Musings, scribbles and doodles.

We’ve just posted what is hopefully the first in a long line of helpers and other bits and pieces for CakePHP: the ordinal number helper.

It simplifies outputting numbers like 1^st, 3^rd or 4,289^th.

Clone it from here: https://github.com/elsewares/CakePHP-Ordinal-Helper

In the course of building my client base, I’ve decided to be as community-oriented as I can.  Partially, that means working with local businesses as much as possible, and trying to get my face in front of some local Meetups.  The other spoke my plan is to reach out on a very local level – and by ‘local level’, I mean the myriad coffee shops here in Evanston where I see coders of various stripes hacking away, and by ‘reaching ...

In conjunction with another web development company, we modernized 3R’s site, making it clean and SEO-friendly.  Open web fonts, content standardization and an easy-to-use WordPress back-end make their site easy for the owners to update, Google to search and enticing for customers, showing off the beauty of their Colorado ranch.

I was contacted by Jonathan Liss to help finalize the the Javascript and PHP coding of this WordPress-based site for a local preschool.  The school itself is bilingual, so all of the content on the pages is meant to be in both English and Spanish.  The easiest way to accomplish this was to create mirror pages in English and Spanish, then use Javascript to move the user back and forth between the two sets of pages.  By using an easy-to-use ...

Oort is an idea that popped into my head while playing the very excellent indie computer game Dyson, which is a procedurally-generated RTS where you colonize an asteroid field with a swarm of self-replicating robots. The different asteroids that you colonize give the robots created there different properties. The differences aren’t really all that noticeable in the game, but that’s not really the point. It’s very engaging and don’t install it if you have any actual work to get done.

This ...

During the summer, the family and I had an afternoon on the beach, and found a bounty of very smooth basalt stones.  My wife mentioned that ‘these would make great game pieces’, so of course I scoured the beach for a couple of handfuls.  The result:

basalt stones

Twenty-five stones in all of various sizes: twenty-one dark gray, and four white ones.  The mechanic: reach ...

For a local physical therapist, I worked with the client to get all of his patient screening information online, and used a clean, bright theme with custom photography. Once the page structure was in place, and WordPress comfortably hacked into shape, the client could add and customize pages easily.

Working in partnership with Jonathan Liss, we hacked together a custom WordPress CMS install that lived up to Jonathan’s original design concepts, while still keeping the site customizable for the client down the road. Typekit fonts help round out the overall feel of the site.

For a local artist, we created another single-page, minimal design that uses a jQuery lightbox to show off her art. Plans are afoot to add blog feeds and a client upload and dynamic contact form.

Gilbert + Kaeding Architecture and Design wanted a clean, modern page with animation and lots of photography to show off their projects. They also wanted their site to be easily updated without needing to incur further costs. So I created a one-page design and used AJAX to put together the page, and some bespoken PHP to pull in new projects and images automatically.

The client simply needs to add a folder with a simple XML manifest, along with the ...