Greetings from Kenora, Ontario. We are once again staying with family (Bec's this time) and soaking up the 30+ weather on the Lake of the Woods, a big beautiful lake here in northwestern Ontario. Apparently it has over 14,000 islands on it!
Bec's family has a beautiful cottage on the tip of an island here, and we spend our days lazing around in the sun, watching Bec's dad build a new arch for his italian pizza oven. I ocassionally help with words of encourageme...
Hello friends and well-wishers!
I write this while sitting in
Lulu, watching Bec make dinner over the campfire. Finley is scouring
the area for "ground candy" and sporadically whining for no reason, as usual.
Milestone the first: Accomplished!
After many sad goodbyes (no wait, "see you laters"), we boarded what would be our last ferry ride for some time. It was a bit somber, but as we headed Northeast through the beautiful mountains of BC, our spirits started to lift a bit.
I've been a little neglectful of my tiny corner of the web and its loyal readers, so I feel I should update you all with the next phase of my life. 3.0, baby.
I've been busy lately, but still steadily working on the ol' web framework. I'm starting to reorganize the core components to maintain a loose coupling between layers. Behold an incremental improvement! Huzzah!
In between my gazillion contracts and side projects, I've managed to eek out a little site for my latest toy, Pronto. Welcome to it!
2008 will mark my first year as an attendee at South by Southwest Interactive. So if you're around, look for the lanky guy with the Vaio and say Hi. I'll be hanging around the nerdy panels and the nuclear taco party.
Many PHP-based web applications use ISO-8859-1 as the character set, as this is pretty much the default in North America and Western Europe, as I understand it. The problem is that this doesn't work out so well down the road if you intend to internationalize your web application. What if someone wants to write a blog comment in Greek, or drop a little Chinese in there? You'll probably end up with a bunch of weird diamond-shaped blocks or odd-looking question marks, depending on your browser.
Nowadays everybody is pretty much in agreement that UTF-8 seems to be the way to go. It's backwards-compatible with 7-bit ASCII and it can handle all the other character encodings out there, so you don't have to juggle them all anymore. So with the choice of ultimate charset out of the way, it's just a matter of convincing your RDBMS and scripting language to agree on the same charset.
So in our past episodes, we covered the basics of page controllers and data models, so it's probably time to go over templates.
Templates are pretty basic -- they don't vary much from framework to framework, except for the choice of template language: native PHP or a third-party markup such as Smarty?
My choice is native PHP. I see no reason to introduce another layer of abstraction when proper PHP is just as easy to read or write. The plus side is you get to avoid the performance detriments (and extra caching layers used as workarounds) of parsing another type of markup. If you look at something like Smarty, all it's really doing is parsing your template code for Smarty tags and converting them to native PHP. Why not skip that step?
If you're into theoretical physics (at the armchair level) and string theory, then this 12-minute video is a must. Thanks Hapy!
