How to build a widget

In MBA school you explore a lot of theory and eventually try to apply that to actual practice. But theory comes first in academia, so theorize we did. And when you have to zoom so far out to make such broad brush strokes you need a common business model or product. In our case it was the widget. (more…)

Tumblr a nice alternative

I’ve been a fan of Tumblr for a while. I’ve had my own tumblr account to mess around with, and it’s been a nice halfway point between twitter which keeps you under 140 characters and a full blog which lets you post tons and tons of content. Just something great for shorter posts, pictures, quotes, etc. (more…)

Announcing: PMProPlus!

The day has finally arrived. We’re launching our own project.

Without further ado let us proudly introduce PMProPlus, a project management and time tracking web application, straight from the Paper Canopy factory. (more…)

Stupid WordPress Tricks

To totally bang home my love for WordPress I wanted to share a nice page that breaks down a lot of useful expansions on the basic WP functionality: Stupid WordPress Tricks

There’s a lot there, in fact there are 76 tricks to peruse. Most of it is somewhat technical as far as how to implement it, but I wanted to share because sometimes examples of what you can do with a tool gives you that “Aha!” moment to really add on some cool stuff to your own projects.

So peruse that list. Find some cool stuff to do, and know it can be done so you can ask for it.

One thing I think I may do with that list is show examples of how to use that added functionality in your own project. First up Meta Descriptions without a plugin. This is a pretty easy one, and you can see it in action on the LegalOut.com site that I set up in WordPress. Outside of just the meta description we set up several custom fields to display different content on different pages.

I’m definitely looking forward to pulling a lot of added functionality ideas from this list.

Ordering lists, UI example

jQuery is definitely my javascript library of choice.

Easy to use and you can spit out awesome stuff pretty quickly and easily.

My latest conquest is drag and drop ordering. Basically what I wanted to do was have two lists. Then you can drag options from one list to the other, and order items within each list.

Here’s a demo of the drag and drop functionality in action

Originally I built this to use in a WordPress plugin I was writing. The point would be to give users some options and let them order the options they selected.

The nice part of this is what goes on behind the scenes. When a user moves an item around (either from one list to the other, or within the list itself to reorder things) the code fires off an ajax call and stores/updates the list in a database.

This is the pretty basic instance of this functionality though. The plugin comes with a lot of options that you can use to really customize the user experience.

Some other options you have is triggering an event (an alert, popup, changing colors on something, etc.) when a person selects an item, when they drop the item, when they put one item above or below another item (before or after they drop it there, warnings anyone?). It’s a nice way to give a lot of feedback to the user as they are interacting with the page and the lists.

And the effects don’t have to stop there. By re-ordering a list on one part of the page could effect layout or content or any other number of things on a page.