Archive for the 'Web 2.Hyped' Category

I wonder if I come off as contradictory: a reclusive tinkerer locked up in his lab (with pet fur and poop collecting on the floor), messing around with code and inventing his own better (or so he thinks) solutions to already ’solved’ problems, while shunning the latest technology fad like an outdated and lazy IT department at…the Department of Windows 3.1 [?].

For as long as I’ve been developing web apps, I’ve also been behind on trends and fads. It really isn’t a good thing for someone in my field, I know. Part of it is that I’ve come across too much badly written/organized code to trust apps written by anyone else. We’re using Wordpress as our blogging software mostly because it wasn’t a smart idea for me to put in the time to write our own blogging system. Wordpress is great for the end user, but while building the templates, I’ve found a ton of nuisances that make me wonder how they got the system working in the first place.

The other part is that I have a negative reaction to anything that’s hyped up so much. Take Ruby On Rails: I had a chance to experiment with at work a few months ago, and aside from the five frustrating days I spent trying to get it functioning correctly, I wasn’t at all impressed by it once I got into it. Yeah, it’s probably the best framework out there for anyone that doesn’t have much experience developing applications in an organized way. But guess what? I’ve written my own framework (which is what the site has been running on since the relaunch), and while it’s not as user-friendly as Rails is out the box, it does just as good a job, and has a few key features that Rails, for whatever reason, is sorely lacking.

Having said all that, I’ve been growing increasingly fond of Ajax. In a nutshell, Ajax makes pages more interactive by sending and receiving data in the background without reloading the page. You’ve probably come across it without realizing it: Gmail, Facebook, Flickr, and the new Yahoo! Mail make heavy use of it.

And now, TCC has it! If you’re logged in, just check out your preferences. (You’ll need to refresh to reload the new stylesheet.) I spent the last week working on a small Javascript library and tweaking the framework to be more Ajax-friendly (that wasn’t tricky or time-consuming, thanks in part to my foresight and skillz with coding).

It isn’t impressive, but now that the foundation is laid, it’s a good sign of newer and better things to come for the site.

Assuming I don’t get OCD with the details.