Keinu, web developer blog

I’ve just finished a project I have been working for some time.

It’s an API mash-up about new movie and music releases, the website presents one current page that is refreshed every week.

The page shows a list of movies with a short synopsis and the trailer, a link to ticket booking website. the music section is a list of album arts where the user has the ability to buy the album on Amazon, and if available on the ITMS.

I just wanted to use a domain name that I bought, so I decided to create a little app based on Zend Framework, so for once I can use the framework for a public mainstream project.

I’ve implemented a front end cache, that dumps the page output into cache files. Then I just use thos cached files to drill back on the previous weeks archives. I could have cached every single request to Amazon, iTunes or Allociné with ZF but it was faster to implemented with a simple file system.

It has been nice to write some PHP again, I really miss this language as I’m stuck with stupid Java at work.

The UI is not complete yet, but most of it is there, sorry non-french readers, you will have to use a translator, or learn French

The website :  www.desortie.fr

We are having some monthly front-end developer presentations at work.

We are only two front-end guys for more than a dozen of back-end developers. The goal of this is to share what us, the front-end developers know so the back-end developers can ease our work using the best practice when delivering HTML code.

Usually the role of the back-end guy will be to produce eventually some HTML so the front-end guy can use it and make it shiny to the designer requirements.

The technologies involved in our projects are Liferay (a portal management system) and some non-web friendly language: Java. The development process with those heavy and old technos makes everything longer, tedious and not front end developer friendly.
I still don’t understand this choice of techno. So don’t count on me to cheer those up.

This is why purity of HTML code is a big added value when dealing with those rigid technos: we spend more time coding and less tine deploying, configuring, resetting, redeploying, updating, tweaking, compiling, rebooting, switching enviros,

Anyway I just wanted to share the powerpoints I made so far, do not expect very high level of frontend knowledge here, its mostly for the back-end guys.

1 – HTML 101 (34 KB):
This presentation was a basic HTML lesson so developers and content editors can avoid making mistakes and if needed write good HTML code.

Presented:  Semantic HTML Do and Don’t

2 – Advanced CSS Techniques (256 KB):
This presentation aims to leverage the CSS knowledge of developers so they can avoid using too much markup and they can use the potential of CSS.

Presented: CSS Sprites, The plus “+”  CSS selector, The overflow trick for floating boxes issue.