Illustrator CS4 Design Example of Polaroids on a Page

The joy of my girlfriend being a teacher is that schools try to do things and have no resources to do them.  Is it bad management?  Oh yeah.  But what are we going to do? Let kids suffer because people are lazy and inefficient?  I digress.  My point was that I often get dragged into doing little projects for free for my girlfriend because of lack of resources (see German Events for examples of a “small” project I got dragged into – which included that website).  I don’t usually mind, since it keeps her happy.  This most recent one was a flyer to encourage freshman to pursue German language at George Mason University.  It had a cool effect that I had sorta seen before with polaroid pictures represented as marketing material.

If you want to check out the flyer, and how it can turn into something cool, here’s the PDF: GermanFlyer-web.  This will give you a way to do it yourself, should you like this design and want the “polaroid effect” on a flyer of your own.

jQuery and ImpressJs

So my buddy did a JQuery rehash for people in our company.  In my opinion, it doesn’t need to be sold.  People like JQuery cause it is easy and the learning curve to do some things is easy.  It follows the old Perl mantra: “Try to make simple things easy, and complex things possible”.  Few folks can argue with that.

More interesting, in my opinion, than the subject material, was his choice of presentation tools.  He chose to use the Impress JS library. It functions like prezi, but with WAY more configuration options (pretty much anything you can think of doing to the DOM).

He posted his presentation on his website here and put the code up on GitHub here.

Maven WAR Filtering

So it looks like you can adjust your war plugin to use filtering, as such:

       org.apache.maven.plugins
       maven-war-plugin
       ${maven.war.version}
       
             ${deploy.directory}
             true
       

This will automatically scan your deployment discriptors, including web.xml.

So we put the following in a web.xml:

<web-app>
       <context-param>
             <param-name>ApiVersion</param-name>
             <param-value>${project.version}</param-value>
             <description>My API version</description>
       </context-param>
</web-app>

At which point you can use this in your JSP:

<% String apiVersion = getServletContext().getInitParameter("ApiVersion"); %>

This will then resolve in any jsp page you have, and you can just use the “apiVersion” variable in any way you want.

A Couple of Years Back, Playing Harmonica

WordPress Child Themes

I recently got a subscription to https://www.elegantthemes.com/.  Sometimes it’s easier to buy.  It was on the customer’s dime anyways.  I originally did this for a subdomain site for GMU for their german department (http://germanevents.gmu.edu/).  It came out pretty well.  Hopefully they do a decent job managing the content.

In general, the guys at elegant themes did a great job in designing their themes.  Since I had access to all of their themes, I grabbed a bunch of them.  I realized the most that they did a decent job when I used one of the templates on my own site (<a href=”http://jlgrock.xtreemhost.com/“>this one!</a>).  I liked it, but of course I had to customize the crap out of it.

Here was the original site: http://www.elegantthemes.com/gallery/lightbright/.

Mostly, the things that I needed to tweak were sizes, which is all contained in the CSS.  My assumption is that if you are a decent developer, and thus use my site, you are not going to be running on a 640×480 screen.  Hardly what I would consider to be unreasonable.

Since they also do a pretty good job on this site at pushing updates to customers, I didn’t want to screw that up by messing with their templates.  Low and behold, there’s a little known ability to create a “Child Theme” in WordPress.  I love it!

I looked over a bit of Theme development documentation by reading the article at http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development. Followed by Child Theme development is described at http://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes. You can also find a simple
example that just modifies the css by following the instructions at http://op111.net/53/.

Anyways, there was one minor hickup (the Elegant Themes folks are using some funky “truncate” that also strips out formatting, which I didn’t want), but otherwise, this went really smoothly. This has adjusted the sizes and added additional features to support Facebook and Google+. I posted the code for anyone who wants to learn Child theme development or is extending anything from the Elegant Themes templates at my LightBrightChild github project.