francisdaigle.com

May 11th, 2010

Ch-ch-ch-changes...

Spring is finally here and that means it's time for a little spring cleaning. I recently moved (same city, different neighbourhood) and took the opportunity to get rid of a lot of those possessions that I rarely (or infrequently) use. Well, I am happy to report that the mission was a success. It's funny how so much of what we think we need are things we'd really be better off without.

In other news:

• I was in Vancouver with Gray Line of Victoria over the course of the 2010 Winter Olympics. As always, I had a lot of fun hanging out with the Gray Line crew – especially in the off hours. However, as a result of my being away from "the lab", I was unable to get as much client work finished as I would have liked. My apologies to those of you inconvenienced by my absence.
• Phase 2 of Missing Link School's new website has been completed and instructor/operator Craig Toker and I are very pleased with the results. After looking at some of the more standard e-commerce options available, I decided to go with a custom built solution. For the storefront, shopping cart and administration panel I used PHP5, MySQLi and Javascript/Jquery with PayPal serving as the checkout. Take a tour of Missing Link School's Tool Store and let us know what you think!
• My friend Paul Mitchell (of Bluebrain Multimedia) recently introduced me to Michael Linton, the creator of the LETS. Michael and I have decided to join forces to see if we can come up with a set of freely available, open source tools to help bring LETS to the greater online community. This should be a fun and exciting project and I am looking forward to our collaboration.
• There seems to be some confusion as to my availability. As I am no longer under contract, I am available for freelance work. If you have any projects that you think I might be interested in or would like to take a look at some of my more recent work, please feel free to give me a call or drop me a line or two. I'm always up for a new challenge.
• After much deliberation, I have decided to adopt Zend as my primary PHP framework. In the past, I have shied away from the use of some of the more popular frameworks as I found the trade-offs too much to bear. I won't go into all the reasons as to why I think Zend is so grand but so far, I am very pleased with what Zend has to offer.

Cheers :)