Version Two

It's been 5 years since the launch of milesj.me, and 5 years of the same design. I spent my recent free time working on a new design. The new design, aptly named version 2, boasts some of the latest in technology. It utilizes HTML5, CSS3, Sass, MooTools, Titon, CakePHP, and more.

Why the change?

After 5 years, you get tired of looking at the same old design. I really wanted to utilize new HTML5 tags, as well as attempting some new CSS3 features like transitions and media queries. Releasing a new version allows for removal of certain features (like snippets), and the refactoring of old ones.

Another annoyance with the previous version was the usage of Decoda (a very very old version at that) in articles and code documentation. It caused nothing but headaches and restricted any customizability that I wanted to achieve. Decoda has its usage in certain situations; that was not one of them.

What technology is being used?

At the lowest level, HTML5 and CSS3 is used for the layout structure. Sass and Compass is used heavily to achieve responsive design at the following breakpoints: 1440, 1366, 1024, 768, 480, 320 (give it a try!). It took me a while to really enjoy Sass, but in the end, its variables, mixins and extremely easy support for responsiveness was welcoming. The Sass files relating to this site can be found by replacing css in the path to scss; for example, the style.scss and skeleton.scss.

On the outside, the Tooltip and Pin component from the Titon Toolkit, a UI toolkit for MooTools, is currently integrated. For code syntax highlighting, I am using the very powerful and nicely built Prism.js by Lea Verou. On the inside, a custom built CakePHP CMS powers everything.

What's next?

With many of my GitHub and website projects out of the way, I hope to find more time to blog about current technology. I mean, what else is there really to do?

Cupcake and Uploader plugins updated

I want to thank everyone who has tested my forum plugin, and thanks again for all the people who reported bugs and features! The plugin is coming along nicely and I have a few features planned for the future. Cupcake has been updated again to provide more multi-byte character support and fix all the reported bugs. Additionally, I have added a quick-reply feature which can be enabled or disabled through the settings.

The Uploader plugin has also received an update, for there was a major bug, the validation never worked! This was my fault because it seems like I removed a reference variable to the parent model (&$Model) which would never update the primary model outside of the behavior, and in turn the validation never worked. I also updated the plugin with multi-byte support.

CakePHP 1.2 Stable Released

It seems the good ole developers over at CakePHP have released an update to their 1.2 Final version, a now 1.2 Stable. As always I enjoy and appreciate how quickly the Cake team fixes, rewrites and optimizes the Cake engine. They have come a long way and with the help of the community, the Forge and the Bakery. The best thing is their use of Trac and the ability of the community to report bugs and even suggest features and code to be added. I have many ideas and have even written my own code that hopefully one day I can submit to Trac, and maybe perhaps join the team!

Anyways though, I highly recommend upgrading your Cake to the 1.2 Stable, simply because they found a security flaw with the Security and Auth Component. For more information on that flaw, the announcement, and the download, please click the following links: