Blog

Long ago, ages in fact, a generous Concrete5 user built up a simple little Twitter block that displayed Twitter feeds on any page.  It was fairly simple, and had only one real shortcoming, in which if your website was in a shared hosting environment, the Twitter API would throttle you and an exception would appear on your page.

Time moved on and Concrete5 introduced a great packages feature that allows developers to build a collection of blocks, page types, etc and run them all through a simple installer.  Slowly the old Twitter block started to become engorged in weeds and vines and became less useful.

Flash forward to... now!

Introducing Tweetcrete!  A free Concrete5 add-on that allows you to easily place a Twitter feed on any page of your website.  Tweetcrete utilizes the OAuth with the Twitter API so that you are authenticated and never throttled!

I'm a big VW fan despite the recent dillusion of their branding with the addition of the Routan, Tiguan, Touareg and Eos to their once nearly-perfect fleet (where's the new Microbus? Huh?  HUUUUH?)

Wait... this is all beside the point.

Our friends at Volkswagen have funded a VERY cool project called "The fun theory".  The idea is that they take every day ordinary tasks that are important to the wellness of ourselves and our surroundings and make them fun to do.  The experiments so far involve getting people to throw away litter, use stairs that are right next to an escalator and coming soon making bottle recycling into a fun game.

From their website:

"This site is dedicated to the thought that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better. Be it for yourself, for the environment, or something entirely different, the only thing that matters is that it’s change for the better."

Visit Thefuntheory.com

I have created a super simple search plug-in for Firefox that will allow you to easily search the Concrete5 Community Forums.

To install the Concrete5 Forums search plugin, click here.

DreamHost has been my hosting company of choice for a good few years now.  What's not to love about these guys? Awesome pricing, employee owned, carbon neutral and the best damned panel out there.  Their service can be rocky from time to time, but in the end they always come through and I wind up completely happy again.  They also do free registered non-profit hosting which I think  is great.

One thing I've found is that getting Concrete5 to work on DreamHost with Pretty URL's seems to be somewhat of a moving target.  In the past I've offered guides via the Concrete5 forums on how to accomplish this.  Once again confronted with re-figuring out the process, I thought I'd post about my most recent successful experience.

I love it when form and function meet in a way that tickles my heart bone.  Today this happens in the form of a portable version of the original 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System that is built inside of an NES cartridge!

While it's not the first time this has been done, it is by far the most attractive to date.

"This portable NES will own any handheld on the market! Airz, from Ben Heck's official forum, created it by ripping apart an NES cartridge and wiring in the buttons, dpad and screen. There is a demonstration video below, along with some more images!"

Via: 8bitfix

In a recent project I was confronted with a technology challenge in Concrete that had "fun" and "pain" written all over it.  The task was to produce a website that has multiple themes; one generic, one we'll call "rockets" and one we'll call "torpedoes".  Upon entering the site, a user could chose to view information about rockets, torpedoes, or they could view  a small handful of generic pages.  The trick was this... Once they viewed either rockets or torpedoes, all of the generic pages should from that point assume the theme of either rockets or torpedoes?

Confusing?  Kind of...  The motivation was, once the user chooses a vertical, their experience should remain consistent across all pages unless they switch verticals.

As of this morning, Blog v1.1.5 is available on the Concrete5 marketplace.

If you have already purchased Blog, you can find it in the Downloads section of your account page on Concrete5.org.  If you're running Concrete5 >= 5.3.3, you can also find Upgrades under the Add Functionality section of your Dashboard.

I finally found some time to put some work into this awesome website my lovely wife designed for me.  In addition, this finally gave me a place to install this Concrete5 Blog add-on that everyone keeps talking about.

Okay, I confess... Along with Scott C, I am one of the authors of the Blog add-on, so damned right I'm going to use it!

I'm not sure what the intent of this blog will be.  My initial aim is to keep it web developmentcentric, but not geeky, personal but not a diary and funny but not foul.  We'll see how I do!