Patrick Miller

Software Engineer, tech enthusiast, and aspiring human being.

Switch to Hugo

Over the years, there have been numerous apps and libs for managing one’s own website. Collectively these can be referred to as content management systems (CMS) and the majority started out as a combination of some programming language paired with a storage backend (database).

Extending colorbox.js

Colorbox is a very flexible lightbox plugin for jQuery which I have used for 2 to 3 years now and found virtually no limitations to what I’ve wanted to do with it. I’ve used it for many things like simple image previews, custom image cropping, image file uploads, as well as custom product checkout processes.

Enhance Angular.js Directive - ngRepeat

Recently I started a social Phone Gap project for a client and decided it would be wise to use a JavaScript framework. It was first suggested that I look into Backbone.js. I investigated it and did a little research and digging. I looked at Backbone.js, jQuery Mobile, Ember.js, various others, and Angular.js . The long and the short is I read a slew of reviews, some documentation, a bunch or tutorials, and in the end I decided to go with Angular.js for my framework of choice.

Django Class Based Views + Mixins

For the pass two years I’ve been developing in Python with the Django framework and I have thoroughly enjoyed. As much as possible I have attempted to build tools that follow the DRY, Don’t Repeat Yourself, principle. With Django 1.3+ they released Classed Based Views Classed Based Views (CBV), which, in my opinion lend themselves more to generic applications than do the Function Based Views Function Based Views (FBV).

PHP Decorator Class

Last year I was given the challenge of adding multiple tiered discounts, simply put as bulk discounts on a large scale custom shopping cart system. The goal was to provide shop owners with the ability to give their customers discounts for buying any product in bulk and that could be configured on a per-product basis.

This shopping cart system hosted multiple stores,upwards of around 30,000 users and grows each month by several hundred. Also each product is setup in a group, when enabled these discounts could be one of two types: Fixed, Compound.

Redirect www to non-www

I personally prefer the non-www domain to the www.* sub domain which evolved from the traditional web beginnings.

Sliding AJAX Photo Browser

Above is the original photo browser for the print details page on any Instaproofs photographer website. It highlighted the previous, current, and next photo for an event category and the previous and next images were also links to the actual print details page and if clicked would result in a new page request. Very clean, simple, and effective. You could browse the prints quicker with a search or category page, which also resulted in a new page request.

Super Dad

My daughter, Olivia, has of late been growing like some plant that has been sprayed with Miracle Grow.

Useful log files

We have a simple API where I work that isn’t anything impressive, it is just a couple of scripts that accept POST and GET requests. However the previous developer who worked on it hadn’t considered the total ramifications and logged all requests using an email with print statements. Additionally, for each request there could be up to 3 emails generated, one for the initial request, one for errors, and one that included the payment gateway request and response. Not mention it definitely breaks PCI Compliance by emailing people’s credit card information, but we were also experiencing load issues on the web server for all the emails that were being generated through PHP Send Mail and the end result is about 10,000 to 100,000 emails waiting in my email account.

Hello World!

Hello fellow webbers! It feels good to finally have some web space where I can get my geek on.