Connor Wilson » Blog Archive » CakePHP is the new Black

CakePHP is the new Black

Posted on May 10th in General, Personal — One Comment so far. Got something to say?

It’s been a while, and I’ve been been busy so posting has seen a halt for a couple of days. I was at the track and field regionals Tuesday and Wednesday competing in discuss, but it wasn’t a very satisfying result. For anyone interested, I got 6th in my region, which is actually one place short of advancing, with a throw of 38m (about 130 feet) which seems kind of disappointing now, even though it’s a good throw for this level. Now I get to wait for someone to drop out of the Southern Regionals to give me a chance, and after that is provincials, but that’s only a shred of hope

With a couple days off I guess I could do a topical post with a bunch of stuff, so here’s my entirely organized list of things:

CakePHP + Intrototheweb
Older articles submitted to Pixel2Life
Got my Reinvigorate Invite
Alexa is funny

CakePHP + Intrototheweb

I just started using the CakePHP ‘rapid development’ framework and it is truly amazing. The ease of use is so great, and the way it works with templating and simple, short code blocks is really working out for me.

Intrototheweb, my upcoming beginner’s tutorials site (like that SEO link?), will run on Cake now as opposed to WordPress, and depending on how that goes the next iteration of this site will sport a new framework as well.

I got inspired to use Cake by Jonathan Snook’s recent redesign. I know he’s been using it for a while now, but the new design he release made me want to at least try it out. So far everything has been awesome, and maybe after a while I’ll write a review

My PHP skills are getting de-rested as this goes on, and using a framework like this is a great step up for those wanting to advance their skills, and really be able to develop quickly. When they call it rapid, they mean it!

Older Articles submitted to Pixel2Life

I’ve submitted a couple of my older article to the Pixel2Life tutorial database. I probably should have done it when they were written, but I’m remembering now, and that’s what counts.

You can check out all the approved and waiting ones at my source search so you can see all the new articles and old ones submitted. Only one has been taken in so far, and has seen about 90 unique hits, so it’s not a spike in traffic, but a nice bit of padding

Got my Reinvigorate Invite

As some of you may know, Reinvigorate is a fancy, invite only stats and tracking app for your websites. It’s very fancy looking, and is pretty cool. I have to say the graphs are amazing, and the info conveyed is interesting. Unfortunately, I must’ve been expecting too much, with it being so private and all.

I won’t be ditching it, because it is still full of useful analyses and pretty colours, but there are some little things that are starting to bug me:

You have to log in every time you visit. Unlike Mint, where it’s always there at my fingertips right away. For your Reinvigorate stats you have to log in, click the site you want and then get out of the dashboard. I guess I like the pane style of mint as opposed the pages and tabs of Reinvigorate.
The prettiness sometimes sacrifices the readability and the functionality. There is a line, which is sometimes crossed here.

Overall, it’s a great app, and I can’t let them go on a sour note, so here’s my favourite stuff:

Timezone map overlay. They have an awesome map that they lay a graph on nicely that really gets you the info. The only stats app to have time zones, or at least display this well.
Too much information. Who said it was a bad thing?
Graphs, and their options. Like I said before, the graphs are extremely well done and are very aesthetically pleasing. You can change them around pretty much every way you want, too.
User specific info. Everything you could possibly want to know about who is visiting, including their plans for the weekend

If you haven’t applied, head over to their site and put in your email. They obviously won’t spam you, but you’ll get your invite in two weeks or so.

Alexa is Funny

While Alexa is by far the worst tracking method for a site’s visitors, it does show trends reasonably well. Its trends are highly skewed, but can be interesting. My traffic has lately been increasing, just a little, but still going up. The other day I was in the top 100k Alexa sites, for two days in a row actually. The day after that my 1 week average was around 98k.

It has since gone back to 114k, but this is why Alexa is funny, and pretty much sucks if you’re not YouTube, or huge like that. My traffic goes up, and Alexa goes down, why? Because I get around 75% FireFox users, and FireFox says no to Alexa. I can’t say I’d even use it if they make a plugin of sorts, but I wouldn’t mind shipping out my stumbleupon toolbar

In conclusion, I’d just like to note that posts with multiple topics get really long, really fast.