Update

I have been working on an actual website for SpatialClastics using jekyll and Github hosting. I have been trying to determine the direction for my blog and I hope to get some direction soon.

PHP: Strange World

Since I have moved to a new team that the main focus is Drupal development, I have to focus on learning PHP.  All I have to say at the moment is that this is an interesting ecosystem due to how long it has been in use.  There are many different ways that have become standards for organization and design which I have not been exposed to mainly being a .NET developer.  After building a few basic PHP sites and reading a few books, I better understand how ASP .NET Pages fit for other developers from the PHP mindset.  I am so grateful that I am getting exposed to other technologies as part of my job.

DevOPS: Drink up

The DevOPS movement has been a movement (lack of better term) for sometime, but it recently has started showing up in the my feed reader and in other parts of the web that I travel.  I have been reading a few different posts and other miscellaneous articles lately and all I have to say is, WOW!  I am a believer in the movement.  There is that gap between system admins and developers that does not have the necessary talent that is needed to provide complete solutions.  Developers have lots to offer to system administration because that area provides tons of opportunities to automate, plus money saved on operations is a big win.  Projects like Vagrant, Chef, and Puppet (many others out there) provide this type of automation.  Also, being involved with system administration exposes developers to the underlying tech that their apps are running on.  I am shocked when I talk to another developer and the knowledge about hardware is not there or that the developer has never installed an OS.  This further supports the need for DevOPS, because more and more developers are not acquainted with the inner workings of the OS or the hardware.  Hopefully, this will gain even more momentum as there is real value.

Markdown, maybe that’ll work!

So I was talking to a coworker today and we got talking about a help file that needed created for an application we are working on.  So after some discussion about generating help files, we came to the conclusion that most help file generators store the help file in a proprietary format.  So we had the idea to store the help file content in markdown files and use a help file controller in MVC to service the help files.  That way formatting could be handle in a view and the layout could be used to keep a consistent look and feel.  Luckily there have been a few people to already do the heavy lifting.  I found this, were the poster had created an html helper to use in views to allow the interpreted markdown to not be html encoded.  This helper can be found on nuget.  There is a note that says it now uses MarkdownDeep.NET, but it seems to work without an issue.

So here is a few examples:

As you can see I just read in the markdown file and pass the string to the view using the view data, this is all a quick and easy way to get up and running.

Then, all you have to do is pass the string to the view helper and you have html generated from markdown. I added a class on the div so you can style the markdown in css.

The next step that I am going to do is to use a convention to label the files and auto generate a table of contents based on the files in the directory.  I will hopefully follow up with that later this week.

Last, but not least, I would like to give props to MarkdownPad, which is a nice markdown editor.

Another reason to use jQuery UI: Theme Roller

jQuery UI provides several nice widgets to use and it is done is just plain markup.  Other jQuery UI plugins like jqGrid also implement the use of jQuery themes.  Since I have been using jQuery in the latest ArcGIS JavaScript API app I have been working on, I have went looking for an easy way to customize the themes.  I had noticed that there were several themes that existed, but I never realized the “Theme Roller” aspect existed.  It lets you customize any existing theme or create a new theme and it displays all the standard UI widgets in real-time so you can see what awesomeness you have created.

There are tons of options on how to customize from saturation, color, font, patterns, etc.  Once you have a theme created and have clicked the download option you are faced with even more choices.  You can pick and choose which UI elements are included in your theme or you can just keep everything selected.  One small over looked option comes in the peach colored section on the left hand side.

                          

The “Advanced Theme Settings” is the interesting option.  The CSS Scope setting is where you can configure the theme so you can apply multiple themes in the same application.  There a blog post about how to do this in a little more detail.

Hope someone finds this of interest.

Life before NuGet

Hopefully, everyone reading this knows what NuGet is, but if you don’t then what rock have you been living under.  Honestly, I really do not know how to answer this question.  NuGet has become such an integral part of my workflow with .NET that I cannot remember what it was like without it.  I almost never used libraries created by other people.  I would just Google, get an answer, then rolled own based off of the sample.  Now my first reaction is to search NuGet for a library that does what I need, click install, and I am off writing the code that I gets the job done.  Simply amazing, that such a basic tool would have that large of an impact on my productivity.  Now, if we could only have apt-get, and PowerShell would officially replace the command prompt.

Open Source of the Week #5

What’s up, hpe you are enjoying this series. I have been keeping this going which has really surprised me.  Down to business, this week we have MapQuery.  MapQuery is a project that wraps OpenLayers in a jQuery plugin.  I think this is a great idea and will make it easier for people to get started.  It is getting even easier for me wean off of ESRI.  Speaking of things ESRI, wouldn’t it be great to have a GIS server that serves data in an ESRI compatible format, but only required a minimal setup and configuration.  Maybe as simple as shapefiles are to use.