I’ve been working extremely hard over the past week and a bit to revamp the sites theme and complete all the sub page sections on the top menu. Finally, about 10 minutes ago I pushed the last changes.

I am very happy with the outcome. I’ve added sections where I can show off some of my work, link to articles I write, share my talks and lots more. Most importantly, since I am back in the freelance game (more on this later), I have added a section called “Consulting”. In this section you will find a list of services that I offer as a freelancer and consultant, testimonials from previous clients and also some of my client portfolio.

There are sections of the site that I want to improve on and I have still got to add quite a few projects I’ve worked on and articles that I have written, but that will only happen throughout the year.

I’m planning on blogging a lot more this year and also writing many more technical articles (especially on other development websites). My plan is to keep this site fresh and up to date with what’s happening in my life and development life.

Stay tuned.

A lot has gone down since my last blog post including turning 25 year old and getting back into the freelance business. I also have a lot of exciting things happening this year. More on all that in future posts though. For now though, I am looking forward to sharing my thoughts again and hearing your feedback!

I am also going to start moving all my old posts from iarematt.com over to this blog now and setup a permanent 301 redirect from there to here. So you will notice over the next week or so that this blog will start filling up a bit.

I also still have to install a bunch of plugins (including MobilePress). That will happen over the next week as well.

All in all, I am really happy with the new theme. Some of the cool things that I have added to the theme so far are:

• Custom logo that I created in Fireworks
• A slick code syntax highlighter
• Original icons that I created – see the category and comments below (I also plan to release these plus a couple more icons soon)
• Favicon derived from my new logo

So there it is. Browse around the blog and let me know what you think! Oh, and it has only been tested in Chrome, Firefox and Safari.

I have decided to switch domains from my old iarematt.com back to mattgeri.com which I have owned for many years. The iarematt.com domain will still be online for the time being while I transfer all the best blog posts from that blog to this one, then I will do a simple 301 redirect from there to here.

You will notice that if you browse around there are a few empty pages, unfinished content pieces and even fewer features that you would find on a traditional blog. I plan to finish writing and completing these pages over time. The reason I decided to leave these pages and features unfinished or out completely is that, in the past, I have spent countless hours developing the “perfect blog” and there never seems to be an end to it. So I thought, rather get something out on the interweb and start blogging, than spend the next few months developing a perfect blog and perhaps never get there.

The same will go for some of the projects I plan to work on in my spare time. I’m adopting a sort of agile development philosophy where I will release early and often. So while they may not be perfect projects at first, over time, they will grow into pretty awesome things (hopefully).

Without pressuring myself, I plan to try post a couple posts a week. Most of them will be related to web development, mobile development, ubuntu server admin, technology and other interesting topics mostly related to creating websites.

So there it is, my return to blogging! Woot.

For those of you who don’t know what git or GitHub is (I suspect very few of you), git is basically version control for code and github is hosting for your git repo’s. GitHub offers you free hosting for unlimited open source projects and if you want private projects they have a subscription model. What I really like about GitHub is that it has a social element to it. You can follow other users and interact in various ways.

So follow me and lets connect

I have done a lot of thinking about my blog and what the purpose of it should be. Should it be to teach others something I know, or to share experiences, or should it be to brand myself or even something else? Other thoughts that I have had is who am I trying to target with my blog? In the end I have come to the conclusion that a “personal” blog should really be about anything you want and the target audience should be whoever the heck wants to read it

A personal blog is all about you, the blogger. Now, that may sound a bit egotistical but it is true. The point of a personal blog is to write about your experiences and share a little piece of your life with the world. Not only that, I feel another good use of a personal blog is for it to be used as a reference. What kind of reference? It doesn’t really matter. If you are a coder you can post code snippets which you find useful and that may need in the future. If you are a Mom with a kid you can document milestones in the kids life. You can document whatever you feel like.

There are a few things that I want to achieve with this blog and I have documented some of them in my about page. Mostly though I want to be able to look back in a few years and say “Hey, I remember when I was working on that project” or “Where is that useful little code snippet that I documented” etc. I want to also connect with my readers and be able to launch open-source projects and get feedback and even contributors.

One thing I have found is that the key to successful blogging is to keep posting . As long as you keep your blog active and post a few times a week you will definitely build a readership and start reaping the rewards. I have started lots of blogs before and all of them failed in the end because I didn’t keep them active.

And that is about it for tonight. I slacked off a little last week and missed a few posts but all will change this week I have a ton of drafts that I need to finish and I am really looking forward to getting them out

I have seen tons of different implementations of pagination. My favorite probably being Digg like pagination as implemented on this blog. While the Digg like pagination class is a very basic form of pagination there are a lot of websites out there that have implemented quite exotic pagination.

One such example of exotic pagination is dzone.com. I recently joined dzone.com and even though the website is rather cluttered and busy their pagination totally rocks. What happens is when you come to the end of the current page you are viewing (it is actually a little frame) there is a Ajax call which loads the next results (that would be listed on a second page). So basically as you keep scrolling down to view more content, it automatically loads it for you without you having to click a next page button. Check it out at dzone.com.

Luckily for us, South African PHP developer and jQuery extraordinaire, Barry Roodt, has developed a jQuery plugin that does all the above and can be implemented on your own site with very little effort. The current version of the plugin is 0.1b and you can get it here.

Definitely check out Barrys plugin (there is also a demo here for you to see how it works) and let him know if you implement it on your own site. I am definitely planning on playing around with it in the near future!

Method 1:

This code works with PHP 4 and PHP 5.

// Open directory and create an object
// The dir() function creates the object
$directory = dir('path_to_directory');

// Loop while the read method goes through each and
// every file
while ((FALSE !== ($item = $directory->read())) && ( ! isset($directory_not_empty)))
{
	// If an item is not "." and "..", then something
	// exists in the directory and it is not empty
	if ($item != '.' && $item != '..')
	{
		$directory_not_empty = TRUE;
	}
}

// Close the directory
$directory->close();

Method 2:

Although the code below is a lot neater and lighter, it will only work with PHP 5.

// Scans the path for directories and if there are more than 2
// directories i.e. "." and ".." then the directory is not empty
if ( ($files = @scandir('path_to_directory') && (count($files) > 2) )
{
	$directory_not_empty = TRUE;
}

And there you have it. Two simple ways of checking if a directory is empty. Let me know if you found this useful in the comment block below.

Anyway, one of my goals (not made public) was to start writing a lot more technical/development related posts. Now, I know that may not be everyones cup of tea and it may even drive a few return visitors away from the blog but it is something I really want to start doing. I especially want to talk about some of the stuff I am currently working on and explain how I am doing it. Heck, you may be able to tell me how to do it better. That’s what I want.

What I am going to do though (to cater for visitors who are not so interested in development but are interested in technology) is supplement each development related post with a non-technical post. Those non-technical posts will be stuff like reviews, current happenings on the web, tech trends, a lot about mobile stuff and I also hope to start videocasting soon!

At the current rate, I am getting out about 2-4 blog posts a day (usually more on the weekends when I am not working). So I definitely think I will be able to manage one technical and one non-technical post a day. What do you think of this idea? What do you want to read more of?