

Warren Shea Resume

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It’s funny how many mistakes I noticed on warrenshea.com when making this thing, despite proof-reading the site 10 times.

I also did a slight text removal in the experience section as per one of my friend’s recommendations. The experience is now…5-10% shorter. 20% shorter on the actual resume. Not that much of a reduction, but an improvement overall.

Posted in All Posts, warrenshea.com | No Comments »

warrenshea.com – complete!

Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012 at 11:45 pm

www.warrenshea.com

(go to it)

After months and months of working on this (including weeks and weeks where I hadn’t touched this at all), this site is complete.

I started out all well and good – developing. It was fast. It was fun. I was doing things I hadn’t done before. I became a jQuery master (well, not quite) but I got a lot more familiar with it.
worldofwarren.com is coded well but there are some best practices that aren’t met simply because when I started developing this site, I wasn’t as strong as I am now (no shame in that). I started developing this after my World of Warcraft addiction and while I’d learned a lot from work, I hadn’t been developing in my free time so I hadn’t kept my skill as sharp as it could have been. It was a dull sword, barely used in 5 years.

warrenshea.com isn’t like ^. As stated on that website, it’s developed to the best of my current abilities. No doubt. It follows all the best practices that I currently know of. It will definitely be interesting to see, in a year, how many things are wrong/I can improve.

Anyways – While making the site, I slowed down at a few specific moments: generally all had to do with content gathering or writing.
I stopped when I had to do my portfolio cuz going though all my work over a decade of items was tedious and boring.
I stopped when I had to write my portfolio content cuz professional writing is hard for me.
I stopped when I had to write my experience / resume portion cuz…professional writing is hard for me.

“Why was the writing so hard?” people have asked. The writing was the most difficult because it was hard to convey my voice. I wanted to sound professional, without sounding too formal. I’m not super professional; I wear sneakers, have an untucked dress shirt and come in late every day. I don’t want to convey that I’m not that type of person in my professional site. And I also had to be consistent with my writing. I would read something I’d written and read something else and they’d have completely different voices and tones. So then I had to fix one…but which one? That went on for a while until I decided to put all my copy into a word document first, before bringing it to the website. That helped keep my voice consistent.

This project really sucked because while I wanted to work on other projects, my sense of completion was overwhelming. How can I start another site when this one isn’t finished?

Anyways, it’s done. My LinkedIn profile has been updated as well, which was also one of my goals upon completing warrenshea.com. Next: building a resume…but that should be easy now that the content is mostly all written out and I have a portfolio site. I have no rush to do that as it won’t take long and I can do it when I need to.

Also: thanks to those that read over my content, gave me usability advice, and/or corrected my grammar. It was much appreciated!
Also: thanks to those that saw my earlier designs and were kind enough to tell me politely that they sucked. You were right and I appreciate that.

Bonus: here are some earlier mockup attempts:

Version 0.1

Version 0.2

Version 0.3

Version 0.4

www.warrenshea.com

Version 1.0

I won’t lie. I’m proud of this site. I’m proud of the steps that took it here. Originally thinking of building a strictly fluid layout: fluid height, fluid width, fluid font-size and everything…and realizing that was a horrible, impossible idea. Scraping that and working on design after design until I found one that worked. Then, taking each page and making them unique and awesome. There are only 6 pages but they’re all well thought out, original and unique. Okay, not that original and unique, but the ideas I came up with aren’t used that often at least. I spent a lot of time on each of them asking myself: “What is the message I’m trying to convey?” “What is my voice?” “How can I make this unique and usable?” “What is a simple, intuitive way for a user to go through information”. I asked myself these questions multiple times with every page and I think it shows. This isn’t a generic portfolio site. There’s personality in here. There’s depth. There’s care. I’m not trying to boast, it’s honestly how I feel. I’m rarely proud of my work, especially the day after I’ve finished it. But I’ve been proud of this site for a while. It’s one of my finest, high quality accomplishments :)

Please feel free to check the site out and provide feedback.

Thanks!

Posted in All Posts, My Life, warrenshea.com | 4 Comments »

Site Updates: warrenshea.com & IE8

Thursday, April 26th, 2012 at 2:02 pm

warrenshea.com uses HTML5, which isn’t supported by IE8. Which is unfortunate because IE8 is used pretty frequently.

I didn’t wanna do another stylesheet/javascript and update both…so I used one of my favorite things: my proxy.php file

This is my default.php for warrenshea.com. Unfortunately, I did have to do a big IF statement but that’s okay because this code never changes. So what it does is check it it’s IE8 (ie. doesn’t support HTML5), and then changes some of the tags: <header> to <div id=”header”>. I’ll likely change the IF statement to something better later…but that’s not the point of this post.

<?php

$srvr_http_user_agent = $_SERVER[‘HTTP_USER_AGENT’];

if ((stristr($srvr_http_user_agent,”MSIE 6.0″) == true) ||

  (stristr($srvr_http_user_agent,”MSIE 7.0″) == true) ||

  (stristr($srvr_http_user_agent,”MSIE 8.0″) == true)) {?>

<!doctype html>

<html>

  <head>

    <link rel=”stylesheet” href=”common/proxy.php?url=stylesheet.css&type=css”>

  </head>

  <body>

    <div id=”header”>

      <div id=”nav”>

        <ul id=”nav-text”></ul>

        <ul id=”nav-background”></ul>

      </div>

      .

      .

    <script src=”common/proxy.php?url=scripts.js&type=js”></script>

  </body>

</html><?php } else { ?><!doctype html>

<html lang=”en-us”>

  <head>

    <link rel=”stylesheet” href=”common/stylesheet.css”>

  </head>

  <body>

    <header>

      <nav>

        <ul id=”nav-text”></ul>

        <ul id=”nav-background”></ul>

      </nav>

    .

    .

    <script src=”common/scripts.js”></script>

  </body>

</html><?php } ?>

Doing this gets rid of some HTML5 tags but the CSS and JavaScript/jQuery still reference the HTML5 tags. So I like to use my proxy.php, which loads a URL, and gives me the option to manipulate it.
FYI – For XML, I use it for my twitter XML (I used to have it done through JavaScript but I found that it hindered load time).

<?php header(“Expires:Mon, 31 Dec 2010 05:00:00 GMT”); ?>

<?php

$page_contents = file_get_contents($_GET[“url”]);

if ($_GET[“type”] == “css”) {

  header(“Content-type: text/css”);

  $page_contents = str_replace(“header”,”#header”,$page_contents);

  $page_contents = str_replace(“##header”,”#header”,$page_contents);

  $page_contents = str_replace(“footer”,”#footer”,$page_contents);

  $page_contents = str_replace(“##footer”,”#footer”,$page_contents);

  $page_contents = str_replace(“content-#footer”,”content-footer”,$page_contents);

  $page_contents = str_replace(“nav”,”#nav”,$page_contents);

  $page_contents = str_replace(“##nav-text”,”#nav-text”,$page_contents);

  $page_contents = str_replace(“##nav-background”,”#nav-background”,$page_contents);  

} else if ($_GET[“type”] == “js”) {

  header(“Content-type: application/javascript”);

  $page_contents = str_replace(‘$(“header”)’,’$(“#header”)’,$page_contents);

  $page_contents = str_replace(‘$(“nav”)’,’$(“#nav”)’,$page_contents);

  $page_contents = str_replace(‘$(“footer”)’,’$(“#footer”)’,$page_contents);

} else if ($_GET[“type”] = “xml”) {

  header(“Content-type: text/xml”);

}

echo $page_contents;

?>

Yes, it’s very hacky and likely not efficient but it does the job.
It changes:
http://warrenshea.com/common/stylesheet.css (HTML5 good) to
http://warrenshea.com/common/proxy.php?url=stylesheet.css&type=css (HTML5 bad)
and
http://warrenshea.com/common/scripts.js (HTML5 good) to
http://warrenshea.com/common/proxy.php?url=scripts.js&type=js (HTML5 bad)
but I only have to edit one file and it’ll make the non-HTML5 version automatically. Sweet.

Anyways, I thought this was worth sharing. Someone might find this technique useful.

Posted in All Posts, Browsers, Development, HTML5, PHP, Tutorials, warrenshea.com | No Comments »