All Change

Since my last post there has been one major improvement as I have moved to the Pixillion tables in the office. Since Saul left at the beginning of March the office now only usually consists of 3 of us and so I was moved to a much more sociable location with the rest of Pixillion.   This has been a really good change for me as I have been able to ditch the Helastel phones for a few weeks and feel a lot more comfortable in the work environment now I am not so separated from everyone.  Not only this but I have been much more integrated into the Pixillion workforce in general.  I now have both a Basecamp login and a Harvest(Time keeping) login, and my name is quite often on the whiteboard schedule. This has increased my responsibility within the company which is great.  I am answering the Pixillion phones now instead, but this is much easier and it is allowing me to interact with some of Pixillion's clients and do support work for them.
In terms of project Pixillion Sessions is now up and running both on Facebook and as a live site.  You can reach these at www.pixillionsessions.com and www.facebook.com/Pixillion-Sessions/101042503311836.  As well as finishing that off I have done some work on Misura, a Netherland based company which we have done three individual but similar sites for.  Although this project was quite stressful due to the tedious nature of repeating the same steps over for each site, I learnt a lot whilst doing it.  The first part of this project was to make two of the three sites live by transferring them to their new domains.  This meant I had to transfer an entire modx install to the new host including the database.  This was the largest challenge as I have not really worked with databases on web hosts before and although I have seen a small amount of PHPMyAdmin I have not had to edit it previously.  After doing some research I decided to take the plunge with the first of the two sites and upload a copy of the pixillionserver modx database to the live database.  After some meddling I managed to achieve the update quite easily as modx exports the database in a readable format for PHPmyAdmin.  This meant all I had to do was get a backup of the old one, remove the old tables and then upload the new tables from the .sql file in their place. I then did an update Modx install for the site which is relatively easy and that was the live site done. There are a few issues I had with this method that might be fixed in ways I dont know how, but I intend to find out if possible.  Firstly the install required I changed some Modx file permissions, but I dont know why.  Also the files such as css and images had to be uploaded afterwards as they were not in the install.  This has been solved in other sites by linking the filemanager to the pixillionserver address but this install wont accept that. Also the files in the file manager are all non-editable which I have not seen before.  This made changing css after upload more difficult and I think there must be away to provide access but at the moment I haven't found the solution.  These issues however do not have a major effect on the running of the site and so for now it is staying like this.
As well as this project I have also been given a new build to do - Martin-Evans.  The build has only taken me 4 days which I am quite proud of, and the user friendliness of the site is also really good.  This was highlighted to me as something that should be included more in Modx builds in general, and so I have gone out of my way to try and make sure everything is easy to use e.g. template variable descriptions and a selectable right hand column.  I have also made sure that previous errors in my build are not in this one, specifically image sizing, as this was a main issue in the Renegade site. Users are often likely to put images into sites that are actually the wrong size for the design and so if the sizing isn't tied down in css all sorts of crazy layouts can be achieved.  I've also fully tested the site with IE and fixed and IE bugs so the site is looking good. One of the main achievements of this build has been my hacked together tag archive for the publications section. Tag archiving doesn't seem to exist in Modx, only date based archiving, and although I actually didn't need it in the end, making a functioning tag archive seemed to be the best and most flexible way.  For the archive I needed a snippet that would get hold of all the tags used in a template variable without having any duplicates.  I therefore went and looked at the php that runs behind the Manager Manager tag widget as this does a similar thing.  I then took this code and manipulated some of it into a snippet which would achieve the desired effect.  In particular I got to learn a little more about the Modx database structure when doing this as I required two SQL statements to get the information I needed.   In the end I got a working PHP snippet that takes a template variable name and uses that to get the list of tags used for that tv throughout the publications. I then used this snippet 4 times over, once for each TV in the publications and the result was a fully functional tag archive.
These have been my main concerns over the last few weeks, along with minor bits and pieces here and there.  At the time I moved I also didn't have much to do so have been able to develop a few ideas for my new portfolio which is good.

Recent work

Last week I finished the Pixillion Session Flash site for Pixillion as my second full flash project for the company.  In building this site I have continued to develop my skills as a Flash developer and learn better ways of working to build sites like this.  My methodology was definitely better this time as my development time was shorter and the overall product is much tidier and more refined.  Planning the project prior to production was the first change I made and it definitely made a difference, as aspects of navigation and control could be planned out effectively ensuring the build was successful. In building this site I have also taken the step to using imported classes, in particular, TweenLite from Greensock.  I have previously resisted using these as I felt that the standard inbuilt Tween class would be more inkeeping with the work.  However classes like this help to aid rendering and performance greatly, and often allow for much better refined functionality so I felt it was about time I started using them.  It is something many professional developers do, although I would like to extend my knowledge further to be able to build Tweens of my own. Another import I used in Sessions was the Flickr API which has enabled me to learn how to develop Flickr elements into my projects.  I was quite impressed with the import classes provided as they were very functional and easy to use and it did not take me long to get a fully functioning Flickr section working.  This has therefore developed my skills further enabling me to make sites more functional in the future by connecting to outside source of information.  I also used video for the first time in this project which was an interesting learning curve. I built a video player using the Netstream class which enables video to be streamed from your server to the user using progressive download (buffering).  I chose to use this rather than the inbuilt component as it allowed me to have greater control over the video and elements of the player.  Overall I am very happy with this project and am looking forward to it going live for the first time once the Facebook version is also complete.
As well as this I have also done some development work on FoxyVineMusic, a flash site built previously that needed updating for a client.  This was an interesting challenge as I had to take someone else's code and adapt it for the purpose.  It also helped me to understand various elements of professional Flash development that  I may not have known before.  This site was structured using a set of swfs that were nested within each other and the entire site was built using OOP.  I already knew this was important and have begun to use it in my own productions but still have not converted fully.  Also the site was left on one singular frame, which was achievable due to the nested swf approach.  I can understand why people use this approach, particularly in large sites but I currently still prefer my method of using one swf with a frame per page.  Once I had got my head around the structure and the processes the changes were easy, I even added pagination with a couple of hours :).
Renegade was back again this week too. I had to make a couple of tweeks to the site before it goes live, although a lot more tweeks had been made before that as the site was a little 'free' for the users i.e. they were putting images in that were the wrong size and it wasn't dealing with them.  I will remember this next time templating comes up as it is easy enough to fix and makes the site much more usable from a user perspective.
Its gone a bit quite now for the last few days and to fill the time I have been working on Openroots, a personal group project that was set up by Will and Gav.  It is a tutorial and informational site for DAT students, but I won't say any more. Been busying myself with learning to understand CCS3 transitions and media queries.  I can't decide which I prefer at the moment; fixed or fluid sites.  Fluid sites annoy me because the percentages can be a bit difficult to work with, but fixed sites are no way near as adaptable.  They say fluid is the future but from what I've seen here at Pix there isn't much proof of that yet.  Although I would rather be working on a real project it has been quite good to get my head around some of this new front end stuff for a change, keeping up with the times kind of thing, even if none of it is actually accepted by W3C validation at the moment.
Its the placement seminar at Uni this Friday, it'll be good to see everyone again and talk about what we've all been doing.  I seem to write enough so hopefully I can fill 5 minutes ok.