Hello budding Symphonists, and welcome to the long-delayed part 3 of our tutorial series! In the last episode, we did some relatively mundane work prepping the structure of our portfolio website. Part 3′s where we crank up the fun and dive into Pages, Data Sources, XML, XSLT, and maybe some other wicked sweet acronyms. Our …
Category Archives: Web
This Ephemeral Year
The Project See it live. And don’t use IE. I haven’t tested it and I’m not going to! The Story In 2010, I rebuilt my website. As usual, I overloaded this project with far too many technology changes, forcing me to learn tons of new stuff before I could do any real work. I also …
Why can’t I be honest with real people?
Yesterday I wrote a tweet questioning why I feel free to express myself on Twitter in the digital company of a bunch of strangers, yet I feel comparatively guarded and closed off on Facebook, which connects me to the majority of the people I actually know in real life. I received some interesting responses, but …
Building a site with Symphony CMS, Part 2
Greetings! In our last episode we completed a Symphony CMS installation and loaded some nice bits of additional functionality with Extensions and XSLT Utilities. Finally, it’s time to get our hands dirty and build something. The demo site I’m building will be visible at symdemo.rocketfoo.com. Before we begin, please note that since our last post, …
In Defense of Crappy Tools
Jason Santa Maria wrote a well-reasoned piece in which he laments the state of web design authoring tools. In a nut: current tools are inadequate, originally built for print design or outmoded metaphors, and each does only one or two things we really need. They are, essentially, obstacles that slow down our work and require …
Building a site with Symphony CMS, Part 1
As promised, I’m going to take you on a walkthrough of building a new site with Symphony CMS. I’ll be referring to my new personal site to demonstrate some functional examples. If you’re not sure why you should use Symphony, have a look at my previous post and then check out the Symphony beginner’s guide. …
21st Century Inspiration
I’ve been thinking about creative method and inspiration recently, mainly because I’m finally tackling a big project, but also due to my recent induction into Dribbble. To be clear, I think Dribbble is wonderful, for many of the same reasons Twitter is wonderful; it provides a wee goon such as myself an opportunity to share …
You should use Symphony CMS, right now.
I’m a web content management junkie. Over the years I’ve used Textpattern, ExpressionEngine, Drupal, and WordPress, but none have fit my fancy as much as my recent love, Symphony. Symphony is a beautifully minimal PHP+MySQL-based CMS that uses XML as its backbone. More on that in a minute. More than any of the other systems …
Yahoo! Pipe for Last.fm album cover art
For my upcoming (and long-delayed) personal site relaunch, I’ve been working on integrating my last.fm data using the jolly good API. I like the weekly album chart, but unfortunately its results omit cover art images. Thankfully, the album.getInfo service includes images. Mash them into a fine paste using Yahoo! Pipes, and you’ve got this: http://pipes.yahoo.com/jonasdowney/lastfmweeklyart …
The Maintainer’s Dilemma
The Maintainer’s Dilemma -Idiom the condition of being overwhelmed by minutiae, preventing significant accomplishments. So, I’m a Webmaster. What does that mean? I have to know about web design, programming, writing, information architecture, user experience, talking to people, and a whole mix of other miscellaneous technology. (I would prefer the title Web Magician, though in …