Monthly Archives: August 2008
CI gets a pat on the back!
I just read a post on Sitepoint where the author, David Peterson, commented on a talk he saw Rasmus Lerdorf give. For those of you who don’t know, Lerdorf is the father of PHP and is still involved in it’s development. In this talk, Lerdorf decided to talk about PHP frameworks and why the majority of them are bloated and try too hard to be all things to all people. Anyway, in his talk he mentioned that he liked CodeIgniter specifically because it’s “faster, lighter and the least like a framework“. This is pretty high praise and I couldn’t agree more. I’m not sure I would say that CI is least like a framework because it certainly acts like one, but it is a lean mean programming machine! If your interested, head on over to Sitepoint and check out the whole article.
Great Advice
I was wandering through my RSS feeds this morning and came across a mention of a post written by Aaron Swartz entitled How To Launch Software. In it he talks about the benefits of launching software slowly and carefully vs. quickly and flashy. I totally agree with him and think you should check out his post for yourself.
10 Tools for Beginning Bloggers
Everyone has a blog nowadays, right? Not quite, but everyday more people start blogging about their passions, experiences, businesses and dreams. Below is a list of 10 tools that will help bloggers just starting out to get up and running quickly and start spreading their word throughout the web.
CI Inferno
For those CI fans out there that don’t follow Elliot Haughins blog, he released an awesome project yesterday called Inferno. The idea here is to create a version of CI that has a bunch of third party code libraries already installed and ready for use. This could equate to a big time saver for those among you who use a lot of third party libraries in your CI applications. So far the package includes the following libraries: TarzanAws – Amazon Web Services, Akismet API and Simplepie RSS Parsing but he is looking for recommendations on what else to include. Download the code for yourself and check it out!
Skills Every IT Person Needs
My dad sent me a link to a great article this morning called 30 Skills Every IT Person Needs published by CIO. It’s got some good ones on there like points 5, 10 and 15. Check it out and see how your skills compare.
Blog Action Day 2008
For those of you that haven’t heard of Blog Action Day yet, it’s one single day out of the year where blog owners are asked to come together and all write about a single issue. I think this is an awesome idea and I’m definitely going to see what I can do to help. This years issue is poverty. Check out the promotional video below and get involved! Blog Action Day 2008 Poverty from Blog Action Day on Vimeo.
Gary Vaynerchuk
I had never heard of Gary Vaynerchuk until I saw him on Chris Pirllo’s web site one day. After I found out how to spell his name I did a little research and subscribed to his blog. He posted a great short video today about a mantra he uses for success.
Surprise Your Customers
I have a subscription to National Geographic Adventure magazine, the photos in it kick ass and I also enjoy dreaming of running off to the bizzare destinations they write about. Anyway, about a month ago I came across a brightly colored full page add for a web site called Zappos. After visiting the site and looking around a little I determined that it was just another online shoe store and moved on.
Generating PDF files using CodeIgniter
PDF files rock! Some of the programs used to view them could use some work, but the file format itself is real handy. As a programmer I have found PDF’s to be most helpful when generating reports that need to be printable. I know we are all supposed to be doing our part to make our offices “greener” and use less resources like paper. But some things just need to be printed (especially when your talking about the financial and legal industries). When generating reports in PDF format you suddenly have a lot more control over layout and design than you do with plain old HTML and CSS (although much progress is being made with print style sheets). You can create some really nice reports on the fly that your users can view, save for later or e-mail to their co-workers for review. In this post I will show you how I generate PDF reports using CodeIgniter.
Who is Chris Monnat?
Chris Monnat (aka mrtopher) is a web application developer and entrepreneur located in Alexandria, VA. This site is his island of information where he blogs about CodeIgniter, PHP programming, business topics, the Internet as a whole and other miscellaneous bits and bytes.
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