I have them mirroring phalacee.com for the time being, but I am considering having all the jasonfowler.* domains pointing to a single separate website. I don't know what I would have on that site yet - I already have my blog at about.phalacee.com , sixthdaydesign.com which I will be using for a design and development network site, and phalacee.com which I use for my work folio and resume.

I might use the jasonfowler.* domains for a collective page, or something like that. Only time will tell.

I won't go in to too much detail here because this is a web-development site, and it's off topic. I will be posting to one (or more) of my many personal journals in the next few days. When I do I'll link through to it.

• jQuery
• jCodeViewer - a nice way to display code samples
• pager jQuery plug-in - an great way to prevent your large blocks of text
• jCarousel Lite - the perfect slideshow
• vjustify - vertical justification for DOM elements

You can expect to see some jQuery plugins implemented here in the near future

To power the site I went for YUI, but now that I've pretty much completed it I wonder if I should have gone with jQuery instead...

jQuery seems to be built for what I wanted to do, whereas with YUI, I had to bend it to my will.

Ah well, I've learned something new, three things actually, I've learned YUI and jQuery, and I've learned to explore your options before settling on a solution.

At first I was considering using Joomla! or Wordpress, but neither of them meet the requirements I have for phalacee.com.

So it looks like I'll be heading down the custom built CMS path - again.

Yes, I know that custom built CMS are fairly simple, I've made half a dozen already, but making one that looks good is a different story.

You maybe asking, "You'll be the only one seeing the CMS for phalacee.com, so what difference does it make if it doesn't look good?" Well, I've adopted a new mentality - if its worth doing, its worth doing right.

I'll have to use and look at the CMS day in and day out, so I want it to look great, stunning infact. Wouldn't be surprised if the CMS gets more attention than the whole of phalacee.com's frontend.

I have a few ideas in mind as to the design direction I want to go. The bulk of the ideas stem from the GUI of Ubuntu Studio. I really, really like the looks of the desktop graphics, they seem to have taken inspiration from Vista and Mac OS X, and although I am hesitant to install Vista on my machine at home, I do like it's UI.

I'll be posting some tutorials dealing with the steps I take in building the CMS - definitely some CSS tutorials detailing how I managed to 'skin' the default browser interface to look like the Ubuntu Studio buttons, tickboxes, and drop-downs. I'll probably release some php classes too, login handlers, etc.

Anyway, I have a few pages left to write for an End User Manual that goes with the CMS I built for a client, so I had better get back to it.

• CakePHP Rapid Development Framework
• QCodo Rapid Development Framework - excellent for form-heavy sites.
• CSS 101: Handling multiple rules for the same element
• CSS 101: Locate and style Web elements with selectors
• CSS 101: Decide what to style with selectors

The reason for this is that with me working full time as a web-developer, there will be few updates to the folio section of the site, because I won't have time to do the work that would result in updates.

That doesn't mean the folio will be removed, or that the layout of the site will be changing. The front page may change(I'm considering swapping the 'Latest News' in the sidebar with the 'Latest Additions' in the body) but I don't want the site to become all text and no images, so it may stay as it is.

The first change will be made to the News section of the site. I've already added a new 'Misc' section, and I will continue to expand that as I need. I also plan on adding a tagging system to the posts, to provide finer control over the categories each post is associated with.

I will also be adding a new 'feature' to the news articles: a weekly (this may be wishful thinking) feature where I post links to some articles around the web which I feel are worth while enough to bring to the attention of other designers and developers out in the industry.

The feature will be titled Links for Light Reading and will contain a short blurb about all the links, and a bullet-point list of no more than 12 links.

I've given up on CakePHP for now. Maybe when it matures a little I'll come back to it, but for now, the examples provided in the documentation don't even work, so how am I meant to figure out whats going on?

On the flipside, I managed to get QCodo working. Its pretty simple, if you read the readme.txt included in the download instead of reading the outdated documentation on their website.

I've also been looking into HAML and SASS - HAML and SASS work hand in hand at simplifying markup and CSS respectively. I really like the fact that SASS gives you the ability to define CONSTANTS so you can change all those references to a colour by editing one line instead of 10+

Another thing I stumbled on was Ook!. Ook! is a programming language designed for Oragutans.

A quote from the Ook! site:

Since the word "ook" can convey entire ideas, emotions, and abstract thoughts depending on the nuances of inflection, Ook! has no need of comments. The code itself serves perfectly well to describe in detail what it does and how it does it. Provided you are an orang-utan.

This makes me think of the Discworld computer game, with the librarian/monkey jokes.

What interested me most was the 'Hello World' example:

I would love to find a win32 compiler for the language. I really want to add Ook! to my utility belt of languages.

On Sunday I installed QCodo on my windows xampp server at home, and I almost got it working, but there is a fair amount of stuffing around involved in that, so I put that on the shelf for a while.

Today I installed CakePHP on my windows xampp server at work. I managed to get it up and running in next to no time, with minimum fuss. I also managed to get it working on the SiteGround development server, despite the tech support from SiteGround telling me it wouldn't run because it was still beta.

Anyway, I've been tinkering with CakePHP for a little over an hour already, and I really like it. It doesn't seem to have the cult following that Rails does, but its good at what it does. Now, if I could add QCodo's QForms into CakePHP I'd be extremely happy.

Maybe I can add QCodo as a third-party vendor to CakePHP?

I'll keep you posted.

I have named the library Serendipity: Quintessential Development Library. The name was chosen as a play on words because unlike other libraries out there - jQuery, prototype, YUI - Serendipity will leverage the power of 5 different technologies: PHP, MySQL, Javascript, CSS, and Markup*.

I don't think Serendipity will be comparable to any of the other major libraries available, because it will rely heavily on the integration of php, javascript, and markup - it won't work on an ASP, CFM, or JSP server, and it certainly won't work under Perl or plain markup.

I won't go into any further detail, because most of the details haven't been finalised yet, and Serendipity is still in the pre-alpha stages of development, but I look forward to releasing the library for others to use.

*Serendipity will support HTML, XHTML, and XML.