Wylie Fisher

Stacey

Stacey is a lightweight content management system.
No database setup or installation files, simply drop the application on a server and it runs. Your content is managed by creating folders and editing text files. No login screens, no admin interface.

I’ve been playing with this for the past day, it’s a pretty neat alternative to WordPress and other database driven CMS. Now I just need to find a project to use it on. In the meantime I have it set up, as a test site, over at spacescurvy.com. Or, you can check out the Stacey site here.

A Tale of Two Books

Recently, I decided that it was a good thing to finally sit down and go through my JavaScript book again. The last time I really used JavaScript was way back when I worked at ArnoldWorldwide, and what I knew was very rusty, and most likely very out of date. I still had my Visual Quickstart Guide from back then, and I figured that re-reading this book would be a cheap way to get back into it, so I sat down and started reading it. Man was I wrong. This book was talking about Netscape and IE for the Mac! Then I checked the published date… 2001. This book was not going to do me any good. Well, it might, but having to sift through the code to find stuff that was relevant to today and not 9 years ago would be too much work for a beginner. So, I went out and picked up the new edition, that was published in 2009. No more mention of obsolete browsers, more mentions of current technologies, like AJAX, and much better for a beginner.

I am liking what I have been reading/practicing so far. Learning PHP made learning JavaScript easier I think… I hope.

Oops

After working on resume stuff quite a bit over the past few days, and after applying to several places, I noticed that something had happened to my link to my analytics file and a PHP error as being thrown onto the page. Not good Wylie, not good. Hopefully I fixed the problem before too many people saw it. Such a silly amateur mistake too.

PHP

With the whole job search coming up, I wanted to bone up on some old languages, as well as learn some new ones. I purchased a book on CSS, DHTML, and AJAX. I figured I could learn some new things about CSS, and get an intro to DHTML & AJAX. So far I have only made it through most of the CSS section.

After talking with my friend Lateef, he mentioned that I learn PHP. It would be good to know, kind of easy to learn, and good for future understanding of MySQL and Javascript. This conversation happened last Thursday, and right after work I headed out and picked up the Visual Quickstart Guide to PHP. Over the next several days I started reading, and watching video tutorials and making some PHP.

It’s been going pretty well. Today I made a few scripts. One was just a regular one, create a variable and display it lower on the page. The second one was generating information via a form on one page and passing it to a second page, both with POST and GET. I even figured out how to pass a page title via a hidden form field. The third script was an if/then statement.

I love this. It’s fun to have the brain working again. I feel the need for a real PHP project. Maybe in a week or so that will happen, right now I am content learning more about it.