weddingsite is online at BitBucket!

Posted on October 20, 2010 by Tom Duff

Just a quick note – I’ve released a preliminary version of the wedding website software I’m calling “weddingsite” (no points for originality, but meh). It’s been published on my dev site over at bitbucket.org. Feel free to fork and set yourself up a repository for your own wedding website. Or, download the latest snapshot by clicking the “get source” link.

An installer script is coming soon, but for now, you should have some working knowledge of CodeIgniter and PHP to go through all the files and edit what needs to be edited (It’s all marked). Feel free to email me through the contact form on my website if you have any questions, comments, or ideas for improvement!

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Marital Development

Posted on October 2, 2010 by Tom Duff

Well, I went and got myself engaged. I’ve been best friends with Kim since High School, and we’ve been living together for the past 4 years, so I felt it was abut time to make it official. It’s pretty neat, actually.

So, It’s been about a month since I popped the question (she said yes obviously), and we’ve actually been planning pretty much non-stop for the past month. We’ve got a date set, a place for the ceremony and reception already booked, DJ, flowers, and everything in the works, and yadda yadda yadda. Kim and her Mom have been taking care of a lot of the details, but luckily, I’ve been given the task of making a web site for our Wedding.

I’ve got a bunch of stuff already written up, the site is in beta right now, it’s got its own domain name, and I’m writing the CMS from scratch using the CodeIgniter framework, like I used for tomduff.net and phlarg.net. I’m having a blast with it.

I recently wrote an RSVP system that’l knock my guest’s socks off. It’s got a MySQL backend, and I’ve even built in a section of the website called CENTCOM, or Wedding Central Command, where Kim and I can manage names, addresses, and RSVP statuses of guests. The whole thing is really neat.

I’m also using the opportunity to avail myself of version control for this project, forgoing my usual SF.net-powered SVN repository, for a more distributed model, using Mercurial and bitbucket.org. It’s been working out GREAT so far. What I’m doing is keeping a working copy at work and home, and committing my changes back up to bitbucket.org. Then, when I get a working trunk, I pull it down to my web server using Hg as well. Pretty neat.

So anyway, that’s what’s going on recently.

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Keeping Busy

Posted on May 13, 2010 by Tom Duff

Lots of things have happened in the past couple of days, I’m working on posting a few new projects, namely a Nessus Scan Automator for Nessus 4.2.2, used for scheduling security and vulnerability scans via SQL table records. I’ve already got this set up and running at work, but it’s a different environment, so I’m trying to make a portable version with a web interface (the one I’ve got now is just CLI-based perl, ruby, and php scripts).

In addition to the Nessus Scanner, I’ve got a few new automation projects coming down the pipes, as well as some more site modifications such as a tag cloud and other nice stuff. Stay tuned.

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Project Development with CodeIgniter – Impressive!

Posted on May 2, 2010 by Tom Duff

CodeIgniter is probably the best and “least fatty” frameworks I’ve used in a long time. CakePHP has its charms, and I’m sure Symfony has its good points too (though I’m not familiar with them) – but CodeIgniter gives you just what you need, and lets you interject the rest.

This site (www.tomduff.net) used to be run by a shoddy, horribly hacked together CMS that I wrote when I was first starting out with PHP. Instead of looking into a framework to ease my work, I chose to build on top of the code I had. In hindsight, I suppose this helped me figure out the intricacies of the language, and somewhat good practices, but for such a large project, if you keep building on top of what you’ve got, you tend to pigeonhole yourself at one point or another, and wind up hitting a wall for new features.

I think this whole thing started when I began looking into Ruby on Rails to fix the issues I had, but what I really needed was the cleanliness an MVC framework could give me, while at the same time, allowing me to use a language I already knew. Ruby isn’t that hard to learn, but I use PHP more, so I was better off with an MVC framework written in, and for, PHP.

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