Chuck's Musings

My last entry is dated January 12, 2010… hah! I’ve been too busy with work to write about anything in a while.

Many of my more recent entries were about my computer/electronics cravings. I mentioned something about going socket AM3 but I instead ended up with a LGA1156 Core i5 setup. I also changed a lot of my computer’s components amongst other things, got a new car, bought a Nintendo Wii console. Finally, I’m planning to get myself an SLR next month (a Nikon D90).

Now that I’m on the topic of “new stuff” and “work”, I forgot to mention here that I’m now working for cr8v Web Solutions still as a PHP Web Developer. I still have the same home-based work arrangement as I did with Zallas; we also have the same work shift, migration to the new company was pretty painless as far as I am concerned.

I’m pretty much trying to enjoy the fruits of my labor while I still can, because I won’t be able to do these stuff once I’ve decided to settle down…

I hope my D90 purchase would be the last of this recent string of purchases, haha, I really need to start saving for real.

Now that I mention it, I really should set up a photo gallery section soon to make use of all this space.

Hey, it’s been a while since I laid my hands on my blog. I’ve been too busy with work. I guess that’s a good thing. Yes I’m still alive, haha!

I was planning on adding new stuff here but I never got around it due to deadlines at work, but I’ll eventually get to it.

I’ve been spending much of my time coding server-side, so I figured I’ll drop my Mootools training for now and focus on cURL. When I do start messing with that, I’ll make sure to post my progress here.

I have recently opened yet another section for my website, named “Canvas“. This is basically my testing area for my Mootools experiments.

If you’ve seen what I have so far, you might’ve guessed what I am aiming for. That’s right, I’m simulating a window-based workspace. For now the content is static but I’ll eventually fill it up with dynamic content once I am comfortable with AJAX.

That makes  3 major sub-areas of my website,

1. My blog – you’re currently reading this
2. TheDirtLab – a repository of my recent scripts and experiments
3. Canvas – my window-system experiment

I might even probably open up a section for multimedia, but I don’t see it anytime soon, lol.

It has been a while since my last entry, being busy with work and all, so I’ve decided to spend some time this weekend working on the basic framework for TheDirtLab.

I’ve already written some content for it in my past entries (scripts, that is), so at least it won’t be empty when it goes up. Hopefully I’d be able to publish them by the end of the day or early Monday.

I liked how my CSS-based navigation bar turned out, so I thought of integrating it into my website’s design. As of this writing, I only included a basic “sitemap” menu and a filler menu for recent blog posts.

I’ll probably think of other things to add there as time goes by.

On closer inspection, adding that menu has a nice side effect towards search engine optimization, because a clean, straightforward list of URLs can be found at the very top of the code, before the other presentational bits. Which means search engines can see my site map a lot easier.

After trying many many times since sunday, I was finally able to make my personal website appear at the very top of the Google search when you try to search for “Chuck Cerrillo”.

Curse my very basic SEO knowledge, lol.

At least I tried and it eventually worked.

You might not have noticed, but I’ve retrofitted my website to follow the  MVC pattern. What this means is that from now on I’ll be able to do my PHP/MySQL stuff on it, while keeping the designing part independent. This way I can keep writing scripts and whatnot, and not affect the layout.

As with any other MVC style websites I make, I start off with the global headers and footers. For that, I made a modified version of the original front page’s design to allow cramming of more content on-screen. I have made a test page using that view. So whenever I create new controller files, my constant parts of the layout will be kept, while the content for the pages change.

If you’re an coder and a designer, you might’ve heard of MVC architectural pattern (Model-Controller-View). It’s basically the separation of the program logic from the input and the presentation, allowing independent development, testing and maintenance of each part. In other words, if I only want to update the look, I don’t need to touch the scripts that involve the input and processing of data.

I’ve decided to ditch the “The Daily Random” concept since I already used that one before and it feels so old, so I’m going with my “TheDirtLab” idea as the main theme of my website, since I’m all about doing various coding junk! *lol*

Give me time and I’ll spruce up the front page with more content, and not just static content.

My next plan is to place everything into a PHP framework so I can work a lot easier within it.

If you’re interested on the technical aspect of the design,  what I did was work with multiple “div” layers and set a picture as a background image on them. This allows me to overlay pictures on top of each other while allowing the background to be seamless and still be stretchable. This should work on any screen resolution.

I used JPEGs for the looped background images (the fence and the grass), while Dirt’s profile and the Title text are PNG images. The use of PNGs allow me to create an illusion of a coherent merging of all the pictures so I won’t have to make much modifications to the source images if I want to add more elements to the background… say for example I wanted to add a “dog house” into the background. What I’d do is to simply draw the dog house in photoshop, make the background transparent, save it as PNG and place it in its own DIV layer on the HTML code. It’s that simple!

Greetings readers (and lurkers), I am Chuck Cerrillo and I see that you’ve found my weblog. Please bear with me as I try to set everything up for the next few days, or *shudder*, weeks.

I have barebone plans for this website. You’ve already seen the blog (which you can view from the blog subdomain). I’m planning to open another section called “The Dirt Lab“, which is a wordplay on a testing area where I place all my junk, i.e. a dirty laboratory, and a black labrador I have named Dirt.

I hope you’d enjoy the content to come, because obviously there’s nothing much to see right now, haha!