Xtremax - Web Design

Finding the Right Colours for Your Website

Tabby Cat — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 09:47:33 +0000

Finding the perfect complementary colours for your web design can be hard. Adobe Kuler will help you solve the problem and we love it.
You can access Adobe’s Kuler here http://kuler.adobe.com. It may be worth your while to register so that you can save your colour themes. If you need color inspiration, you can view Kuler themes created by others.If you are up for it, you can also share yours, and help contribute to the color community. The best thing is Kuler is a free service.

Kuler

Create your Colour Theme

Kuler in Illustrator

Launch of Dads For Life Website

Tabby Cat — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 09:45:18 +0000

On April 1, 2010, our team sat through a launch ceremony of a website that we have painstakingly taken few months to do – a community portal that aims to engage the fathers in Singapore to be “present” in their children’s lives. The website - www.dadsforlife.sg - is sponsored by Ministry of Community, Youths, and Sports and, designed and built ……by Xtremax!!!!

The website, launched by Vivian Balakrishnan, is designed with web 2.0 tools, such as Forums, Twitter, Youtube, Widgets, Facebook to create a thriving Dads’ community. It is a resource portal that provides fathers with tips and tools to stay connected with their children.

Before this web design project for Dads for Life, I didn’t realize the seriousness of the problem of Father-Absence. A society built on uninvolved fathers is often plagued with problems like “a higher rate of poverty, failure in school , teen pregnancy , substance abuse, violent crime, depression, and ultimately loss of hope.” (source : National Center for Fathering.) Wow, that is very serious.

So fathers, go to www.dadsforlife.sg and make your commitment today.

Web Development Technologies

Mr Otter — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 15:50:06 +0000

Was just rummaging my old tired brains on all the different programming languages and frameworks that we have worked with in Xtremax in the recent years.

Hmm. Just came out with an interesting Mind Map….

Social Media Explained

Tabby Cat — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 12:46:07 +0000

Just the other day, a web design client asked us whether we knew about their survey campaign that was advertised on TV recently. Our immediate response was “errr…..we don’t watch TV.”

Whatever we can get on TV, we get even more on the Internet. So why bother using that remote?

Times are changing. To reach us, the young working adults, who prefer to have a higher level of participation with our mediums, you need to be where we are - Social Media. You need to work this in when designing your websites if you want your websites to have stronger user engagement.

We are where we can interact with others on line - the Social Media and it takes on many forms: Blogs, Microblogs like Twitter and Plurks, Social Networks like Facebook and Friendster, Podcasts, Vodcasts Wikis, Social Aggregators, Virtual Worlds, Photo Sharing Websites like Flickr, Video sharing websites like youtub and vimeo, just to name a few.

Still clueless? I found an excellent video that explains Social Media in Plain English.

Enjoy.

Neat and Tidy Web Development

Mr Otter — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 17:22:45 +0000

I am not the tidy soft of person. In fact, I hate doing housework. But something about untidy codes really irks me. Recently, we adopted the use of crucible as a code review tool. It revealed a whole lot of badly formatted codes in our projects.

The codes look innocently neat and tidy in the Eclipse IDE, i.e.

However, the minute they are committed to the server, the formatting runs in fisheye.

So what’s the reason? The main culprit is the use of tabs. Tabs render inconsistently between the IDE and the web interface. As a matter of fact, this is a common problem, and most open source projects have a rule to forbid the use of tabs in their source codes.

However, such stringent coding policy will require a powerful code formatting tool which will ensure that our developers can easily adhere to the standards.

Ah.. that is solved by our PHPEclipse, with its nice tab to space conversion tool…

All we need to do is to go to Preferences >> PHP >> Code Style >> Formatter and set the tab policy to convert all tabs to a 4 space indent. Once that is done, all we need to do is to do a

Ctrl + Shift + F

To perform source code formating in eclipse… and hey presto! Nicely formatted codes in both Eclipse and Fisheye.

Amazing Krumo – Alternative to J!Dump

Mr Otter — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 00:34:13 +0000

After doing quite a bit of development in Joomla, I was getting used to the very friendly J!Dump to list out all the objects value in a dhtml tree format. Recently, I have been tasked to customise some e-marketing product codes. Hmmm… sounds like I needed something handy like J!Dump…

Thankfully, there was Krumo. Once Krumo has been installed properly, you can do a dhtml tree dumb of an object values with 2 simple lines:

require_once(’Krumo/class.krumo.php’);
krumo($dumpObject);

Some screenshots to illustrate the power of Krumo:

Tada… the entire dhtml tree of the object:

The installation is also mightily simple. Just download the entire Krumo project and dump it into your php include path.

FTP Client - FTP Voyager

Mr Otter — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 02:03:21 +0000

Needed to help a client retrieve certain files from the web server through FTP and the default Windows FTP just does not work…

Decided to download a ftp client, FTP Voyager for the job. For the 30 day trial version, it can be downloaded here.

Step 1: Click on the Connect Link

Step 2: Click on Create a NEW site profile and Finish

Step 3: Enter Profile Name and click Next

Step 4: Enter either IP Address of Domain Name to connect to and click Next

Step 5: Click Next Again. Do not check Anonymous Login

Step 6: Enter FTP User Id and Password and click Next

Step 7: Select the folder which you will want to transfer your file to and click Next

Step 8: Click Finish

Step 9: Just click and drag across the files between remote server and your computer.

Eclipse DB Connection to Microsoft SQL Server

Mr Otter — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 08:58:16 +0000

Well, with limited memory on my computer, I needed an easy way to access the table data and perform simple CRUD operations on it. I ended up trying DBViewer.

Update Site URL for DBViewer is at:

http://www.ne.jp/asahi/zigen/home/plugin/dbviewer/

After installing the plugin, you will also need to install the JDBC driver as well for DBViewer to work. Installation of the JDBC driver is at:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=99B21B65-E98F-4A61-B811-19912601FDC9&displaylang=en

Do not be mislead by the seemingly htm download. Inside the htm file, they will provide a link for u to continue on with the real download… :P

Upon successful Installation:

Data Editing Capabilities

.NET Development in Eclipse

Mr Otter — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 06:04:13 +0000

I just hating with for my Visual Studio to recover from its periodic hangs. I was thinking about it.. man. why not I just do the .NET development on my Eclipse IDE? Surely, all I need is a XML editor for the front end files, i.e. .ascx and a .NET editor for the CSharp codes?

Well, for the XML, I can easily use the Eclipse built in ant editor. For those that have installed the enterprise version of eclipse, I think they did include a pretty good HTML editor plugin as well.

For CSharp there is not so much choices. Guess we will need to go with Emonic. They do provide quite a decent CSharp editor.

Emonic - http://emonic.sourceforge.net/updatesite/internap/site.xml

Content Migration in Dot Net Nuke (DNN)

Mr Otter — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 04:45:40 +0000

If you have worked on a DNN project, one of the problems are that the images entered using the HtmlModule is hardcoded with the location of the context path. This essentially means that any changes in the context path of the web application will result in a tonne load of missing images.

Well, I did remember that MySQL had some simple string replace function to address the problem… and after some surfing on the net… wola… The solution to changing all the image path:

update dbo.dnn_HtmlText set DesktopHtml = REPLACE(Cast(DesktopHtml as NVARCHAR(4000)), ‘/aapaf/Portals/0/banners/side’ ,’/aapaf2/Portals/0/banners/side’);

Yes… I know this is not rocket science… just wanted to blog it down here to remind myself during the migration process… and hopefully.. who knows? It might just help some frustrated soul in the future…