Feature Projects
Steven Miles
All booked and serious looking forward to Code4Lib 2011 in Bloomington, IN. Specially to talk to and see how other libraries are making their digital collections more accessible online.
This was my first visit to LibCamp. Basically it's a loosely structured conference (or unconference) for people who work in public and private libraries to get together and discuss various technologies and issues.
One very interesting aspect of the unconference, is that everyone is encouraged to participate. From presentations to facilitating a discussion on a top or even just proposing questions or topics for discussion.
As I work @ the State Library of Western Australia and have developed the SLURP (Digital Asset ingestion and presentation) System, I decided to give a presentation on how you could use Open Source Software, Idea's and concepts to facilitate easier and cost effective access to digitized collections online and a great opportunity to showcase some of the R&D I have been doing. :)
Like must web developers I'm always looking for was to improve the techniques that I already have. This week I was thinking there must be a better way of combining and compressing css and js files to clients, especially core library file that don't change all that often.
I was already combining multiple js and css file into a single stream using the standard output buffering compression built into PHP, but these files where being combined and compressed everything they where requested. There had to be a better way to reduce both server load and improve caching on client browsers.
Then I though why can't I keep the combined & compressed files on the server and stream them out instead.....
After 7 years living and working on the east coast of Australia, it's finally time to head back home to the west coast. Definitely looking forward to seeing friends and family again on regular basis, as I haven't been home all that often over the years.
It wasn't a easy decision to make but at this point in my life it just feels like the right think for me to do. Unfortunately I'll be leaving a awesome job and a project (SnappCMS) that I have put a lot of time and effort into over the last couple of years but I'm leaving it in good hands and look forward to following it's progress and it's launched into the market place.
So I'm currently on the lookout for any exciting projects or opportunities in Perth to get in involved in once I'm back in Perth in April 09.
Time really fly's by these day's, it's been over two years since I've had time to site down and do some work on my own site (Other project priorities taken over :P ). An haven't things changed in that time!
While having a look through some of the work I've been involved in over the past fews years, I was pleasantly surprised at just how much there was! and how far I have come in the in not only programming, but also the hard lessons that where learned along the way. What I found the be especially interesting is how businesses expectations for their presence on the web have changed in such a short timeframe.
Many of the projects I'm working on these days are very heavily focused to strategy and analytical reporting. Fortunately there's awesome products like Google Analytics out there these days, with a little careful through during construction can really provide great insight into what type, and how customers are interacting with your site, as any good site is constantly growing and evolving.
Like any developer, I'm always on the look out for information and resources to help push what I do to the next next level, and hopefully with some regularity I post what it have learned, as both a tool for me refer back to and also a resource for others as well.
For those of you who are looking for the Ajax Upload Loader, I had published some time ago, I have decided not to continue with it's development, as I'm struggling to find the time to fix several bug and limitations with using perl and php to upload files and there are some many good free alternatives out there..
So if you are looking for a solution to upload large files to you site I would recommend swfupload as a solution. Although it does use flash to do it's uploading, there is a great deal of documentation available and is very easy to customize to suit most situations
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