Silicon Chisel » News

Treatment-Programs.com Launched

Silicon Chisel — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 20:14:36 +0000

This week we launched the latest follow-on to find-a-therapist.com: treatment-programs.com.

This was an 80% rewrite of the old code-base. Some thought was given to going to a full-fledge PHP framework stack, but instead we opted to keep things light and simple. The Smarty template engine was used to handle the “V” side of an MVC application. This also benefited the application by providing a nice view-caching mechanism to increase performance.

Adodb’s ActiveRecord implimentation was used for the “M” part of the design. This put everything on a nice, solid database model which would also allow for migrating to some other platform should the need arise.

Throw in a splash of JQuery here and there, and some other JavaScript controls and voilà.

Find-a-Therapist v2 Launch A new version of the successful psychotherapist directory - Find-a-Therapist.com - was...

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WordPress Conversion Underway

Silicon Chisel — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 10:14:31 +0000

WordPress 2.5 2.6 was released this week and it was so nice that I decided it was worth converting my old Joomla installation over to WordPress for the main Silicon Chisel site. Another incentive is that my personal blog is also in WordPress - as well as a few other sites I manage, so it just generally eases the maintenance load.

The first cut over went pretty well, aided by the “MAMBO2WORDPRESS IMPORT WIZARD“ script by Rodney Blevins which - with some modifications for table names and the like - at least allowed me to get the primary content into WordPress.

It will likely take another week or so to get everything settled in, and finalize the plugins - but then I should be able to get back to writing about technology. Some topics I plan to cover soon include:

Reviews of the Mac web design packages RapidWeaver and Sandvox.
A look at the “big three” content management systems - well, at least as far as I see it, anyway - Drupal, Joomla, and Wordpress.
Some of the new Web 2.0 sites I’ve been beta testing.

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Macintosh: The Underdog Strikes Back

Silicon Chisel — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 07:20:57 +0000

Many years ago I was a heavy Mac user, as well as a Mac developer. Then I was more or less forced to adopt the Windows PC - partly for economic reason, partly because I entered the PC game industry.

Recently, though, I acquired a MacBook Pro and am loving it. Not just for the fun of using a Mac again, but also for the fact that it makes a great development machine for web applications. So the site will be adding reviews and articles about the Mac, and using the Mac for software devlopment.

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Find-a-Therapist v2 Launch

Silicon Chisel — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 08:02:07 +0000

A new version of the successful psychotherapist directory - Find-a-Therapist.com - was launched this week. It features a complete rewrite from the ground up for speed, ecommerce support, and deployability across multiple platforms. A sister site for psychotherapy information - Find-a-Therapist.info - was launched as well.

Treatment-Programs.com Launched This week we launched the latest follow-on to find-a-therapist.com: treatment-programs.com....

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StikiPad Template CSS

Silicon Chisel — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 01:13:36 +0000

I’ve added a nice CSS template for the StikiPad online Wiki service to the files area. It uses the “Classic” layout style - just duplicate that in your “My StikiPad”, then paste in the new CSS and update the reference to it in the Layout.

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NewOrleans.com

Silicon Chisel — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Last month I completed development work on NewOrleans.com, the site for the city of New Orleans. This was a massive rework of a legacy site, some parts of which had been around for many, many years. The new deployment’s core is the Joomla CMS. Supporting are phpAdsNew for banner ads, Gallery2 for photos, and Simple Machines Forums.

Some details of the work include:

Mosets Tree used for the directory of hotels, restaurants, and other points of interest.
A custom module was written to allow the creation of customized search blocks into Mosets. For instance: search restaurants by district.
Galllery2 was deployed to handle photo galleries.
Simple Machines Forum was deployed to handle message boards. A module which lists the latest posts is put on Joomla pages where appropriate.
The Event List component was used to maintain the list of special events in the city, and their venues.
The site’s existing recipes database was migrated to the Rapid Recipes component .
About half a dozen custom database converters were built to migrate data held in multiple HyperSeek databases into Joomla.
The “ad tower” modules on the right side (actually called “Five-to-One” module as it puts five ads in one block … and a subtle Doors reference) connects to phpAdsNew and also takes section and category source tags, so that ad campaigns can be targeted to specific areas of the site.
A special header banner module was also created to connect to phpAdsNew and uses the same source-tagging logic.
The prominent Flash Video Channel component is something I wrote. It’s driven by XML files to define the video, text panels, links, and overlay contents. XML files are the most convenient means to manage the data based on past experience, plus it allows easy swapping and scheduling of changes to the channel.

Joomla goes Hollywood … www.ltnla.com LTN is a new local interest TV network for the...
Adult Content Mambot This weekend I'm releasing a little Mambot for Joomla/Mambo that...

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JackRabbitTheMovie.com

Silicon Chisel — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

I just finished a little project for a friend; building a site for his upcoming Indy movie (hey, I’m 5 miles from Hollywood, what do you expect). It’s fairly basic, but it does use Exposé for the various photo galleries.

[ Visit Site ]

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Joomla goes Hollywood … www.ltnla.com

Mark Miller — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

LTN is a new local interest TV network for the Los Angeles area. With 9 shows broadcasting new episodes each week there’s a lot of content. The content team has 6 people creating articles and media. I chose Joomla as our CMS foundation for the site.

Some details:

Running Joomla 1.04
Template based on Jamboworks Global Biz
Uses SEF Advance

Custom modules for hooking up with phpadsnew (4 zones, sensitive to the branch of the site)
Custom modules for “home page” and “side bar” videos - these tie into a
broadcast database and video library which was also custom coded
Custom module for showing the daily schedule on the home page
Custom module for linking out to “Adult Content” … this brings up an age
verification dialog before proceding to the link (you can download this
from SF).

The site has been up for less than two months and already has over
550 articles of content and 250 clips of FLV video. It’s currently up
to about 1000 visitors and 35000 pages per day in traffic. I built the
whole deal in about 6 weeks.

NewOrleans.com Last month I completed development work on NewOrleans.com, the site...
Adult Content Mambot This weekend I'm releasing a little Mambot for Joomla/Mambo that...
JoGadgets Something new and cool for the Joomla CMS to keep...

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Adult Content Mambot

Silicon Chisel — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

This weekend I’m releasing a little Mambot for Joomla/Mambo that I built for a project at a TV station. It’s intended for sites which need to link out to adult content and puts up an age verification dialog before proceding to the link. The code is a little basic, there is no nice control panel to set the text for the pop-up. That can all be edited in the files - this needed to be done in a hurry so niceties were left for later.

Joomla goes Hollywood … www.ltnla.com LTN is a new local interest TV network for the...
NewOrleans.com Last month I completed development work on NewOrleans.com, the site...

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SpeedGeezers.com Gateway v4

Mark Miller — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

I finished work on the new gateway for the sim-racing enthusiast site this weekend. It’s basically a hand-coded XML-driven directory of all the leagues and projects we host on the server, plus a nice open-source news script I integrated. The look and feel was kept very clean and subtle so it is more contemporary. [ Link ]

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