News / Blog

A New Plugin Class - AvTemplater

A new goody has been added to SyntaxSeed - our simple PHP Templating class - AvTemplater, so check it out! In other news, our hosting server was upgraded recently to PHP version 5.3 and we've discoverd that the version of Codeigniter we're using is full of deprecated methods and errors. So we'll be doing a mini project soon to upgrade SyntaxSeed to the latest version of CI.

Download Counts

I've been keeping a cursory eye on the download counts for our various little apps and noticed they were not budging for a few months. I started to get a little sad about the lack of interest until I noticed that our downloads on Sourceforge were steady. A bit of testing revealed that I had a bug in the download log function. It's fixed and it's back. I've also noticed steady traffic and slow appearance on search engines, so that's encouraging!

Finally, a homepage

I can't stand having an under construction page, so I've finally put up a real home page. The over all design is still just a minimal look for now. I'm hoping to make it so that projects can be marked as 'featured' then they'll be added to the menu, and cycle randomly on the home page.

Accepting Donations

After wrestling with this decision for a little bit, I've decided to add a method for people to contribute financially if they find any of our code resources or applications useful. I wasn't sure if I wanted to do this, but an email from a user of AV Book Library convinced me that I should leave the donation decision up to you, the users. So, if you think it's worthwhile, you can now donate to support these projects. Thank you so much! We are also receiving some positive feedback from corporations using Task Timer Light!

The user who wrote to me, expressed that after using our application for over a year, he felt he had received so much benefit from it, that a small donation would balance his appreciation with his need for a low budget solution. He said that something he's used for a year is worth at least a few bucks and probably more if he could afford it. He tries to contribute to at least a few of the open source projects he uses each year. Something that I do as well. So, thank you sir, you've convinced me!

Clean Up and Project Released

I've cleaned up the look of the site a little bit so that it doesn't look too unfinished. It will still need a nice design, but something clean. I'll have to do a replacement for the under construction home page soon.

A new main project has been added to the site and is in a completed, downloadable state: Task Timer Light. The number of projects on here is slowly growing and I still have a few more to add.

Project Admin Coming Along

I have the basic project admin working now- that is editing, creating and deleting projects. Each of these steps was a learning process with CodeIgniter. The biggest challenge was figuring out how to use the same View with the project form for both Create and Edit. Got it though and it's quite elegant.

I've also struggled with whether to put the CodeIgniter logo in the footer of the site. I've added it for now, but I'm not sure whether it's relevant. If I eventually Open Source the code behind the site itself, then it may be informative to tell people what it's built on.

One exciting addition is that I have written an extension to the CI logging and profiling functionality. It is wrapped up in a nice class with extra functions like starting and stopping timers. I may package that up and publish it as well.

Something Worth Doing

Some people treat every piece of code written as a deep dark secret, and if a project can't earn a profit or doesn't have a client initially willing to pay for it, it doesn't get written. However, since I enjoy contributing plugins and themes to open source projects, and have projects of my own that I have published as open source, I want to do something with them, because over time they've ended up all over the place. Some are on SourceForge, others on my various personal websites. It's time to gather these together in one place and make it more, well, official.

So, SyntaxSeed was born. I have decided to build it on the CodeIgniter framework. This is a great opportunity to learn a new framework, and possibly create something amazing. In under a week I've become familiar with CodeIgniter, and have set up the skeleton of the site and have it drawing project information from a database. Fun stuff. Let's see where this goes.