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.

I had a good surprise this afternoon figuring out that 2 ‘new’ albums of Soziedad Alkoholika have been added on Spotify.

Intoxikazion Etilika their first album (1990) and Ratas (1995), my 2 favorite albums.

Intoxikazion Etilika is a very dark punky hadcore album, the guitar riffs are just complex and powerful enough. The sound is not the top of the pop, yeah it was 1990, color tvs were almost everywhere, but something was missing, the drum/guitar sync is not always fine but all this crap bring something authentic, warm and un forgetable.

Ratas is for me one of the best albums, more modern than the one above, i can tell that they started to listen to some other californian and radio punk at this time. All the somgs are happy, major tuned, fast paced full of energy. Some funny samples in between song have been added.

So many souvenirs are rushing into my mind when I’m listening to those Basques from Gasteiz.

They have been quite lazy lately, in a way they always been lazy.

Can’t count how many concert the cancelled in the last minute for some obscure reasons. Of course I’m not talking of the censorship they have been through preventing them to play in heaps of places in Spain.

Indeed, the Spanish government alleged the band to be too close from ETA. For them every Basque and friends of Basques are terrorists. Ah, I forgot to say that Spain still use torture in their prisons, especially with Basques.

Anyway, the last 2 albums were too easy for me, not many work put in song strutures and riffs. Couldn’t find this pseudo-easy songs that used to be so recognisable.

They very last album is not even a new album, they just took all songs, and replayed again slightly re-arranged with modern recording techniques, what a shame!

Even though they mostly sing in Spanish some of the songs are in Euskara (Basque language).

They usually  spell the names of their song in the Basque way avoiding the non-Basque letters such as q, c, w, v.

As an Euskaldun (Someone who knows Basque language), I always welcomed bands form Basque Country singing French, Spanish or even English.
Unfortunately in Iparralde (northern Basque Country) when you are an Euskaldun and you are cocky enough to sing French or English you might get yourself a one-way ticket out of the Basque speaking community.

I think this is very sad to be that close minded. But, for some reason I will explain someday here, I can understand since Euskara is still in danger of vanishing.