Jake Strawn's blog

Complete overhaul of Himpressive theme

Posted by Jake Strawn on Wed, 07/09/2008 - 16:32 in

Since recently updating himerus.com to Drupal, and breaking out an old PSD that I had originally started for the project I had titled "himpressive", I've been working on figuring out how to really make that into a Drupal theme that people would want to use, as well as a theme that I can use as a core starting block for all my Drupal projects.

Himerus.com updated to Drupal

Posted by Jake Strawn on Thu, 06/19/2008 - 23:47 in

I've updated the himerus.com site to Drupal, and decided once again to make it a project I keep on the front burner for personal blogging purposes.

Chapter 1 Finished... Roughly

Posted by Jake Strawn on Sun, 03/23/2008 - 13:16 in

Well, I can say after getting into this that writing isn't the easiest thing. I've always been capable of writing fairly proficiently, however, writing for a book that can't be updated easily after publish is another ball of wax altogether.

ShareThis module for Drupal 6

Posted by Jake Strawn on Fri, 03/07/2008 - 10:27 in

Update: The official release is active, and posted in the projects section. The official Drupal page is located here.

Last night, I was doing some further research to find a valid solution for implementing the ShareThis system into Drupal 6. There was a valid solution (still in an alpha stage) for Drupal 5 by using the share module, but nothing for Drupal 6, which is what I was going for.

Personal Project: Mastering CVS and publishing first Drupal module

Posted by Jake Strawn on Wed, 03/05/2008 - 22:46 in

I've spent the last couple of days starting a project that will be first in place here on this site regarding a full featured Drupal module that encompasses the functionality of the quote form.

jQuery Tutorial: Using jQuery to align column heights

Posted by Jake Strawn on Wed, 03/05/2008 - 19:02 in

This tutorial will show you how to use the popular jQuery library to match the height of 2 columns in your layout. I've found that I'm always needing to have this type of feature on design projects in order to make sure a navigation column is the same height as the main body content section, or vice versa. This walk through will get you there with a quick bit of jQuery added to your code.

The status of himerus.com

Posted by Jake Strawn on Mon, 03/03/2008 - 20:27 in

I've been debating on what to do with the Wordpress blog that I've been using at himerus.com. Over the past few months, I haven't had too much time for personal blogging, and since truly, the development/design blogging takes precedence over general chatty type blogging, I'm going to be phasing that blog out somewhat, or at least converting it for other purposes.

Official launch active

Posted by Jake Strawn on Mon, 03/03/2008 - 14:09 in

Well, the IE7 bug didn't prove that problematic, so the site is now up and running here at himerusinc.com, and will continue to be improved upon over upcoming weeks.

IE6 Compatability Update

Posted by Jake Strawn on Mon, 03/03/2008 - 12:49 in

After a quick look at IE6 in this new layout, there are only a few bugs that are currently causing issue. The header menu isn't displaying inline properly, and the footer region is a bit off.

How To: Check if Apache is running & restart via cron job

Posted by Jake Strawn on Mon, 03/03/2008 - 01:24 in

I've personally been running into issues on my server lately that would for some still unknown reason crash Apache at some point during the night, and I'd have to find out when I first loaded up one of the sites on the server the next morning, then manually start Apache back up, and it had become quite tiresome. So I've done some investigating on how I can set up a shell script to check to see if Apache is currently active, and if not, restart the service.

Denver Web Development

Himerus Inc. offers advanced web development services to the Denver, Boulder, Lakewood, Littleton, Arvada, Westminister, Thornton, Northglenn, Cherry Creek areas, and other surrounding Denver metropolitan areas.

Himerus Inc. has been creating and maintaining web sites for over a decade, and has vast experience in working with projects from concept to launch and beyond with Website Marketing and Search Engine Optimization.

You may read more about some of the technologies we use to take our projects from idea to reality.

jQuery Development

jQuery is a fast, concise, JavaScript Library that simplifies how you traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, and add Ajax interactions to your web pages. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript.

Himerus Inc. recently began rapidly learing this new method that allows for fast Javascript development, interactive AJAX features like the ones used throughout our site, and our CMS, CMDRpro. Jake Strawn of Himerus Inc. has also recently been contracted by Apress to author a book on the topic of jQuery.

With jQuery, Himerus Inc. can develop the latest interactive web application features your site needs to stay ahead of the curve.

Denver PHP Development

PHP: a server side scripting language, and MySQL: a database management system are the two pieces that power all of our websites. By combining server side scripting with database storage of site data, tracking data, etc., these tools give us the ability to create features that extend the usability of your website.

PHP/MySQL is is used to build in features to our web development projects such as message boards, blogs, newsletter mgmt, content management, etc.

Anything you can imagine your site could do can be accomplished with our vast understanding of these two server side technologies.

Denver XHTML Development

The Extensible HyperText Markup Language, or XHTML, is a markup language that has the same depth of expression as HTML, but also conforms to XML syntax.

By using proper XHTML markup standards, Himerus Inc. is able to create a site that will render properly on multiple devices using multiple browsers including text reading software for the visually impaired.

XHTML 1.1 became a recommendation by the W3C on May 31^st, 2001, yet you would be surprised to see the amount of "Web Development" firms that are unaware of the technology, and the benefits of creating sites using standards compliant XHTML.

Denver CSS Development

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML.

CSS is used by both the authors and readers of web pages to define colors, fonts, layout, and other aspects of document presentation. It is designed primarily to enable the separation of document content from document presentation.

By using proper CSS, Himerus Inc. is able to create a site that can be greatly altered by creating a new stylesheet and not requiring any editing to your content.

CMDRpro Content Management

CMDRpro is our custom built Content Management System based on all the above technologies: PHP/MySQL/jQuery/XHTML/CSS. It is an an advanced, and easy to use system that enables users to fully manage their site through minimal training and available documentation on the features available in CMDRpro.

CMDRpro will be the future of most of our web projects where custom work is required, and has proven quite efficient at pluging in even small content sites to as well. Rest assured your site will stay ahead of the curve and easy to manage using our in house content management system.

Drupal Development

Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Tens of thousands of people and organizations have used Drupal to power scores of different types web sites.

Himerus Inc. has built several large content sites using Drupal. Drupal is a great system with flexibility. The administrative interface is more complicated, but allows very detailed modification of most key systems, and is quickly expanded with a large community of developers that create plugins that are free for use on other Drupal powered sites.

Wordpress Development

WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. What a mouthful. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

Himerus Inc. highly recommends Wordpress for our clients interested in creating a blog. Drupal and CMDRpro both have blogging capabilities built in from the start, and can be used for a new project that includes a blog for ease of management, but Wordpress is the perfect option for adding a new blog to an old site quickly and efficiently.