ZEE4

SimcoeDining Re-launch

SimcoeDining.com has been running for 3 months as of October and currently lists about 150 of the best restaurants, bars and clubs in the Simcoe County area which includes Barrie, Orillia and Collingwood.

Originally launched as a directory in 2007, a complete re-write of the site was done over a 2 month period this past summer.

Technical: SimcoeDining is written using the CakePHP framework and uses the jQuery UI library for the client-side.

SitePoint Blogs YYZtech.ca’s Web Design Book List

It looks like Sitepoint noted YYZtech’s list of best books for web designers 2007 a few weeks back – thanks guys! Seriously, SitePoint seems to be one of those publishers that is really improving, I remember their one of their early checklist books, good information, but very functional layout, flip forward to something like their CSS Anthology and you see how far they have come.

ZEE4 back up on Dreamhost

Well since moving to DreamHost a few days back, there’s been no problems so far – in fact, I’m finding their organizing to be much better than the previous hosting solutions I’ve used. As of today, the under-maintained ZEE4 site is running on it as well… now about that under-maintained part…

Halifax-Restaurants attracts Nova Scotians

Well this summer’s project, Halifax-Restaurants.com was a bit of a disappointment (stillborn would be a bit cruel), mostly due to my unfamiliarity with the CakePHP framework I used as the underlying framework, I was surprised to see that it was actually starting to attract visitors from the Halifax area, according to Google Analytics.

That’s the good news. The bad is the time I have to work on it. Ideally, I’d like to re-write nearly everything about it, then fix up the layout, which is too ad-heavy, as opposed to content for me right now. I have a few ideas about how that can be improved, but the fact is, adding content is the biggest task right now.

Saved by the book

The last few weeks I’ve been selling off a bunch of older titles I had laying around (instead of working on this blog), one of them that almost went off to the local BMV was PHP 5 In Practise; Fortunately, I passed on that one and tonight, while trying to finish off a tag-generator for Halifax-Restaurants.com, it saved my tail at least once. When I originally reviewed it, I was impressed with the amount of material in it- it’s still one of the best books out there when you’re looking for something like- “how do I remove white-spaces from a string” and such basic but necessary things.

Digital Bedouin of the North?

I’m sitting in a local Second Cup dashing (ok, bit faster than crawling) through my TTD (Things To Do) list, fueled by cold coffee (yes, more caffee – same price) and I’m thinking about the “Digital Bedouin” (so termed by a U.S. writer Dan Fost in his article WHERE NEO-NOMADS’ IDEAS PERCOLATE, written a few months back) and I’m wondering what it means- kind of like the team cybercrime or auto-crime (yes, apparently when cars where new, criminals who used cars where refered by their tool, much like there is crime and there is cybercrime – I give it another 10-15 years before it’s just called “crime” except for the old folks at CTV – yes, they still show temperatures in Fahrenheit, what 20 years on?).

Anyways, I’m thinking that it’s one of those things that people will just start doing without really thinking of it as anything special- go to a university campus and you’ll see students working on laptops far from the classroom – in a few years some of them will be working far from the boardroom- hopefully with newer laptops. Doubt most of them will describe themselves as Digital Bedouins as much as anyone called themselves a “computer user” past 1990.

In the mean-time, there’s a few good links over at Slashdot, ShannonClark, or Going Bedouin at Web Worker Dail if you’re looking to get into it anyways.