While I don’t work on the team responsible for the Arena.net site I help out all over the company wherever I can. When it was decided that the old site needed to be updated I got the call. After some discussions around what exactly the site should encompass it came down to wanting to have the site be an aggregator of updates by arena.net on various different services.
Here’s the rundown:
I certainly wasn’t looking forward to building parsers for the multiple different feed types that entails, but YQL came along and saved the day again. I only had to do simple things manually like make sure that Twitter links & @username replies were properly wrappped in <a> tags. To keep from bashing on YQL every time the page is loaded it stores the transformed results of the updates for an hour in a local APC cache. This provided the best of both worlds and made caching super-easy.
The site itself was built using YUI grids, YUI 3b1, and DD_belatedPNG to solve transparent PNG issues in IE6. It’s also using my favorite new PHP framework, Nice Dog. It’s a nano framework (about 100 lines) that is more of a VC than MVC. For a site like Arena.net it’s perfect as there’s no need for models. I could’ve plugged in an ORM to make it the full stack but when getting all your data is as simple as
apc_fetch($key);
the need to build a “proper” MVC site kinda isn’t there any longer.
September 18th, 2009 Comments Off
Sunday morning I had a few too many skittles after waking up and decided I wanted to build an actual landing page on patcavit.com
So then I started on it, I had grand plans. There were even icons that I was going to grab from… somewhere. That part of it was rather poorly planned. After doing the basic layout I spent about an hour trying to find the right icons. Eventually I threw up my hands and just dropped the whole idea.
Here’s what I’d planned for it to look like:
Notice my awesome hand-drawn icons… 
Today I was feeling more up for a challenge though. I did some reading and decided to use YQL thanks to Chris Heilmann’s screencast illustrating how he used it to pull multiple sources of data together. After deciding to just ditch the icons I picked a few colors for the top-level sections instead, and here’s what I came up with.
I like it well enough. Still wish I could’ve found icons I was happy with.
May 25th, 2009 2 Comments »
In a fit of inspiration I’ve updated the xbox live friends gadget with offline friends and hopefully taken care of the phantom friend problem in a more thorough way. Also went ahead and added a refresh button because two minutes is apparently too much time for some people to wait.
Pictures!
You know what time it is!
August 6th, 2008 4 Comments »
This is gonna be a long one, so watch out. I’ve been collecting feeds of people who I consider to have really worthwhile things to say about my chosen career (web development, for the people who don’t know that about me already). I’ve got quite a list, and since I’m of the opinion that sharing is caring I will be providing a huge list of links to sites that I think are awesome and deserve your attention.
I make no claims that this list is authoritative, in fact I’d love feedback pointing out really smart people I missed. I read a lot of feeds but none are more dear to me than the ones contained with my “development” folder. Adding new items to it is a joy each and every time.
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Usability/Design
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Roger Johansson does a great job of covering usability issues on the web.
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Harry Brignull and Andy Baker cover usability design both on the web and in client apps.
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Usability fascinates me, and this is one of the best usability blogs I’ve ever seen. Updates are infrequent, but always incredibly insightful.
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Bill Scott left Yahoo! for Netflix but we won’t hold it against him. His UI design comments are fantastic.
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Another really fantastic UI blog. I wish there were a lot more done this well.
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Web Development
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Great writers and a ton of content makes this a great resource. Doesn’t update that often, but always great content.
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Tiny little nuggets of web knowledge, updates infrequently but with useful info.
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Ajaxian’s great about updating with the newest and greatest javascript libraries and techniques.
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Small Design firm based out of Austria that posts nice wallpapers and some decent articles every now and then.
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Monster collection of CSS tips and tricks, always a nice reference to have around.
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Browser quirks, CSS techniques, all sorts of stuff. Updated rarely.
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Unofficial group dedicated to promoting good Javascript, I can get behind that goal.
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Crockford discovered JSON and writes great articles about Javascript best practices. Also see javascript.crockford.com and JSLint.com.
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A Googler (we won’t hold it against him) yet he still loves YUI (yay!). Produces a lot of really interesting code snippets.
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Mike Papageorge runs this general web developer resource/weblog. Good stuff though getting a little stale.
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Firebug development blog, updates almost never but good to have a subscription to in case it does.
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Isaac Schlueter is a fellow Yahoo! and writes some fantastic pieces about web development.
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Garrett Dimon’s weblog is wonderfully minimal, yet still provides really great insights into the development process.
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I worked with Hedger last summer, he’s a true mad scientist in the world of web developers. Seriously, I have no idea how he comes up with most of this but it’s insane and amazing.
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Only occasionally development related, but still a good read.
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Joe created Firebug, so you know he’s pretty damn smart. Too bad his site appears to be unloved these days. Staying subscribed just in case!
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Author of JQuery and an all-around Javascript genius, I love reading about John’s continuing adventures.
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Interesting observations about the web, definitely worth checking out.
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Julien’s the author of the YUI compressor and consistenly posts things you should be reading.
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Matt Snider does a great job of breaking down JS and investigating all the 8 bajillion frameworks floating around these days.
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One of the main YUI guys, Nate’s super smart and consistently posts interesting stuff. Not always web dev related, but always worth checking out.
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Great articles, wish they’d start updating again a bit more regularly.
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Pete’s a Cold Fusion guy but still posts things that apply to web dev in general.
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I like WordPress an awful lot, so keeping tabs on its development is a good idea.
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Scott Schiller is a web dev genius. I have no idea how he’s so good at what he does, I wish I did. He’s at Flickr now, before that he worked on the really impressive new Y! Photos that was canned.
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Django co-creator, Simon also writes a lot about OpenID.
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Lots of good articles to be found here.
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Lots of PHP talk, it’s good stuff.
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Features new websites that do things well. Good for keeping up with the current state of web dev.
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Vitamin is kind of like A List Apart, another big group of contributors writing amazing articles.
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Keeping tabs on WP development, even if I don’t have my hands into the guts as much as I used to.
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General Development
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Jeff Atwood’s posts are always well thought out and engaging, I love his blog.
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Joel Spolsky writes about software development from a very pratical place, having done quite a lot of it himself.
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Programmer’s Notepad rocks my world. I use it every day and love it to pieces. Keeping up with releases via a feed is tops.
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Rasmus is really, really smart. Not surprising, given that he wrote a bunch of PHP (the language itself, not just PHP code). He’s another Yahoo! as well.
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Lots of good development tips to be found, as well as general programming talk.
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Programmer’s Notepad author’s personal blog. The feed is just for the PN category, because that’s the programming related stuff!
And just in case you made it to the end of that huge list, here’s a link to everything I read on a not-at-all daily basis. It’s a little ridiculous. My Feeds.
February 13th, 2008 Comments Off
I’ve tossed a copy of my senior project up at http://patcavit.com/dev/classfinder/, a quick inspection makes it look like it’s working fine but I can’t say for sure.
For those that don’t know this is an attempt to make the Classfinder tool at Western Washington University not only easier to use but also cleaner and faster with more emphasis on getting out of the way. To that end it has a few features that the original Classfinder doesn’t have, including a freeform search box that will guess what you searched for and dynamic scratchsheet handling. You can add classes instantly without having to go to a seperate page. No screenshots for now.
It’s not the prettiest thing out there but it’s very functional and tries to take better advantage of screen real-estate than the previous Classfinder. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out overall.
April 20th, 2007 1 Comment »
