Michael Flanagan

…working with Dave and Ronan in WebTogether.

It’s my first time properly working together with a group (we’ve got an office and everything!), as opposed to the usual freelancing routine of one man alone in his sitting room. That aspect alone, possibly despite initial reservation, is definitely something I’ve appreciated over the course of the year. It’s good to get out there, it’s great to share and bounce ideas around with smart people who, between them, know much more about visual design and the business side of business than I’d ever want to ;-), and it’s invaluable knowing that those other aspects are in such capable hands – while I get all excited over my codes.

Over the course of the past six months or so, I’ve expanded upon my knowledge of Codeigniter to build a powerful multi-site CMS system for our clients, launched websites for clients such as McGovern Surveyors, DBASS Accountants, ETAG Signs and the classifieds ads website, Fetch.ie. And at the back of it all has been the project which arguably brought us together, Octopied.

And Then?

For the new year I’m hoping to enjoy a good deal of the same, while shifting more of my time and attention over to Octopied. Over the Christmas break (my first real “time off work” all year) I’ve been reading extensively on the Symfony PHP framework, and I like what I see. Compared to CodeIgniter, it feels a bit like getting the kid-gloves off, and 2010 might just be the year for that. Here’s to it!

Happy new year!

A saw a tweet from Dave Barrett a couple of days ago :

I want a simple PHP script that I can dump into a directory on a web server and get an image gallery. Too much to ask?

which inspired be to create a simple PHP script that I can dump into a directory on a web server and get an image gallery.

You can download the files here, which includes the script (the only thing you really need), instructions, some stylesheets and a few example images.

You can also check out a simple demo.

Everything is provided ‘as is’ and for use at your own risk.

Feel free to use, edit, distribute and do whatever you want with this script. If you do anything cool it’d be nice if you let me know :)

I have, of course, listened to an awful lot more music than this in the past twelve months – but I don’t scrobble all the time. Apart from the numbers though, this list is probably accurate enough.

So, according to my Last.fm profile, this is what I have been mostly listening to in the past 12 months.

Pos. – ARTIST – # Tracks Played

1 – Kings of Leon – 286
2 – The Beatles – 229
3 – Radiohead – 219
4 – Vangelis – 214
5 – The American Analog Set – 86
6 – Philip Glass – 82
7 – Beirut – 75
8 – Rage Against the Machine – 43
9 – Led Zeppelin – 37
10 – The Flaming Lips – 32
11 – The Redneck Manifesto – 31
12 – Calexico – 29
13 – Nirvana – 27
14 – R.E.M. – 26
15 – Air – 23

I just “pwned” / jailbroke my iPhone.

I can now mount the phone wirelessly over SSH in Ubuntu (or anything else) and drag + drop my tunes, videos, files, etc. over to it :-D

The Ubuntu User Guide has instructions for getting this done.

…there also seems to be instructions there for getting iPhone2.2 working with ‘normal’ syncing apps on Ubuntu. Going to try that out now.

Not *too* much else of interest from the jailbroken app store, to be honest… though InteliScreen is good — displays upcoming calendar events and new mail summary on the lock screen…. but wireless transfer was the killer app for me. My fenestraphobia has kept me from changing my tunes for too damn long.

Nice SlideShare presentation on creating ‘Sexy’, or well structured, style sheets for your web pages/sites.

Spotted this video over on mulley.net.

The Budwiser ‘Wassup’ guys, eight years later, looking forward to some change. All gets a bit cheesy towards the end, but it made me laugh anyway…

Written, directed and produced by Adam Curtis, ‘The Trap’ consists of three one-hour documentarys which explore the concept and definition of freedom, specifically, “how a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures led to today’s idea of freedom.”

Originally aired on the BBC in March 2007, you can now watch the programmes via Google Video below.

The style, and quality, is very similar to Curtis’ previous — and equally brilliant — documentary series “The Power of Nightmares”. Curtis seems to have an ability to look at our world as though he were examining a colony of ants… avoiding preconceptions, sweeping statements and black and white judgement, and instead offering a largely unbiased (though inevitably somewhat anti-establishment) overview of the systems of the society we live in.

These are the documentaries that Zeitgeist, Loose Change, et al, can only wish they were.

Part One : “Fuck You Buddy” :

Part Two : “The Lonely Robot” :

Part Three : “We Will Force You To Be Free” :

Keeping it simple, and taking full advantage of -moz-border-radius / -webkit-border-radius to give some nice rounded corners in Firefox, Safari and other compatible browsers, while still looking pretty good in others.

Must fix up the frontpage to suit.

Having previously struggled with the documentation (or lack thereof) for the CakePHP Framework, looked briefly at Zend and even dabbled with Ruby On Rails (not knowing much about the underlying language – Ruby – I decided this wasn’t my best in-road to MVC), it was finally CodeIgniter which served as my first real introduction to web frameworks and the Model/View/Controller way of doing things.

I’m naturally hesitant to put something on a pedestal and evangelise without having truly sampled the alternatives – maybe Cake starts to teach itself after the first hurdle… perhaps it really is worth learning a new language to unlock the power of Rails… and Zend? It could be worth more than a cursory glance – but in the past few months at least, CodeIgniter has been good to me.

After a lot of mucking about, a couple of false starts and much reading up on the excellent User Guide and wiki, CodeIgniter became the framework of choice for the latest project – Crewger.

Crewger is a networking, project management, and exhibition site tailored towards both traditional and what we like to call ‘new’ Irish filmmakers – those that, like us, see the Internet a great opportunity for film.

With this specific target, what I didn’t want to do is what I’ve done for more general online communities in the past and mould the website around a pre-built Content Management System. This certainly works in a lot of cases (I remain on good terms with the humble CMS) but for Crewger I wanted something much more flexible. I wanted to create the tool or resource which I knew should exist, not simply re-iterate whatever I can find that’s out there already.

And at the same time, why reinvent the wheel?

The nature of a framework like CodeIgniter, Rails or CakePHP, means it makes light work of the more common tasks while not holding your hand all the way to a finished website. Common tasks taken care of, you’re free to use your programming skills to concentrate on the not so common… all those cool things that make your application special. For someone with more imagination than patience when it comes to building new things, this one’s a no brainier.

And while I may in future look elsewhere for my framework fix — perhaps to the recent ‘more open’ fork from the CodeIgniter project, KohanaPHP — for now at least, and for Crewger, CodeIgniter is kicking ass.

The CMS is dead? Long live the Framework.

What is 1time.net? From their website :

1time is a web-based time and expense tracking application that allows you to easily keep track of real time project costs.

In my own words : 1time is an online application developed by Irish crowd Jeebers. With 1time you can – as the blurb says – easily keep track of time and expenses while working on a project.

As pointed out by iarfhlaith, 1time is a multi-user, multi-interface application, which translates to different access levels for managers, workers and clients, and the ability to access your 1time data not only through the web-based interface but also via email, RSS, and any number of ways using the 1time API. It’s down to whichever way suits you, the user, which is certainly how things should be done.

Pricing at 1time starts at the lovely word free, allowing one user (or ‘employee’) to work on up to 20 projects. Not bad! And if you’re business comprises of more than just a single being – and you’re prepared to part with some of your paper-moneys for the service – you’ll be granted such tasty treats as secure SSL, data upload, and the ability to work together with other users/employees (1-5 for €14/month, upto 100 for €210/month).

After having a quick enough scan through the website and features in the past couple of days, this looks like one application that does exactly what it says on the tin. Sign-up is as easy as they come and the product itself seems pretty high on useful while remaining suitably low on fiddly little complications and unnecessary settings.

Head over to 1Time to check it out for yourself, or see what some other Irish bloggers have been saying about it :

• Iarfhlaith
• Robin Bladford @ ByteSurgery
• EirePreneur
• Conor O’Neill @ Web2Ireland
• Niall Larkin @ Clunky Flow
• Damian Mulley

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This post is part of the Tuesday Push. Head over to mulley.net for the low-down on that.