Tuesday, June 20, 2006

Blog Template

Okay, you're reading "Matt the Webguy", and probably wondering:

"If he's a webguy, then what's up with the canned template?!?"

I'm working on it, okay?!? Geesh....

Gettin' My Code Jones On

I've been in a bit of a rut lately. I've had the itch to write some serious code, but it just wasn't flowing right. Well, yesterday... I got my Code Jones rolling.

One of the things I've been working on at the day job (I'm the web developer at 13WHAM.com) is trying to make posting content to the website as easy as possible for our content editors and producers. One issue has been including images with the stories we post.

While the content management system our parent company provides is fairly decent, the image functions are strictly "upload only". I wanted to create a few apps to handle some simple image manipulation, without having to put graphics software on every machine in the newsroom.

(Yes, I know there are really cheap, or even free, graphics software out there, but I'm thinking about our IT Guy, Tom... more about "The Dalai Tommy" in a future post)

Anywho, I set out to create three distinct apps: a resizing tool for video screen caps, a Chyron-style slide creator to mimic what is used on-air, and a photo cropping tool. Of the three, the cropping tool was the most difficult... but nothing a recent post (Image Crop) to DHTMLGoodies.com, and some code tweaking couldn't fix.

One major tweak I made was to change the crop processing to use the GD library instead. I didn't want the script to have to rely on Imagemagick to work, and since GD is pretty much on every Apache installation out there, I thought it would be best.

It took a little wrestling, but it is working great now.

Now, to keep the Jones rolling...

Monday, June 19, 2006

Sunday, June 18, 2006

Father's Day

Father's Day. It's a good day.

I was awakened this morning with a slobbery kiss from our "so-to-be" 16 month old, "NtG"...of course it was around 5:30AM. NtG and Mommy then let me sleep a bit longer before it was time to start the Sunday Morning Ritual.

Yup... you guessed it.... Dad's Special Waffles and Bob the Builder (more on Bob in a later post).

Last year was my first Father's Day, but NtG was only a few months old, so rolling over and smiling was all he was pretty much doing. He's grown a lot in the past year... sometimes a little TOO fast. Now, he's digging my waffles, drooling like a faucet, climbing on the couch, toddling around the back yard, and still smiling.

I was going to call my Dad today, but he and Mom are "somewhere in Alaska" with a local seniors tour group. I'll catch him later this week when they get back. Hey Rocco! Happy Father's Day!

It's a good day.