Category Archives: Web development

Learning a MVC framework : laravel 5

Leave a reply

Some useful links:

http://laravel.com/docs/5.0/helpers#urls

call custom files (php or otherwise) into a laravel project. For me app.php file to which I added

'Helpers'   => 'app\TradeLogic\engine'

was in config/app.php

The app.php file didn’t help.

What actually worked was adding :

include_once (__DIR__.'/../resources/views/engine.php');

to the file bootstrap/autoload.php
The path shown is from the location of the autoload file.

 

Migrations

To drop a column, need to run “composer require doctrine/dbal” otherwise a rollback that drops a column will fail.

If the filename of a migration got changed, or it got deleted, the ‘php artisan migrate’ command will complain. Need to run ‘composer dumpautoload’ shich will fix things.

MN DAR Display

Leave a reply

Displaying New Album Releases ; wordpress plugin

The album release data is stored in a database that is populated daily (the part that populates the database already works). With each daily update, older releases need to have cover art verified (that a non-zero file exists) and that a link to amazon.com MP3 or CD store exists. If not, update that information.

The data display will happen in parts. One will be a widget, and the other will be a page.
– Widget simply displays chronological list of latest albums.
— List of albums to be scrollable (small scrollable area in CSS) and display latest 10-20 releases (with date delimitation)
— Table view of albums. Cover photo, with 2 rows of info to the left. Further to the left, audio preview of album from Amazon.

– The page content (which will be driven by a shortcode) will be a scrollable, paginated list (AJAX driven?) of the albums released in chronological order. Larger album cover view then the widget.
— Have multiple shortcodes to display several things? Like list of albums, Featured album?
— Sortable list option. Sort by Genre?
— Preview link to Amazon player (if album is available on amazon)

HEX color picker

Leave a reply

Used this great color picker to convert a site from one color scheme to another. Needed to keep the same luminance value for the colors, but go from green to orange.

Had 2 windows opened, and matched the luminance between the two colors. Worked like a charm.

MN: Site Update

Leave a reply

The site layout needs to change.

For home-page: (the blog page will be another page)
On top: Site title section: site title on left with advertising space on right.

Below title section is the top navigation menu.

Large ‘top’ widget area. Divide the area (screen width) in 2 sections. One section will list an up-to-date list of podcasts (with link to the blog entry that featured it) and the other section will list the latest album releases in a chronological format (sorted by day posted).**
Widget area can be grown down for as many rows I need -> album reviews? photography?

Below the large widget area, is the main site content area. This space is divided 4/5 left area  (for content) and 1/5 on right for widgets.

Top of the right widgets bar has a sponsors area.

** Re: podcast widget area. The widget displays a limited number (6 or 7 of “featured/recommended” podcasts. The featured podcasts are choosen by me (have to work on a mechanism to allow for this). All podcasts will be tracked. And they can be followed in the blog area/rss feed, with the “featured/recommended” podcasts  being in the header of each blog.
All the podcasts will have a rating system implemented where users will be able to rate the podcast. This rating (average of last months’s worth of votes) in turn determines the sort order of the listings for both the featured and regular podcasts.

Mechanical Nation : to do

Leave a reply

For the podcasts, categorize the podcasts. Ones that are purely music, and ones that provide some other content.

Create a widget to display a list of the tracked podcasts with a link to their respective latest podcast. If a podcast has not had an update in xx number of days/weeks, take it off the widget list (but still track it/query the RSS feed internally).

New Layout-  Across the top will be the title. Beneath the title, there will be a grid, 2 boxes wide and x number of rows. Each box will contain a widget. Each box will have an defined height, and scroll bar. One widget would be the podcasts list. Another would be the latest album releases. Another would be latest photos. Another would be album reviews.

photo website update

Leave a reply

I’ve updated my photo.onsendesigns.com site a few times, but I’m still not happy with the way it’s setup. Initially I had a wordpress blog and ZPgallery as the gallery. I didn’t like that setup because while I made two themes to maintain the look between the blog and gallery, I didn’t want to be creating themes every time I wanted to change themes.

So I changed entirely to ZPgallery (which now has rudimentary blogging features thanx to ZPage)  in order to maintain only one theme, but I’m not happy with the the theme selection for ZPGallery.

So I’m thinking of changing things up again. Reinstall wordpress and ZP gallery. Showcase all the work in wordpress (there’s some nice photo-blog themes out there) and keep zpgallery as the backend which is not used to show anything, just serve up images.
Will setup this arrangement on a test server to see how it look.