Some seven years ago, I began life as a web programmer by learning PHP to build my first WordPress blog. Over the past twenty four hours I’ve embarked on my first project using a “new-to-me” programming language called Ruby on Rails. While I’ve been working my way through Michael Hartl’s Ruby on Rails Tutorial Book an upcoming presentation to a potential partner led me to just jump in and start buidling a prototype. Here’s a couple of things I’ve learned:

• Rails is very different from PHP, yet somehow more elegant
• Scaffolds are a great way to cheat as a programmer, but messy to clean up if you do something wrong
• Don’t use a plural name for a model (i.e. “news”) because it will cause you a world of pain
• Google as always is your friend but be sure to add the phrase “Rails 3″ to your searches
• That said, there are answers to your questions out there, just be patient and try to find answers on stackoverflow. They truly are the best out there.

Anyways, I’ve been at this too long. Time to go home and get some sleep. More soon!

Discussing the new Nokia Lumia 900 running the Windows Phone operating system in the New York Times:

“It’s not just about software,” said Albert Shum, general manager of the design studio for Windows Phone. “It’s about the whole end-to-end experience.”

Funny how good ideas take a while to be accepted.

Today, I relaunched my blog design. As regular readers of this blog will note, I probably spend more time writing about reprogramming my blog than actually writing it. I’m hoping to change that in 2012 but allow me for a minute to discuss the story behind the latest incarnation of RasheqRahman.com.

The impetus began this past summer when Twitter announced its new CSS framework called Twitter bootstrap. As I read more about the theme and downloaded the v1.0 source code, the simple, clean design tugged at me as if begging me to use it in a project. I had looked for years for a simple theme that was mainly white for the text part but had a fixed top navigation bar that could pull together my different interests (photography, writing, web development) but in a compartmentalized way so that the output of each activity could be cleanly displayed in a format that highlighted its unique characteristics. Bootstrap provides such a lattice upon which build such websites. As always, WordPress is the brains behind this project because, like the dependable friend that it is, I can connect it to my front end HTML and CSS almost immediately and know that the key files will be in the right place and easily customizable.

I vowed for this project to use as few WordPress plugins as possible, relying more on code snippets and design patterns to customize my website so I truly understood what was “under the hood.” As I hope to share in coming posts in the code category, I did this in order to improve my PHP skills and to gain a better understanding of WordPress theming. Having now completed this site and several others this year I am excited to declare that I intend to “hand roll” my own themes from here on out, i.e. using only HTML templates and adding in the WordPress code myself. If you are at the point of having configured a few existing off the shelf WordPress sites yourself and are looking to really grow as a WordPress developer, I highly recommend the “roll your own” approach.

Overall the process took some four months, with a two month long break in the middle and several pauses in the middle while I thought about the design and how I wanted everything to fit together. I decided to launch it today to kick start the New Year knowing full well that both content and design need some continued tweaking.

Look for the aforementioned coding posts in the coming weeks and please feel free to comment below. I look forward to your thoughts and questions.

Today, I sold my old Powerbook G4 to someone else, bringing to the end my first Mac laptop in the modern (post Jobs’ return to Apple) era. This Mac was where I learned to program PHP and run MYSQL queries, where I first blogged and built my first production level website – www.nybap.org. It lasted for four and half years, much longer than I expected!

Fortunately, last week I purchased a new MacBook Pro 15 inch 2.4GHZ beast which will carry me forward!

Google:

If you’re listening, please add the ability to track cash in the Google Finance portfolio tracking tool. I track my portfolio in this excellent tool but I can’t enter data related to my holdings in cash instruments. I should be able to enter the cash amount as “shares” with a value of $1.00.

I’m joining the chorus of others who’ve been asking for this feature.

I recently upgraded to Mac OS X Tiger and have been enjoying the functionality of Dashboard. I like to think of Dashboard as part information swiss army knife and part virtual library. I have the EggTimer widget which I set when baking my dinner because my oven has no self-timer. I also have various dictionary and wikipedia widgets to allow me to do quicklookups without firing up my browser. It was therefore a pleasant surprise to find this morning that a new WordPress widget had been released which would allow me to post directly from the dashboard. Though its still pretty limited in its functionality I like the concept especially for quick posts. Maybe this will be the much needed insipiration to get me blogging again.

Word from CNET that Apple will “officially” announce on Monday that it is dumping IBM’s chips for Intel’s processors in future machines.

This got me thinking. What will happen to the epithet Wintel that Mac users used to hurl at Windows users? Is Mactel around the corner? If both operating systems share the same processor family what will Mac and Windows geeks have to argue about into the wee hours of the morning?

I admit that I have a more than passing interest in google results for my name. It was interesting therefore to open up the New York Times this morning to see an article discussing how to expunge or promote yourself on Google. It turns out its pretty near impossible to remove all references to yourself from the web. The best way to do so is to start writing your own blog and get yourself associated somehow with heavily visited websites and blogs.

A few days back as I was skimming through my plethora of rss feeds on Bloglines I came across a post from Tod Maffin looking for a programmer to write a simple script which would parse an OPML file of podcasts into HTML which could be included in a web page. The task was straightforward enough and given the ubiquity of OPML in RSS readers, I knew someone else would have at least written a basic parser in PHP that I could start with. I wrote back to Tod telling him that I was the man for the job and set about working on the script. I offered to do the script pro-bono as a way to help spread the word about public-radio podcasts which keep me entertained and amused throughout the day.

A quick google search brought me to Joe Grossberg’s PHP script for including his OPML Bloglines subscription list as an HTML un-ordered list on his blog. His code was very straightforward and well writen so I decided to use it as a base.

My first task was to strip out all the code that was particular to Bloglines OPML format and customize the script to the format of Tod’s OPML file (you can find an example here). This proved to be more difficult than I originally anticipated and I had to consult the PHP manual to understand how the PHP function, xml_parse_into_struct function worked in order to make sure I was pulling out the parsed podcast feed title and URL. However, after a few hours of trial and error, I was able to parse the OPML file correctly into an ordered list. I even added a small bit of code to ignore the first entry in his OPML file which is a link to add new podcasts. (Tod had hardcoded that link into his website and he only provided the link in the OPML file so that it could be used in the Ipodder directory to have podcast listeners contact him about new podcasts).

With the parsing complete, I turned to the task of displaying the podcast information in an HTML table. I took my cue from Tod’s orginial page which he had been manually updating as new podcasts were added. In that layout, podcasts were organized by categories and alternating categories had the same color so that it was easy to distinguish between categories. I wanted my script to generate the table entirely using PHP so I had to reaquaint myself with the process of writing code by hand because my script would have to add the table tags dynamically depending on how many podcasts were in the OPML file. After a few hours of tweaking the code and a night’s worth of sleep I finally had it generate a basic table which I could include in another PHP file.

In order to make the table a little easier to read, I used the trick of alternating colors for table rows that’s become popular around the Net and in applications like Apple’s iTunes. The easiest way I found to do this was to keep track of the number of podcasts in each category. Every time my script would go to write out the table cell definition for a podcast it would check to see if the podcast number was divisible by two meaning that it was even. Even numbered podcasts would be colored using one color and odd numbered podcasts would use a different color. To make things even more interesting, I kept track of the category number as well and wrote code to create two sets of even/odd color pairs – one for even numbered categories and other for odd-numbered categories. You can admire the results at http://todmaffin.com/feeds/ . http://publicradiofeeds.com.

With Tod’s permission I’m releasing the source code for my file under GPL so that others might benefit and improve on it. The file is called ipodder.opml.class.php. To use it, you’ll need to add the following code snippet as a table row in another .php file:

In addition you’ll want to set the color values for even/odd podcasts and categories using the following four variables:

Anyways here is the link to the ipodder.opml.class.php file.

I hope you find it useful in and of itself or as a point of departure for building your own OPML parser. Please email me with any feedback you might have at projects@rasheqrahman.com.

I wrote a few weeks ago about learning php. Well today I got stumped by a php problem so I took the brave step of contacting the author of my php book, Jason Gilmore, to see if he could shed some light on my problem. I was surprised to see an answer from him by the time I had finished dinner and he even dropped a nice comment on my blog.

For a beginner like me, it’s nice to know that great help is out there.