Another website goes gold.  This one, investincheese.ca, is a website dedicated to the promotion of cheese-making and enjoying in the Frontenac, Hastings, Lennox and Addington, and Prince Edward County regions.

The site features dynamic pulls from Twitter, Flickr and YouTube as well as some unique things like a news ticker, the Digg Digg plugin which enables easy sharing on Twitter, Facebook and Google Buzz as well as the Share This plugin.  It is, of course, a Wordpress-driven site and is best of breed for March 2010.

Coming later this week is a news aggregator.  Very cool stuff.

I say, LET THEM EAT CHEESE!

Yesterday I put the finishing touches on a website for photographer Caitlin den Boer.  Her company is called Adelita Rose and the website features some neat tricks using Wordpress.

Along with her most recent Twitter tweet, we also automatically show an excerpt from her most recent blog post.  On the home page there is also a slideshow going on in the background.  I wanted the site content to be completely controlled by Caitlin so that meant using only standard Wordpress tools for the post and page editing.  Well, in the newer versions of Wordpress images can be displayed in galleries.  A gallery normally shows up as a series of thumbnails on a page which, while a neat way of showing a collection of images at one time, is not nearly as visually impressive as an auto-advancing, full-framed slideshow.  What I did was I hid the thumbnailed gallery and used Mootools to read in all of the links to the medium-sized images, used AJAX to follow the links and grab the images, stored them in local, hidden divs, and then created a cross-fading array loop of those divs. The effect is seamless and fairly quick.  The bonus is that each of the images is clickable to the full blown image (copyright Adelita Rose, of course).  The portfolio pages use the same tricks.

The contact page is a modified plugin and the music player is a free, Flash-based mp3 player that I have randomly selecting a loop of Caitlin’s chosen music.

The look and feel went through a couple of revisions with Rene Dick at Scout Design to nail down Caitlin’s vision but the end result is awesome.  I’m so glad we were able to deliver a non-Flash product that she can administer that still has that polished look a photographer wants.

Cheers to Caitlin and Rene on a very successful project!

J

This is a general call for help.  An APB if you wish.  I’ve got a client who has requested Google Maps.  No problem.  They want a CMS.  No problem.  They want to be able to get directions between the articles, which are points of interest, in the order in which the user defines.  No problem.  Now they want to bundle the whole thing in a single zip file, including the articles which should be pdfs.  No, er, what’s that?

I can put the attachments in a single zip file.  I can make the articles into pdfs.  What I can’t seem to do, for the life of me, is get the Google Map into a dynamically created pdf.  I’m sure there’s a way, I just haven’t come across it yet.  Anyone?

Anyone?

I’ll post the answer here and give credit where it’s due. promise.

Anyone?

I borrowed the title of this post heavily from my friend, Rene, who lamented on how he was busy but how he had to find time to keep up appearances on his website.  I, too, find myself in the position of being so busy that keeping my site up to date has taken a back seat to actually doing the work.  But please don’t let it sound like I’m complaining.

The past month has seen me busier than ever before.  I expanded my business to include my favourite hobby, home theatre and movies in general, and wouldn’t you know it, my web business blows up.  I’ve released 2 sites already this month and will have another 3 before the July page flips to August.  While it puts stress on the home life, the nature of the beast is such that you must strike while the iron is hot.

Since my biggest project of 2009 so far has now gone gold with only minor updates remaining (niagaragreenbelt.com) I feel it’s time to update the site.

To date I’ve partnered with great creatives like Brock, Rene, Aron and Gabriel and the work seems to be flowing nicely.  The even better news is that I’m very busy at Sears Canada and the work there seems to be rounding me out.  Not only can I code your front end website but I have the ability to do the dirty, SQL back end too.

Let me just close by saying that 3G has finally arrived in Belleville, but it hasn’t reached into Prince Edward County.  Typing on an iPod Touch is not as easy as it is on the Blackberry, and that isn’t easy in the first place (with chubby digits).  I’m now trying to Tweet as much as makes sense but I’m still not paying enough attention to my LinkedIn account.  I still love my PS3 but even more so now that I’m streaming iTunes from my Macbook.  And lastly, why hasn’t Adam Sandler been making kids’ movies all along?

Oh yeah, and I’m an uncle again!  Congrats to my sister Maija, brudder Jonny, niece Lexi and only nephew Jonah Watson Goward (7lbs 5oz).

BIDS is the acronym we use around the office for Microsoft’s SQL Server Business Intelligence Development Studio.  It’s an invaluable tool for moving data around between, into and out of SQL Server.  It’s extremely powerful and was a major improvement over the old Data Transformation Services bundled with SQL Server 2000.  The problem is, I don’t think it was ever tested by real life users.

Let’s just start with the interface.  The GUI in BIDS is pretty typical of modern Microsoft apps whereby there are multiple floating panels that you can dock anywhere you please.  They’re ok, I only have issues with the pinning when it refuses to auto-hide.  My screen isn’t big enough to have everything open but I would imagine that on a 24″ widescreen pushing 1900+ pixels wide, it would be very functional with most panels always open.  The real problem is in the Control Flow panel.  If you’ve got one lonely little task in that panel, BIDS, for some reason, can’t detect where that task is and have it auto-centered.  Most of the time I’ll open a package and have to scroll around the screen looking for the one task.  But this problem is merely annoying compared to some of the other problems.

One major issue I have is that when you first open a project, BIDS tries to validate every single package in the project.  This can take a very long time, especially if some of the packages rely on connections that aren’t live offline or rely on attached devices.  Those packages will fail validation, pop errors, and waste time – since you may not have been working on those packages anyway.

Another issue I have is with connections in the Connection Manager.  If you rename a connection, and that connection is used in a nested task, chances are pretty good that you’ve now broken that nested task.  BIDS, like most Microsoft products, uses an internal unique ID instead of the names (likely in the name of performance) to actually point to connections.  Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to recurse into all of the tasks to update the ID/names of assigned connections if you change a name – causing hours of frustration as you hunt down why a package that worked before a simple name change won’t work now.

My last complaint, for today, is with the SSIS Import and Export Wizard.  This is the only way to graphically pull or push data from and to your servers.  If you choose to copy a table from one server to another, where the table already exists, you have the option of deleting the existing data.  If you choose to delete existing records, BIDS creates an Execute SQL Task that is supposed to have all of the DELETE statements.  It doesn’t.  What you end up with is a set of GO statements.  That’s it.  One for each table you wanted to overwrite.  It took me three or four tries with primary key violations to realize that nothing was being deleted.  This is consistent and cannot be fixed.  I end up having to do the deletes on my own.  Obviously that’s not a big deal but it’s such a simple bug – did no one try to do one of these in testing?

Ugh.  Any other strange BIDS problems out there?