cogneato posts

I had a stressful end of workday yesterday. I accidentally deleted the database on three live sites, including our most important e-commerce site, and had to scramble to restore from backups. Continue reading post "#4622"

I took an at home Covid test today, which showed negative. Continue reading post "#3751"

Apparently, the Western Fruit Basket sign that's on the corner of the Cogneato offices / Full Grip Games got bumped by a semi today. Continue reading post "#3062"

I'm kind of excited that we moved the first site onto a new server setup at Cogneato. I had worked off and on on the setup for months before we finally went forward with it. It brings a new OS, new host, new software, and a number of other changes to our previous setup.

I made it through the first week of working from home during this virus-caused lockdown. Continue reading post "#2746"

I work tomorrow, but it still kind of feels like a four day weekend, because I h…

Kind of a late night working getting a messed up newsletter send back on track. Continue reading post "#2031"

Went to look at Cogneato's new offices. The company is moving downtown (still Akron) catty-corner to Summit Artspace. Continue reading post "#1499"

New Cogneato people

For a small company like Cogneato, it's always exciting to bring in new people. New personality, new ideas, new experience, new opportunities. We hadn't brought on any new people for probably two years, and had even lost a few from our maximum. And most importantly for me, we have only brought in two new developers in my entire tenure, only one of whom remains.

With increasing business and one of our "contenters" (who do client communication, work on content, light development, etc) leaving near the end of the year, we decided to bring on not one but two more people. One of them is a contenter (who has already started) to replace the one leaving, but one is a developer. We just signed her on last week and she will be starting by the beginning of December. She doesn't have a lot of web experience, at least on paper, but has a masters degree with a focus on programming. It will be nice to have some help and to have another person to discuss development things with. I'm excited.

It's been a few weeks since I've posted a Happs or any blog post. I think a lot of the things I want to post about, I want to post a dedicated post, but that doesn't always end up happening.

Conferences

The weekend before last, I went to two conferences. I took notes, which I plan to post once I get them digitized and cleaned up. I enjoyed the conferences even though having both in one weekend, with one in Pittsburgh, was a bit tiring. I went to Rustbelt Refresh and Pittsburgh Tech Fest.

Rustbelt Refresh

I had gone to this last year (the initial year) as well. I was pleased with the talks again. It's a single track, single day event on general front end development and design. It brings in some of the "celebrities" of the industry. This year included Karen McGrane and Jeremy Keith, for instance, and last year had Eric Meyer (our local web "celebrity") and Jonathon Snook. It is definitely nice to be able to hear talks by some of the people driving the thoughts in the industry. I had a good time, the talks were good, and I learned some things or shored up some ideas I already had.

These happs blogs don't always allow me to go into as much depth as I would like, but they are definitely a lot easier to write. I have been writing much more frequently now that I've started them. "Remember, a writer writes, always."

WordPress Starter Theme

After much time and effort, I've finally released my WordPress base theme, TJMBase. It is the very bare parent theme for what my website has been running on for several months now. These days, I don't use WordPress for very much, but I have done several projects with it, especially earlier in my web development life, and to some extent still like it.

Years ago, I had made a theme starter that was basically bare of any styles and extra fluff, the kind of thing you might want to start with if you wanted a good starting point for doing a theme basically from scratch. I never released it (didn't release anything open source at that point), though I did use it for some projects and let at least one interested party use it. I had stopped doing much with WordPress once I got my current job, but I did want my theme starter to be useful to the community. WordPress 3 came out and brought some important changes that made my old theme behind the times, missing some important features.

At Cogneato we've had a CMS that has been built up over more than a decade. We started working on a completely new system a while back to have a new and more powerful interface, add new features, and get rid of a lot of the cruft that the old system had from being developed over such a long period by many developers with different styles. We decided to use Doctrine as an ORM and Symfony as a framework for our back end.

We have maybe 200 sites running on various versions of our old system though, and we need to be able to add the new system's features without having to completely redo them. We needed a way to be able to leave all the current stuff in place and pull in the Symfony stuff to the existing files with a simple include.

As I've mentioned, at Cogneato we've been building a new version of our CMS using Symfony on the server side. I've spent a LOT of time with Symfony now. I like it and will be using it for some other projects outside of work as well. We've been working on some eCommerce type sites that will hopefully be launched in the coming months, while building the system that all of our sites will eventually run on.

Though I like it, there have been many challenges to deal with, especially with making Symfony work with our old system. We have way too many existing sites with more than enough custom programming to convert them completely to a new system, so we're setting it up so that both can be run side by side on old sites, while new sites will eventually only need the new system. But it has been a lot of effort to get the two working together properly. Symfony is inflexible in some ways, and not well documented in some areas. I intend to, in the coming months, write about my solutions for the various issues we've dealt with.

At my place of work, Cogneato, we recently lost one of our developers. It's ki…

The design of the gallery portion of the David Hawkins site I'm working on at Cogneato called for a reflection of the current image below that image. This could have been done by making reflections for each image in an image editor and then adding them to a separate field in the CMS. That would have been a pain and would require (most likely) us to be involved for each image added.

Luckily, since this site was already going to be using jQuery, I was able to find a jQuery plugin that handles the reflections automatically on page load. People without javascript just won't get reflections. It works in modern browsers and IE 6-8. It is less than 2kB, which would be much smaller than even a single separate reflection image, though the now-more-bloated 72kB jQuery might ruin size benefits if we weren't using it already. And as far as adding images to the site, the reflection is added automatically, well worth it.

Because of the design of the site, I had to modify the script somewhat to make it work properly. One issue was that I had a border around my images. Continue reading post "David Hawkins: JQuery Image Reflections"

I've now been at Cogneato for a little over three months. It is definitely long term now. I am still liking it, especially since I've been branching out into other areas even more. I've been doing more programming in PHP and Javascript to set sites up and add functionality, and have even gotten to work a little with SQL again.

For example, on one site, called Pink Rave, I had to add blog functionality, which isn't quite built right in like with Wordpress. For the standard "archive" box, I had to make a bit to spin through all posts and chunk them based on date, then output the represented dates in the box. For the search functionality, Cogneato's CMS has nothing built in, so I had to do custom queries. They are using the BLOB data type, so I couldn't use the FULLTEXT searching, instead having to build concatenated LIKE statements. Luckily, the CMS can easily put the results of custom queries into its result objects, so it is easy to then work with them like I otherwise would. In fact, for this blog, I handle all multiple item listings with the same output script that just fills the object array with different data depending on the type of page.

In addition to my front-end development at Cogneato, I've begun doing site SEO.…

Well, it seems like my job at Cogneato is likely to end up long term. Cogneato…

Yay! I finally found a job. After six months of no income, I needed it. I'm doing front-end development for Cogneato, a small web development firm in Akron. They've done quite a few sites over the past decade, and have their own CMS/CRM they've built over that period. It's pretty neat, allowing for some complicated things to be done with data and interesting features for managing customer information. It has many fancy AJAX features in the administrator interface. There have been seven people working there, and another one is coming soon. I only get to work on the front-end though.

Cogneato is only a 20 or so minute drive from my house. The atmosphere is very casual (hoodies instead of ties) and relaxed, very comfortable to work at. The owner and all the employees have been very nice.