Author: Joe

Categories
Development

Bioderma Medical Laser & Aesthetics Redesign

Bioderma Laser & Aesthetics

Just went live with the redesign I had been working on for Bioderma Medical Laser & Aesthetics.  Been working with them on a site redesign and incorporating many new features to their website.  Working with them has been a pleasure and the site has turned really nice.  There’s a lot of heavy tech running in the background that gives users a great and informative experience while giving the client the tools necessary to manage their website with little training.

Some notable features include:

CMS powered by Joomla

Building on top of Joomla for the CMS gave the client an amazingly powerful and easy to use CMS solution.  They now have the ability to make basic content edits to their own site at their own convenience.  Allowing them to keep the site content current and up to without having to pay a web developer for basic edits.  

interactive mapping and driving directions powered by Google Maps API

To help their customers find them, mapping powered by the Google Maps API was incorporated into their site.  Current map, satellite, and hybrid information is delivered via Google for users.  Custom driving directions are delivered with no page refresh/reload via AJAX scripting to save users time and unnecessary load times.

newsletter management

A full newsletter management system built upon the ccNewsletter Joomla component has been incorporated into the upgraded site.  Users can easily sign up to receive a newsletter via the newsletter sign up box or through the contact form on the website.  A full admin panel is built into the CMS for the client to easily manage, create, and send out newsletters to users who’ve signed up to receive their newsletter.  A very cool feature.

custom contact form

A custom contact form allows users to easily contact the client.  Submissions are delivered to the client as well as recorded to a database for easy retrieval of information for the client.  DOM scripting found in the contact form hides/reveals content if relevant for the user.  Leading the a cleaner, simpler experience.

lightbox powered before & after photos

Before and after photos associated with their respective services are powered by the slimbox lightbox extension.  This enables full sized detailed photos to appear via a modal window ontop of the page via clicking on a thumbnail photo.  This reduces unnecessary page load for the user while looking really nice.

Categories
Video Games

Guitar Hero World Tour

 

Guitar Hero World Tour

Just picked up Guitar Hero World Tour for the Wii the other day.  Went with the Band Kit version.  That comes with the game, guitar, drums and a mic.  Figured it’d be cool to get 4 of us going at once, and be very entertaining to hear someone sing off key for a bit.

The quality of the instruments is very impressive thus far.  The guitars seems more natural to hold than previous versions and now includes a new fret bar.  Though I haven’t tried messing around with that yet.  The drums are very nice quality.  They’ve taken a pretty serious beating thus far, and have held up well.  They’ve been very responsive and durable.  

The game itself is very impressive as well.  The 80+ song list is great.  There were only a few songs I wasn’t familiar with, and none that I’ve really hated to play thus far.  Some pleasant surprises have been Eye of the Tiger and On the Road Again just to name a few.

The online and downloadable content are the best I’ve seen on the Wii to date.  I’m very impressed with how they pulled this off considering the Wii hardware and lack of a hard drive.  I wouldn’t think that a third party would be able to make such a slick online experience.

This game is at it’s best when played with four fools.

Categories
Development

Dashcode

 Dashcode

Finally got around to messing around with creating a dashboard widget using Dashcode. Wow, the whole interface had a polish on it that you don’t find in most software, especially IDE’s. Very smooth, clean, and can pretty much just drag and drop anything that you like.

It makes creating certain types of widgets extremely simple. I made a quick RSS feed based widget in just a few minutes, with no tutorial. Eventually I had to tweak some .js and .css files a bit by hand, but that was very easy to get too as well.

I’m very much impressed with Dashcode, and won’t give a tutorial as there are already many great one’s online.  It’s a great tool, now I just have to come up with some cool ideas for gadgets.

If you run OS X 10.4.3 or higher feel free to download:

Categories
Development

Using a Spreadsheet to populate a chart with the Google Visualization API

I’ve been messing around with adding charts/graphs to web pages that can pull their data from a Google Doc Spreadsheet.  That way the chart is updated when the data is updated, instead of placing a static image of a chart on the page.  Conveniently the Google Visualization API makes creating attractive visualization of data fairly easy.  All you have to do is set up a Google Docs Spreadsheet, then do the following steps:

To get the data source url for Google Spreadsheet data sources follow these steps:

  • Create a spreadsheet in the format expected by your gadget.
  • Select the range of cells you want to display in the gadget.
  • From the toolbar, click ‘Insert’ and choose ‘Gadget’.
  • Choose an existing gadget or select ‘Custom’ as the gadget type, enter the URL of your gadget XML specification and click ‘Add’.
  • In the gadget title, click the arrow icon on top right of the title bar.
  • Choose “Get query data source url…” from the popup menu.
Then you can just call that data source url through some javascript on a webpage.  


Categories
Adventure Sports

Went Fishing

Went fishing the other day for the second time.  The only other time I went was probably 8 years or so ago, and it didn’t go too well.  I also think I may’ve had an orange Snoopy fishing pole growing up, but can’t confirm if I ever went fishing with it or not.  Can’t remember that far back if it was an actual fishing pole or just a toy, but it was orange and had Snoopy on it.

I did purchase a fishing rod for this momentous occasion at K-mart.  I have no idea if it’s any good or not, but I do have a slight feeling that it will catch me many a fish and perhaps sharks or something cool like that too.  It came with all the stuff to get started, so that was really cool.  

The Shepherd, Dustin, Joe and myself got some clams for bait and headed over to probably around 17th Street in Longport and began to fish off the Jetty.  It wasn’t too difficult, you just throw the hook with bait into the water and wait.  And wait.  Nobody did catch anything that day, so I blame the fish.

Someone started up a movie based game to pass the time.  While facing elimination, I was certain that Will Smith was in the film Philadelphia.  Everyone else playing said he wasn’t in the movie, So I asked some joggers to settle this argument.  They didn’t think he was in the movie and I was then eliminated from the game, which for the record is a stupid game.

Categories
Development

reCAPTCHA

I’ve been looking to reduce the amount of spam that web forms have been getting hit with recently. Figured that a captcha would be a good solution to determine if a human is in fact filling out the form and not some spambot.  I’m been hesitant to implement most of the captcha solutions I’ve come across due to their lack of accessibility.  For instance, most standard captchas require that you look at an image and then key in what it says.  This would prohibit someone dependent on a screen reader or a user who has images disabled in their web browser.

I’ve been messing around with reCAPTCHA as a solution and thus far have been very much impressed.  It offers and easy and very well documented means of incorporating a captcha into a site.  And it also offers an audio captcha for vision impaired users, which is great.  Also the submissions go towards helping digitize older books.  Might as well apply that extra time to solving a noble cause.  They also offer a library to work with most every server side scripting language available.