A couple of months ago Chelsea’s grandmother handed this to me (whatever for, I don’t know).  Maybe it was a foreshadowing of my recent haircut, minus the flirting.

One year ago, today, I was in Chicago with Sammy visiting our good friend Brandon O’Brien.   It was my 22nd birthday and I wished that it wasn’t.  I don’t usually like to be given extra attention, but I especially didn’t on this particular day.  It was one of those days where the littlest things drive you nuts.  Nonetheless, Sammy and I set out to make something of the day.  We found ourselves at a cold Lake Michigan and Sammy suggested a birthday swim.  I reluctantly got in with the handful of other loonies braving the frigid water.  Not necessarily what I would have chosen to do, but now I can look back on it with fondness.

When something’s supposed to be special, I tend to get too caught up in it being so that I overlook its specialness.   Though I do have tons of wonderful memories that are invitingly summoned to mind, I can’t help but think of how many things I miss or how much greater some of these memories could have been.  This has been added to the list of things that I need to work on.  Good thing I’m still less than a quarter century old.

There was a period of time where my titles were just the date. I believe I was a more thoughtful blogger back in those days because I wasn’t wasting my energies attempting to summarize my scattered thoughts in 5 words. For a while I would just use the title of whatever song was in my head (typically Simon & Garfunkel). I was really just trying to make people think that I came up with a beautifully poetic phrase that perfectly summarized the content of my post.

All that to say I might do away with titles. But then I would have to blog better and more frequently. We’ll see what comes of this..

A few years ago I ran across this article and ever since I have been building on the ideas presented to create an extremely powerful PHP Scaffold Class that I have used in numerous production sites.  In it’s simplest implementation, all you do is pass the table name to the class and the scaffolding is created based on the table’s structure.  Over time I’ve added functionality for table relationships, image uploading and resizing, and more.

I imagine this class could be very useful to the PHP community.  I plan on refining it further and eventually making it available to the public.  My purpose in writing this post is to find out if there’s any interest in this sort of thing and to see if, and how much, people would be willing to pay for a license to use it.  Your feedback is welcome in the comments below.

Features

• Parent/Child relationships
• Image uploading and resizing
• Thumbnail generation
• WYSIWYG text fields
• Disable certain actions (show, add, edit, or delete)
• Handles SET or ENUM fields as select boxes
• Sort by any of the columns
• Pagination
• Hide different columns from the listing table or from all views
• Automatic recognition and handling of created and modified date fields
• Extremely flexible

Demo

I’ve setup an example of a simple store backend to show its functionality.  You can view the code and database structure by clicking the links at the top.  Here is an example of a frontend that has been built on top of a backend powered by this class.

I’ve been back from West Texas for a couple of weeks now.  I meant to write about my revelations but it never  happened.  The main revelation was this: no matter how busy or un-busy you are, time still must be made for those things you “never have enough time for”.  This post is a case in point.  Oh, how I need to be more disciplined.

Last week I endured placement exams, auditions, and parking tickets.  Now that that’s all out of my system I am beginning “classes” this week.  Classes is in quotes because my classes are really just rehearsals and lessons; quite a change from undergrad work.

Yesterday Chelsea and I ate at Mr. Chopsticks and I had a really great curry.  If you’re ever up in the Denton area I will treat you to some tasty chopstickable food.  Speaking of chopsticks…