Posted by, Chris Kankiewicz on November 8th, 2008
So, Gizmodo had a list of 50 skills every geek should know. Seeing as I choose to don the title of “Geek” I feel obligated to see how many of these skills I posses.
Skills marked in Bold are skill I have and have used, or have all the essential knowledge to perform without reference. My notes are [encased in square brackets].
View the original article @ http://gizmodo.com/5078829/the-50-skills-every-geek-should-have
Check out the list after the break.
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Posted by, Chris Kankiewicz on November 6th, 2008
Well, it’s finally here, after approximately a month and a half, many late nights and many liters of caffeine, version 1.0.0 of CK-Gallery has been released! Version 1.0.0 introduces a few new features, the most noticeable to the end user being dynamic pagination. Just open the script, edit a single value specifying the number of images you’d like to display per page, and the script will dynamically generate your pages and the menu to navigate between them.
Behind the scenes much work has also been done. Not only have I improved the speed and reliability of the gallery, but I’ve also managed to improve compatibility with older versions of PHP as well. Also, GZip compression was enabled on the default index.php to help reduce load time and bandwidth when possible. And don’t even get me started on the number of bug fixes I’ve resolved!
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Posted by, Chris Kankiewicz on November 4th, 2008
I have been hard at work late into many nights to get this up and going. With the update to version 1.0.0, CK-Gallery now has dynamic pagination. This will let users with larger galleries split the gallery up into several smaller pages and allow visitors to easily navigate to those pages via a small navigation bar below the gallery. This beta must have seen 20+ operational sub-versions before reaching the point you see here.
While dynamic pagination is the biggest update, and most relevent to the end user, there are many other updates as well. Here is the changelog for version 1.0.0:
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Posted by, Chris Kankiewicz on October 31st, 2008
I’ve just pushed a slight front end, major back end update to PHLAKNET.com. This update is intended to improve the performance of the site slightly, and greatly improve the SEO of it as well. Along with this update I will be modifying the theme to use as a template and posting it on the Web Design page for download in the next couple of days, so stay tuned.
Also, I’ve done some back end work to ChrisKankiewicz.com to optimize performace slightly and adds very minor improvements to the SEO.
Posted by, Chris Kankiewicz on October 25th, 2008
A lot has changed in CK-Gallery since I last posted about it. I have since stared hosting it on SourceForge, and made many a bug fixes. Also, a decent amount of optimizing of code for both readability and performance has occurred.
I’ve also got plans for the future of this script, namely pagination for multitudes of images, but more on that later.
Head over to the CK-Gallery page and check it out.
CK-Gallery Current Changelog
[ Changes to .83 ]
- Modified thumbnail creation algorithm to check if the file is an image
before checking if the file exists in the thumbnail dir
- Miscellaneous spelling corrections
- Miscellaneous formatting corrections
[ Changes to .82 ]
- Merged file extension conversion, thumbnail generation and markup output
gerneration into one while() loop, reducing code and overhead slightly
- Moved thumbnail cleanup to end of script
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Posted by, Chris Kankiewicz on October 20th, 2008
UPDATE: This script has been updated, see: http://www.web-geek.net/posts/2009/02/14/first-friday-script-updated-and-simplified/
While developing phx2600.org, I ran into a slight dilemma. The PHX2600 meetings occur once a month on the first Friday of every month, and we wanted to display that on the site. However, it was becoming a tedious chore to change the date once a month manually. So, being the automation addict I am, I thought, why not write a script. So one night I hammered out the following script that will calculate the first Friday of next month:
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Posted by, Chris Kankiewicz on October 13th, 2008
Part 2 of my Free Alternative Lightweight Software for Windows will cover basic security and performance enhancing/maintenance tools.
I have broken this article into four parts to make it easier on both you, the reader, and me. As I publish the other sections of this article, I will add a link to them.
Replaces: Norton Antivirus, McAffee Antivirus
Alternatives: AVG, Avira
Pros: Unobtrusive, Lightweight, Fast
Avast! antivirus is powerful anti virus software, but, unlike its mainstream competitors, Norton and McAffee, you’ll barely be able to tell that it’s there. Avast! is lightweight and unobtrusive, it wont bog down your system and barely bugs you unless it finds a virus or other malicious code. The home edition of Avast! is free for 13 months if you register it, and when it expires, all you have to do is register again to get another 13 months of updates.
Download Avast! Antivirus: http://www.avast.com/eng/download-avast-home.html
Mirror: http://www.filehippo.com/download_avast_antivirus/
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Posted by, Chris Kankiewicz on October 9th, 2008
For as long as I can remember I’ve been looking for a simple photo gallery that let you drag and drop images into a folder on your web server and let it do the rest of the work. After a long time searching with no success I decided why not make one my self. So I did! Ladies and gentleman, I give to you CK-Gallery, a simple, yet powerful PHP photo gallery that will basically manage itself for you.
Features
- Supports .jpg, .gif & .png image types
- Automatically creates thumbnails on the fly
- Automatically generates XHTML compliant markup
- When you delete an image, it will delete the corresponding thumbnail
- Creates a log file for reference and debugging
View the CK-Gallery in action: http://www.chriskankiewicz.com/photography.php
Download it at http://www.web-geek.net/ck-gallery/
