Now for those of you that know what ModX is, your are about to slam me because ModX can be used as a framework, I do realise this but I have never quite got my head around using it in that way, maybe it doesn’t lend itself to that otherwise I wouldn’t have picked up another tool.

Over the years I have worked with a variety of web programming languages however I have always had a desire to go deeper into PHP but because I have been using publishing tools, they have made it easy to shy away from. Wordpress is just bloody good at what it does, once you have used it for blogging I fail to see a need for any other tool. It does however have it’s limitations when it comes to a far more complex site.

ModX is a great CMS, through the use of what they call template variables it has the ability to rapidly customise the data entry and display. Really powerful stuff but because I was working inside their CMS area I always felt a little limited even though it is easy to use and customise a site, I have used it for a few sites now and will most likely use it again. My biggest frustration with it and the primary reason for not rolling it out on this site was that there was no automatic hook or quick hack to get it to play nice with my Wordpress stuff. I could go ahead and move my blog into a sub folder but I am not convinced I want to do that yet, from what I have been reading, Code Igniter plays very well with Wordpress and this is a huge plus.

So why am I enjoying CodeIgniter? Good question! Perhaps it is the tinkerer in me wanting to take full control of my code base, the more I read about CI (as they call it), the more I like it. I have dabbled with many content management systems over the years and also tried getting into the various flavours of the month such as Django, Ruby on Rails and CakePHP but the learning curve has always got in the way of productivity.

CI seems to be straight forward, yes it does have a learning curve but it is isn’t intimidating me, I have found myself reading a bucket load about it, and what’s more I am finding it fun and am already thinking of how and where I can use it.

Do you have experience of using CodeIgniter or other frameworks? How did you find them? Why do you use them? Where do you use them? When do you pick one tool over another? I will write more on these questions at a later date but for now I am interested in what you have to say…

Quite an interesting process and it made me start to think about what I want to be doing with the site and how I might start to organise it. Some of you will notice this re-design has never ever been completed for a number of reasons, I make no excuses about it but I will do something about it.

I have dabbled in many things over the years from coaxing you all to play asteroids and pacman, stuck my toe into podcasting, made you all reel with bad jokes, tried to inspire others, written about my life and family, written about my goals, acheivements and passions and generally really enjoyed running the site. I’m curious as to what parts of my blog makes good readers like yourself come back? What features did you like, what would you like to see come back?

It’s a funny old game blogging, I think I lost my way a little when other priorities entered my life, predominantly work and families. Not that this is a bad thing but it blurred the lines a little bit, when I first started this blog I did it for fun and for my passion of the web, I ask myself now what will this site do? who is this site for. Soul searching questions indeed!

Oh dear, I can feel a long rant coming on about web sites serving a purpose, solving a problem etc etc but I am going to quel that monster for the time being. This is just me checking in, seeing where things take me, re-drawing the lines to see what picture forms. It’s just as well I design sites on an Etcha Sketch.

So folks, I leave you now to go and solve some stupid IE 6 issues at work, I’ll be back with more on that in a bit but until then hold tight and I’ll catch you all soon.

Feels good to be back already

The original

My modified version

I really enjoyed visiting this design earlier tonight which is why I thought I would share with you lot.

Cheers!

Apparently this thing has been ticking over anyway and I need to go through the useful comments and trash the rest, hopefully we can get back up and running now that I have found a moment to breathe. Perhaps a full explanation will come at a later date as to why I disappeared without trace, for now lets call it the 3 kids, full time job and freelancing monster that many of us battle with.

Not going to make you any promises of where the blog is going and what my plans are but I am happy to be writing this now, feels good to be back, tapping away quite aimlessly.

One thing that can be assured is that I will be trying to integrate my phone into what I post up here, macro blogging so to speak, I don’t have time for twitter and the likes these days but my phone is going to be a suitable medium for delivering certain kinds of content. We’ll take it as it comes though.

With a crazy life work balance it makes sense to slip things in here in an unobtrusive manner (applying progressive enhancement to life… ain’t that a thought? Perhaps there’s an article in there!!!) so that I can do a little bit of everything I need to get done.

On another note, I didn’t introduce you all to our newest addition, back in October we had another baby girl; Lily-Grace White who appears to be crying just now so I am going to cut this short and I’ll write again soon.

Pics will follow, take care folks and I’ll catch up with you all when I can.

Tyme, Mike and Scrivs, I thank you all for having me as part of your network and perhaps one day you will have me back once I have time to channel my thoughts and passions into my blog again on a regular basis.

It’s been a pleasure getting to mingle with my peers, people that I look up to and that I have a lot of respect for, not only that I’ve made a few good friends with whom I stay in touch.

Time waits for no man as I have said before and it’s time for this man to move on. You’ll be pleased to know I am not going anywhere though so it’s a pointless statement, all I have done is retire from the commitment of writing as a part of 9rules.

I’ll still be writing and I hope that you will continue to stop by if and when it takes your fancy.

Take care folks and you’ll see me about. Got about 700 things I need to do on this site but until then I have 700 things to do on other things which I am afraid to say take precedence over entertaining you lot..

Watch this space, I think Tyme said it beautifully when she told me “don’t be a stranger, that very much goes out to you lot too!

Check this out…

Network outage affecting several servers

Posted May 31 at 18:22 CDT by Richard Cooper in Downtime – 0 comment(s)

Issues at one of our data center are causing downtime on several servers. We are working to resolve this problem as soon as possible.

Update: Today at approximately 5:45 p.m. CDT, a transformer in one of The Planet’s Huston datacentres caught fire, requiring them to take down all of the generators on site on the instructions of the fire department. This is one of six data-centres used by WebFaction. All servers hosted at that datacentre are currently offline.

The difference between Webfaction having issues and a Fasthosts cock up is that I still trust Webfaction and know they didn’t hand out my passwords or some stupid shit like Fasthosts would do.

I just hope the poor souls that had to deal with it are getting a week off after a week of no sleep.

Anyway… that’s the why the site has been down, please excuse me if the site is a little wobbly over the next few days but I hope that is now service resumed.

Smoking is a crap habit, it wastes my money, it ruins my health and it jeapordises the future of my family.

I have had relatives die of cancer, I have a history of high blood pressure and heart related bad stuff in my family… is it worth tempting fate?

I just went onto google to go and have a look at images of lung cancer and nearly puked up, it is a very scary thought to die a horrible painful death, it’s a worse thought for my wife and kids to have to watch that.

For years I’ve had a love affair with smoking, it has been my crutch and also my burden, it’s given me space to think and be creative but what benefit is creativity at the expense of death. Seems to me that there’s actually no point if you look at it honestly…

My three year old daughter is shit scared of the fact that I smoke and that it could kill me, I’m scared that it could kill me, I’m also scared of the fact that if I stop smoking I could die of lung cancer anyway so why bother.

Today I haven’t smoked, hearing my daughter on the phone asking if I had been smoking is a potent thing, I don’t want to let her down, Caroline hasn’t smoked since she got pregnant and she also nags me on a day to day basis.

It’s time for it to stop. I know I have uttered words to do with stopping before, I just hope that this time I manage to keep it going…

Don’t watch this video if you are of weak stomach but if you smoke, time to wake up and smell the coffee, we are not just killing ourselves but the people around us to…

After putting on The Highland Fling 2008 – The browser and beyond, I knew that I had to write a post about how wonderful the day was and how much it meant to me but I also knew I wanted to write something other than a carbon copy of what people were expecting.

Back in 2006 when I had the concept for doing the conference it scared the crap out of me, it was something that I had never done before, it was outside fo my comfort zone but I still went ahead and did it. I pulled the trigger!

Many times since I started working for myself I have had ideas rush past me and I have never acted upon them, I didn’t pull the trigger, I didn’t reap the benefits from pulling the trigger either. Although I don’t regret much in my life I do regret not having acted on a lot that has been on my mind, that said there is still a lot there which I do plan on acting on.

I was once told that an idea means nothing unless it has been put on paper, recorded in some shape or form otherwise it will be forgotten. Very wise words indeed. I envy designers and their fascinating mood boards, I miss the frenzy of a brainstorm in an agency environment and I wish I kept a digital scrap book to act as my idea sponge. I think it is really important to find a way of storing these waves of ideas that rush over us, a net for catching all the cool thoughts we have. I’d maintain a wiki but they bore me and to be honest I find them confusing as they grow arms and legs and then before you know it they have turned into a monster.

The Highland Fling was set up to help inspire people, to bring together like minded people and help them forge new ideas, relationships and plans for moving forward in what they do every day. I have encountered a wide variety of hurdles in doing the event but I have always done my best to get over them and move on. To do this I had to decide on what I wanted to do about it and pull the trigger!

Pulling the trigger is a final act, once you’ve done it you have commited (hopefully not an act of homicide), you’ve made a final decision, you’ve said to yourself that you are going to do something and you’ve crossed the line, there should be no turning back.

Perhaps this article is not really my follow up to the conference, I’ve been a very busy man over the past three years and I’m wondering if this is an introspective look at where and when I pull the trigger.

To be honest I think I have using a sub machine gun of late, I organised The Highland Fling whilst working on contract and dealing with my own clients at night, having house rennovations done and to top it all off I got married 3 weeks ago on Friday and I’m now down in London contracting.

Pulling the trigger? I think I just fired a cannon!

One thing that I’ve realised of late is one of the reasons I haven’t been blogging much, I fell into a trap where I felt I should be writing about certain things instead of just being myself. I presented myself with a mental hurdle which prevented me from writing about whatever came into my mind, free thoughts for the public.

I’m glad I’m over that hurdle now and look forward to pulling the trigger on a more regular basis.

Take care folks…

Blistering heat, commuting and agency life are some of the things that I have had to deal with on a day to day basis which is the complete opposite from normal. For the last 2 years I have sat in the cave that is my office, devising my plans for world domination and trying to make a bit of cold hard cash but now I am out in the open and taking deep breaths of life.

Fat men on motorcycles, pushers crying “BUY WEED”, hostile beggars, tens of thousands of flip flops, sweaty undergrounds full of nobody talking. A far cry from my cave!

So what is going on? I read 3 papers a day just now, I think they hand them out for free just to try and switch us on to things we don’t really care about, or are they trying to tune us into what they want us to think? A potent question. I like the concept in the film Pi where patterns can be found anywhere and that there is order to chaos, it’s all in the numbers.

The cool thing about the film is all the religious connotations when a Jewish mathematician gets involved as he is also looking for answers through numerology and number sequences in The Torah. It ties in with a book I read a long time ago called The Bible Code which is essentially all about the original Hebrew text version of the Bible being like a giant word search that contains everything that has been, is and could be.

I am not a very religious man but have enjoyed a good few conversations about the chaos that is life and where we are from, where we are going, what’s going on…

Ever since getting Sky HD, I have been watching loads of programs about the physical aspects of biblical topics, real life tie ins with what I have been told over the years. I find it fascinating to see evidence to substantiate these stories of great things, conquests, sacrifice and mystery.

I had a conversation the other day about all of this and Paulo put it in one of the most amazing ways I have ever heard. He placed a big box of wine on the table in between us and said “This is religion”. At first I thought he was taking the piss but then he went on to say that no matter which way it is looked at, nobody can ever have exactly the same perspective of it. Even when the box was turned so that I was looking at what he had been looking at and he vice versa, there was still no way that we were seeing what the other had seen. Such a simple but clear way of putting it.

We talked about the universe working on different frequencies and that we are just antennae picking up signals, we talked about M-Theory and Multiverses, I played devils advocate and brought up aliens… A really enjoyable and deep conversation, the type of conversation that I miss having now that I work so much and don’t really get out.

So, the rat race is on, I don’t think any of us really know what is going on, we all struggle day to day to get by, some of us believe what we are told, some of us think outside the box, some of us give up and kill ourselves, most of us strive for something, some of us couldn’t care less.

For me, I have a family to look after now, my life got difficult but having a family made it a lot more simple, I have focus, I have written before about maintaining focus which is another topic but it does cut out the crap in your life and allows you to just get on with it.

Unfortunately I consider myself to think outside the box, so although I think I know what is going on, I know I am probably wrong and that there is so much more out there to discover…

I’ll keep you informed should I find any answers but until then, if you think you know what is going on then please do share…

Just a quick one to start you all off, been a while since I did a bad joke Friday and I am on my lunch so figured I would post one.

This Friday the topic is Robots and here’s one to start you off.

Q: Did you here about the robot that transformed into a bar?

Have fun folks…