Crain Industries ~est. 1981~

The Wedding Website

If you’ve made it this far and are looking for Megan and my wedding website, it’s just a step farther at

www.crainindustries.com/wedding

It was a fun little side project that unlike this website, actually serves some purpose. It’s always more fun to design when there is a vision and a goal. I’ve been realizing how much vision makes a difference in my life, but that’s an aside. I am also starting to create a side site for our church to help people from our church with local resources for living a greener life. It will most likely look similar to this site, but that’s an aside as well. Again, no flash on the site, just a couple cool mootools effects, including the banner which is straight from phatfusion (the pictures obviously are changed, that would be weird.)

Website Template v1.0

I’ve been putting together a few different websites that incorporate the same basic functionality in the navigation system. Its not a CMS, but rather just hard coded html and php which uses a lot of cool little things to dynamically create the navigation (sort of). I’m sure this could be way improved as I continually find new stuff to add, but I thought I would put up an archive of the current version.

The big thing is to setup the website in folders. These folders will define the names of your pages so make sure that they’re named correctly with an underscore for spaces. When I’ve applied the template to a few sites the biggest mistakes come from naming something wrong somewhere, so make sure you have a plan and stick to it.

This also includes other fun things like Eric Meyer’s reset CSS, ALA’s Suckerfish Dropdowns, and ALA’s vertical grid basic CSS. I hope to add more foundational base things in upcoming versions that kind of give an overall example of how to implement stuff. Mainly because I need that.

The markup on the current version isn’t the best, and the CSS could use some desperate work, but you get the point for the most part.

Download the Web Template v1.0!

template.zip

FileMaker Content Management System Part I

One of my greatest joys of this past week was finding out that I will be able to use a FileMaker PHP API to put together a pretty slick content management system. I’d like to gather some resources and experiences in this post and hopefully show the way a little easier for someone who may want to follow.

A little background. The School of Music (this is where I work) is entrenched in FileMaker databases, from handling lockers and keys, to scheduling rooms, keeping track of student records, handling CD duplication and everything in between. Over the past couple of years I was thrown head first into learning how to use FileMaker and develop some hefty solutions and applications including a album/royalty tracking database and a huge application for handling the front end user interface of a 30 year archive of music from the Wheatland Music Festival.

Over the years I’ve come to realize how much I enjoy database and especially user interface design. I don’t fully understand the tools especially the web specified ones like PHP, but I’m learning and it’s something I enjoy. But I do enjoy FileMaker, and it looks like I will be able to bridge the knowledge gap using FileMaker logic to teach myself a little PHP. I came across the entire CMS idea almost by accident. I developed a simple FileMaker database and wanted a simple way for students to login to it via AD and have access to one simple locked down page based on their login. Simple enough. A few little FM scripts and with IWP I’m up and running. In the back of my head, I’m thinking there’s got to be a more customizable thing than this so I could do a little better/cleaner UI than what IWP gives you. It’s not that I hadn’t known about customizable web publishing using XML or PHP, it’s just that I never put 2 and 2 together and realized the possibilities for our department. I also underestimated the ease of use for something like this. It’s got a learning curve that’s for sure, but it’s been done before and there are some resources available.

One of the main things I came to which told me this can and has been done before was this recording from Kevin Nathanson, Product Manager, FileMaker Server products and Web Technologies, FileMaker, Inc., Eric Jacobson, Web Technologies Architect, FileMaker, Inc., and Lance Hallberg, Principal Owner, FM Synergy. This one is will worth your time if you’re interested.

FileMaker and PHP

The FM Synergy site contains downloads to the FM files utilized in this demo, but they are actually from a DevCon conference that Lance did a few years back, so you don’t get the exact talk through he gave there. But poke around the files and you should be able to figure everything out. (Also has some cool AJAX tips on his site too.) Oh and one thing that tripped me up for awhile…make sure you are using the current filemaker.php file not the one included with this download, otherwise you will be getting an error and your pages won’t load.

VTC has a few basic tutorials to work through (and more if you pay, I never did…).

Jonathan Stark has also done a ton with the FileMaker PHP API including literally writing the book.

Another great book is FileMaker Web Publishing: A Complete Guide to Using the API for PHP. This book was written by three great FileMaker developers and would make a great resource. It goes a little more in depth with examples and things you can do with PHP than the Jonathan Stark book, but both are great resources.

This is really just the groundwork for getting started with FileMaker and PHP. Hopefully I will be able to make this more of a series as I tackle this puzzle from the ground up.

Wordpress. Grrr.

I swear Wordpress hates me. It looks so nice and seems so easy. I think I’m probably doing something wrong, but every time I try to format my posts or correct little issues like paragraph breaks, this ignorant little wysiwyg editor just mashes up my code and spits it out in ways that look like a four-year-old wrote it. Can someone please help!?

And I finally get sick of looking at someone else’s theme and reverted to the one I made a while back. It’s version 0.1 of what my theme should be. I need to add about ten things to it, but alas I must remember its content over a pretty interface. (at least for now, and come to think of it, this probably isn’t helping…)

Update…Its seems as though this issue is common when using a Mac and Safari, at least certain versions. Firefox seems to run too slow for me, so I will probably be looking for a different wysiwyg editor plugin or better yet a simple text editor plugin so I can just code everything.

The Original Crain Industries

There seems to have been an actual company “Crain Industries, Inc” a national manufacturer and distributor of flexible polyurethane foam. It was dissolved into its parent company 10 years ago (nearly to the day that I started this website…) after being bought for $213 million by Foamex. (Got that info here.)If someone wants to buy this Crain Industries, I will sell for a tenth of that. $2.13 million and it’s yours. Digging around the net it’s interesting who you find with the same name as you, including the guy running joncrain.com, who lives around an hour away from me, Jon Crane photography, who runs some ads through Google, and a large group of one off things I’ve registered for like Vox, Newsvine, numerous tech forums, photography sites, and plenty of other forums and sites I’ve registered for while looking for information. Ironically as well the joncrain.com guy (Hello! if you ever stumble upon this site), has the same full name as me too, Jonathan P Crain, but I don’t know what the P stands for. Mine’s Paul.

Flickr vs Picasa vs FTP

I keep going back and forth on how to handle photographs on the site. I love the Flickr integration with Lightbox all in a Wordpress plugin that just works (after a night of it simply not working, and then working fine the next day without any changes), but I hate the Flickr limits of 200 max photos, and limited uploads per month, which means if I do use them in a post they may be gone after I upload my 201st photo, or so it seems. Picassa is pretty slick as well, but I haven’t been able to do quite a nice integration with Wordpress and Lightbox. I can always just store the photos on this site itself, but I miss the auto sizing and stuff from Flickr. I may just have to keep the photostream thing at the bottom through Flickr, but store the photo posts on the site itself. That seems nice. Now to size all my current images, re-upload them, and make sure they all work with Lightbox…

Engaged

Online

Well we have officially gone public with the site. I have some tidying up to do, but the good thing is that I have a vacation to do it during. I’m also excited to announce that we soon will be expanding as Megan Vander Kooy is joining the team.

Knowledge

I read on Donald Miller’s website (www.donaldmillerwords.com) few weeks ago some wise words on our desire to know things. I keep wanting to read them, but they are gone from his site, and I keep losing digitally misplacing them. They have been a blessing to my soul.

I’ve been thinking lately about how much freedom there is in not knowing things. I’m not talking so much about politics or current events, as much as I am talking about that subtle lie we sometimes believe that “other people are experiencing things” that we are missing out on. In the sacred text of scripture, the evil one tempts a man and a woman with knowledge. “If you only knew” he says, “then you would understand.” The appeal is to this other exciting existence that is out there that we have yet to tap into. That other existence, it turned out, was a farce. And yet I find myslef feeling, quite often, that somehow I am missing out on the pleasures the world offers, and a competitive, catch-up spirit overtakes me. But lately I am finding more pleasure in life’s subtle offerings. A sunset seems to be beating a party (nothing against parties) or a book beats a movie. Wanderlust can have its benefits because it motivates us to see more and experience more, but as with cheesy infomercials, a product that promises much, that makes us feel like we are missing out on something, often results in cheap crap collecting in our closets.
> For me, the spiritual life has been an acquired taste. I would like classical music so much more if I didn’t know about the new (insert band name here) album. I would like tea more if I didn’t know about Red Bull. But at the end of the day, I find myself tired and stressed. I think I want to slow down a bit, understand the grass is not always greener, and find joy in the mental spaces that come with a bit more work. Acquisition is not always the source of power. The people I admire the most are often the people who show the greatest resistance to the pressures of the info-mercial promises. I think there is something to be said for having “gotten over it.”

Interesting…

When my dad died, I got his computer, and it struck me from browsing through his past emails that the majority of his subject lines were one word or short titles followed by “…”

I do that a lot too…