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 :)

November 10th, 2009

I've Been Busy Alright?

Whoa. Long time no post eh? Well, I'll try to make up for my lack of entries with a big one.

As you may know, I have been working with Artemis Branding (AKA Artemis PR and Design) for the last six months or so. I must say that it has been an absolute pleasure working with the creative team at Artemis. From design to copy, they really know their stuff - which of course makes my job as a developer a lot easier.

I thought that I might feature a few of the sites that we have launched over the last few months. Just click on one of the images below - I think that you'll like what you see.

• Missing Link School - We had a lot of fun creating this site. Clean, accessible and informative - I think this site really shows off everything that owner Craig Toker has to offer. A couple of interesting features are the gallery and the use of Lightboxes for displaying images and Google's Calendar API. Check back for Phase 2 - the online store.
• Donna Eichel - If you've traveled through the Victoria International Airport recently you will recognize this local Canadian artists work. We put a lot of effort into making sure that Donna's paintings translated well onto the web. As it was important that we get the colours 'just right', we ended up using lossless 24-bit PNG's as opposed to standard JPEG images. Although the file size of a 24-bit PNG tends to be a bit larger, the image quality tends to be a bit better - especially when dealing with sharp transitions.
• Carreiro the Studio - Admittedly, this site proved to be a bit of a challenge but we think the results are stunning. Award winning Victoria stylist John Carreiro wanted something that would really bring his work to the fore. The challenge lay in having the large background and gallery images load as quickly as possible. Through the use of sprites, preloading and optimization, we were able make the page transitions almost seamless. The gallery was custom built using Flash/AS3 and the 'news roll' in Javascript using my favorite library, jQuery.
• SME Victoria - From an SEO perspective, it is important to make sure that search engines can index a site properly. Like all of our sites, Sales and Marketing Executives of Victoria features my favourite image replacement technique - for those instances that an image might be more suitable (or aesthetically pleasing) than your standard browser font. This site also features an RSS feed to the news items and tips as well as an easy to use contact form.

All of these sites are XHTML strict compliant and cross browser compatible. And yes, even IE6 is supported as they still hold quite a large portion of the browser share as you can see for yourself. Additionally, all four sites utilize our custom built content management system - allowing the client to update content through an easy to use administration panel and a built-in text editor.

I'll try to post some of my experiments in the coming while as I'm always playing and learning but for now, I guess it's back to work.

Cheers :)

July 21st, 2009

Special Announcement

I am excited to announce that I have recently signed an exclusive contract with Artemis PR and Design - one of Western Canada's premier full-service agencies.

Kerry Slavens (CEO & Director of Creative Services) and Maggie Kerr-Southin (President & Director of Public Relations) have invited me to join the creative team at Artemis as Lead Developer for all web related services and technologies. I am looking forward to helping maintain the standards of excellence and integrity that have established Artemis PR and Design as one of the preeminent agencies in Western Canada.