A Path Less Taken

Only one day in and I could not help tweaking my new theme. I’m not sure if you can call it an improvement, but at least it’s different. I started playing around with the idea of a gradient background image. I decided to add one to the top of the site to add some pop and increase the contrast between the color scheme and the background. I found a number of articles on-line for doing this, but the one that I liked the best is here. I actually installed Gimp specifically to edit images for the new theme and I have to say it’s working out really well. If you have a strong opinion one way or another about the new background post a comment below and let me know.

After putting off a re-design for nearly a year I’ve finally opted to update the look of this site in honor of my 100th post (well 102, but who’s counting). What you are seeing now is the first cut of the new design. I consider it an evolution rather than a revolution. The design is based on top of my Welcome theme which was itself built completely from scratch. Taking this approach allowed me to reduce the design time from approximately a month for Welcome to less than a week for the new Bogus theme. There are some parts that remain largely unchanged while other parts have had a big over haul. I plan to continue tweaking fonts, colors and images over the coming months to try and improve the look incrementally. If you have any interest I’m happy to give you a brief tour under the hood.

What follows is a list of PHP Frameworks that are actively supported based on a VERY cursory review by the author. Please feel free to provide any comments or feedback that would help improve this list. It is mainly intended for my reference, but I hope that it might be helpful to you. The content is primarily the BIG frameworks or the interesting one’s. Interesting is defined here as attempting to fill some niche that larger frameworks either don’t address or don’t adequately address.

It is the plight of the modern software engineer to know that there is always more than one way to solve a problem. Often we struggle with trade offs between usability (our own) and performance (the users). Eventually we individually or collectively chose “something” only to find that a single choice then cascades through our entire solution. If you don’t believe me you can validate this for yourself. Just ask a software engineer their “best practices” for managing dates and date logic and watch their eyes roll.