Tenthline

I am proud to announce that we’ve just officially launched our brand new Tenthline.com and Tenthline.blog(), both designed and built by Yours Truly.

Let us know what you think by e-mail or in the blog comments.  =)

Web layout with CSS is usually painful.  Sure, it’s better than the alternative — trust me, I’ve written enough table-based layouts to know — but at the same time it is painful enough that many insist that web designers should just give up on CSS layout all together.

Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve blogged about the Ingres/Alfresco combination before, but recently Ingres announced the release of Icebreaker, a full ECM appliance that combines a solid Linux OS base with Ingres DBMS and Alfresco 3.0.1.  Today, I installed the appliance and started poking around the web administration interface.  I must say that I’m really impressed. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been so busy on my current project that I haven’t found the time to mention this until now but something cool was brewing in the Tenthline office just a month or so ago.  We’ve developed a Sun IDM resource adapter that can create and delete accounts on a remote Alfresco server.  It was a bit of an involved process because Alfresco’s API for user accounts doesn’t handle all of the auxiliary operations that the JSF client performs such as creating a space for the new user. Read the rest of this entry »

I had a little fun with the GitHub API last night: I created a small plug-in for WordPress called GitPress that provides a sidebar widget.  The widget can be configured to show a list of repositories for any user on GitHub.  It was pretty simple but it was a nice exercise because I learned a lot from it:

• How to create a WordPress plug-in and define a widget within it.
• How to create a widget control so that the widget’s attributes can be configured.
• How to store and retrieve widget attributes for rendering by using the WordPress options mechanism.
• Use PHP to call on a web API (using PHP’s curl library) and parse the resulting JSON (also using PHP’s library functions).

And all of this took me just a couple of hours after work.  I got into a programming flow and I had fun.  And now my mind is imagining many other cool things that I could do with it:

• Make it possible to have multiple instances of the widget with different settings.  (I just finished this today!)
• Display more information than just a link to the repository (e.g. number of forks, number of watchers) and allow the user to choose how to format that information.
• Create another widget that displays news feed items for a GitHub user.
• Create another widget that displays recent commits for a project.

Some of this doesn’t seem possible through the current GitHub API but there are plans to add more features.  Hopefully I can leverage the new features to build even cooler integrations with WordPress.