Category: Web Development

Creating a Web-Based Management Tool

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About a year and a half ago, I was given an idea for a web-based management tool. I probably should have started building it back then when I was in contact with the person asking for it daily, but other things came up, and I just made a note of it after putting some thought into how to build it.

Come to now, and I have all the time to build the tool but not sure if there is still interest in the tool. I would expect the person asking about it, still needs something, and if they were correct in thinking, others would also be interested. If I were to get it built this fall and out asking people to use it in the spring and summer, it should have some return on time spent creating it.

Another dilemma is that I am working on several projects slowly right now, but time may be running out, and I will need to find real employment if none of these becomes full income before winter. I do not think this project would be something people who would use it are going to be asking to spend money on in the winter. But I hope it means I could have it built in the winter.

This project should not be too hard to get the basics started and working. I want to do it in ASP.net Core so it would be easy to make and API and later a Xamarin App. But I do not have the most experience working in that set of tools. I also expect that some of the features will take some work to put together as they are not just your standard data types.

These projects I have plans for, do not seem too bad, but it seems hard to get going, especially when I do not always feel the greatest. But I think if I can get it to the point that I have something people want to use, it will get me more motivated to put the time in even when there are so many other things I spend time on.

If you have not figured it out, these writing sessions are to help me think about my projects.  I don’t want to put too many details out of this project because every time in the past, I would talk to someone about an idea, a few months or years later, I would see the same thing out of no ware taking off or being advertised. One example was an e-ink meeting room display and an online booking system for offices, then a year later, I would get an ad every day for that idea someone else had made. That is just one idea.

I will contact the person looking for this tool and see what they think. Either way, it is something I could get working and provide as a service within a few months if I were to start working on it.

Create Custom Sites or Live with Tools That Do The Job Kind of Like You Want?

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Right now, I have a few sites that I want to build out. These sites could be made with custom code and all kinds of custom backends to make them work how I want them to. But that would take a lot of work, and in some cases, using something like WordPress may be enough to get it working. But that is about as far as it would go, just enough, not really what I want.

Some prebuilt tools have the advantage of having other people help build them, and this makes them do all kinds of things without me having to come up with a way to make it work. But they don’t do exactly what I want, and in most cases, add a lot of extra junk / HTML I don’t need. Just this page has so much additional trash code thrown in to support things nothing to do with blogs, but it makes it so you can make a store or page with a WordPress site.

I think I will have to suck it up and put in the work to make what I want. There will not be a plugin or way I can make a site builder do what I want. Two of my projects are like this, and I need to chose what one I think can become something that starts to make me some money first. I may have to get some parttime development work soon anyway, but both of these would be good to push out into something more.

One thing I will need to figure out for both is how I want to produce the content. One requires a lot of me creating the content, and the other requires me to do a lot of me researching and monitoring the content. I am not even sure if other people want my stuff, either. But this is some of my ideas, and I don’t have a good set of software I could sell yet, so that is also off the table. I also expect both sites would need ads and donation’s to pay for them, but I’m not too fond of ads and feel strange getting money from people.

Then I have some video projects, and I want to make a site to store them separately from YouTube. There seem to be some ways I could have my videos on a WordPress site, but then I would again be dependent on others rather than my own site. Let’s get some videos out before I put too much thought into it.

To finish it up, I will need to create a site for one of the projects to make it work how I want it to. The other can start as a page builder, but I should use it to create a system for it that I control soon. It may even be a good piece of content for that site going over building a custom website.

Starting An IT Help Site

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As part of my plans to create my own company providing IT services and programming, I want to start putting out content on IT topics, programming, or just other technology-related subjects. I wouldn’t mind doing some streaming question and answer type things, but I don’t know if that would always work out.

To start, I want to cover some of the basics of IT and see how that goes. I have written a few lists of topics to cover that would be easy to start with like HTML, C#, Wireless Networking, Network Cabling, Blogging, who knows what else comes to me.

I have two domains I can use, one was an old technology news site I tried to run but found out it was lame just rewriting press releases, and no one wanted another one of those sites. The other would be a tutorial site similar to this, but I now think the name is lame now, and it has no presence online yet.

I hope to have text-based information, real-life photos of examples, and some videos about the topics. That way, it covers the primary way any average person learns new things. I also plan on producing a video just talking about a topic each day (3-5 days a week), Eli The Computer Guy is an excellent example of what I am thinking of basing these videos on.

If I can handle all this, I also want to try making a video every other morning after taking one of my kids to school talking about the news or other things going on around me or in the world not related to technology in particular. I think it will be an excellent way to vent some of my thoughts without having to put too much effort into it, like writing one of these 300+ word posts, not that I won’t be trying to do more of this.

Will see what happens in the next few weeks, it’s hard to get clients for my IT services business with things shut down and people working from home, I would like to get more business either way, but I can only put myself out there and hope people are looking for me. I hope to keep my blog updated on the progress.

PS: I am writing this differently than usual, I started writing this in Grammarly’s editor. I’m hoping it will help me not only spell things better but produce better text. So far, it seems to have helped with some words that make me sound better and see if the premium is worth it now.

Broke The Blog

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So I thinking “I haven’t logged in to my blog in a few I should see if it needs updates” then I was getting errors with some cache plugin or the built in one, not really sure but I was also having problems connecting to DreamHost sites at work and then all I could pull up was a white page for everything. Of course WordPress has had many “White Page” errors some have to do with plugins, others with memory, or database problems. Ether way you get no error message even with error reporting on. Finally traced it down to just needing to disable the WordPress cache in the config and everything came back up, with a few problems with my Theme, just had to reinstall it and now its back.

I would love to dump WordPress, but it just kind of works. I did lose some of my interest in blogging, its not the “cool thing” for a lot of people. But I think I want to get back into it. I also have noticed that since most of the “how to sites” no longer link to my post on how to fix handbrake and they just took my steps almost word for word, traffic is way down to the site. So moving the important posts to something new wouldn’t be too bad they would get re-indexed and still show up when people look for them.

This could be a good opportunity for me to take some of my CMS tools I have build for my works site and move them into my site. No more broken WordPress, with its vulnerabilities and slow performance. But its a lot of work getting my system built up and not as just drop in some images and bang out a few paragraphs when I want to add something. The text input isn’t too bad, but I haven’t built a great solution for uploading images and files just things that get a simple job done.

Another thing about building my own solution is that I like using PHP and MySQL, and that is what my CMS starter code is in. But I would like to learn ASP.net Core and build a site with it, but my hosting is LAMP. Anyway I will just leave it like it is and hopefully get motivated sometime to make something new. At least start posting once a week would be good.

Happy New Year 2013

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Just wanted to post a Happy New Year message for 2013, and put out some goals for my websites. This year I have had amazing amounts of traffic to my Handbreake setup guide with almost 600 views in one day to the site the 27th of December 2012. I also started the Tek4.Me site that was starting to get good amounts of traffic but I stopped updating the site the past few months when I change some of my plans, but I am not going to abandon the site more to come on that.

I have been working on building a recipe site for learning and also just for fun, I also have in the works a event listing site that will be my next ground up web project that I hope will become a good place to find events and also post events.

As for WebLuke.Net and Tek4.Me, I have set a goal to blog post every day, my not be on both sites but I should have something. I have set goals like this before but things are changing, this domain is 12 years old, I am starting some new schooling this month and I want to include blogging in my new daily plan.

Hope the year is good for everyone, and we both can work hard to achieve our goals and plans for 2013.

Reflecting on the Past few months of Tek4.me

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tumblr_md39piSaRR1rk9vano1_r1_500A few months ago I started Tek4.me technology blog website, and started to build out content. The problem is during the past few weeks I seem to have neglected the site a bit and my traffic is showing that. When I started it I didn’t expect to get crazy amounts of people going there each day but things were looking good as far as no real promotion other than just wringing articles and some free Facebook ads that didn’t bring anyone to the site. It was fun to read though the list of announcements and find ones that I found interesting, then put together an article about the product or service. Problem was when I had other things take some of my time and there was a slow or lame bunch of news for a week I lost a lot of interest.

The site isn’t dead but it seems that way based on traffic numbers, and number of new posts. That brings me to one problem, most of my content was only relevant for a few weeks and then it’s just old news. I’m sure that is what the big sites have problems with also, that’s why they have so many of those filler posts that are tutorials or things that aren’t news but just fun to read things. I was trying to make this site all news and nothing else. So that’s one thing I will be working on. The other thing is I wasn’t writing about things I didn’t find cool, but what I need to do is still cover those things just don’t worry about getting full details like I did for products or services I thought were real cool or wanted.

So what’s going to happen, in January I will start going to University for Computer Science (don’t waste your money like I did with ITT-Tech schools don’t transfer your credits and employers don’t think its good enough) so my focus will be on doing well in my classes, but I hope I can pull myself back to daily posts on Tek4.me. I plan on working to add more content starting this week and get things going again. Also on WebLuke.net I hope I can use this as more of a place to put my experience of school and things. I have wanted also to do more tutorials like my popular Handbrake for Windows 64-bit article. Some other things of note are I have been reading up on how to use PHP again and coding in HTML, I kind of lost my love for things like that a number of years ago and just kind of lost the feeling of how you do things, but I will need to get that all back in my head because I at some point want to build out a recipe site I had once built but lost and also an Events listing website that I have prototype in Drupal but doesn’t work like I would like it to, so if I can get to it that is a long-term project I will work on.

I think this post is me telling myself I need to get things going again and I can do it. With school coming it may make things harder but I have the opportunity to go to school, build my websites, take care of my kids, and learn new things. If only I could monetize this all better things would be a little nicer!

Tek4.ME My New Technology Blog

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A few weeks ago I quit my normal crummy job that wasn’t helping me with my goal of working with computers, technology, or the internet. I had gotten my degree as an Information System Administrator but the job market for IT workers is very hard because there aren’t that many jobs where I live, but I had a few ideas on how I can still have an income.

First I have done some service calls for a company installing Internet, and those pay good for the work, I also have some friends that has been offering to get me doing the service calls they do but in my area. Because these calls aren’t consistent I plan to do some other stuff with my time when I’m not just taking care of my kids.

So my plan is to write on my Technology and Gadget blog Tek4.ME as much as I can. It will have topics such as news about upcoming Apple, Microsoft, Google, and other Companies new products and services. The blog will also have tips and tricks for best using your technology and online services. Some of the articles already up include my Hands on Review of the Nexus 7, information on why YouTube won’t be part of iOS 6, and what’s new in Windows Essentials 2012.

Finally I would also like to start building a few websites a month; this would be things like setting up and building a site using WordPress or Drupal for any type of business or organization. If interested check out more information at Grand Junction Computers web site.

Please follow us on RSS, Google+, Twitter, or Facebook for all the updates!

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Google’s New Look

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Over the past month or two Google has been changing how things look on their sites such as the search page, G+, news, docs, and recently Gmail, Reader, and calendar. I have the new look running on all my Google stuff except GMail. I don’t know why but with the extra spacing I was having problems reading my inbox, but as writing this I did switch to the new look and after seeing that you can change the “Display Density” I kind of like it too.

All the new looks are meant to make things nicer and more modern, along with make all the Google pages the same look across their sites. I have one problem with them having dynamics width and not a fixed with once they get too wide. But not vary many people are running there screen at 1080p and maximize there screens like I do, I think. Writing this in Word I only have it using half the screen because it would look bad so I need to go back to keeping my GMail in a smaller window. G+ dose have a fixed width though, humm.

Now that G+ is on my domain apps things are working better, since I can stay logged into one account now. But it seems that the new look dose make it much easier to use the sites. Seems that I’m just rambling on about this so will call it for now.

IE HTML5 & CSS3 with Selectivizr & HTML4SHIM

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While reading though my book about HTML5 and CSS3 they talk about a JavaScript library that helps Internet Explorer understand CSS3, and its new ways of styling websites. Selectivizer, previously IE-CSS3, will let you use good HTML5 code and some of the new ways of doing styling in CSS3 without adding lots of extra code that other browsers don’t need.

The problem with a lot of these JavaScript libraries is that they expect you to know how to get these things working without much explanation. So after a few pages of searching Google I did find Rey Bango’s blog and he gives a good explanation on how to use it and set it up.

Here is the code snippet that he gives about how to get it running on a page:

<script src="jquery-1.4.2.min.js"></script>
<!--[if lt IE 9]>
<script src="selectivizr.js"></script>
<noscript><link rel="stylesheet" href="css/ie-fallback.css" media="screen, projection"></noscript>
<![endif]-->
<link href="style.css" rel="stylesheet">

Also if you are trying to use HTML5 for building new websites or fixing up an old site you should also check out the html5shim that will fix IE so that it will understand some of the new elements added to HTML5.

To get it working on your site just add this code, no downloading needed because it’s all hosted up on Google Code:

<!--[if lt IE 9]>
<script src="//html5shim.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/html5.js"></script>
<![endif]-->

These are a few things that are needed to make a site work right in IE because IE is such garbage.