A few weeks ago I was trying to figure out how to create a thin, vertical line using CSS the purpose of which was to separate two sections of a web page, for instance a side bar from main content, that would be offset a number of pixels from the top of the element. I couldn’t use a border because of the offset needed (I don’t think) and modifying the underlying HTML was out.

Reading this 24ways article on CSS3 patterns helped me to understand css3 gradients and multiple backgrounds a little better and gave me some ideas on how I might accomplish this using CSS3.

After reading a couple of books on Buddhism I’ve become interested in the practice of mindfulness. Being attentively aware of something, like breathing, that we do every day without thinking about it and therefore take for granted, seems like such a simple concept but I’m closer to admitting that it will probably be the hardest thing that I attempt to learn.

That’s why I was really excited to find Plum Village Online Monastery videos on Vimeo. Last night I watched the video “Basic Mindfulness practice” right before bed and I think I was able to sleep more deeply than normal.

Basic Mindfulness practice from Plum Village Online Monastery on Vimeo.

I highly recommend watching it. The instructor, Phap Luu, seems like a very friendly and likeable person. I especially liked the idea of using the sounds that cell phones and other electronic devices make as a reminder to stop and breathe and be mindful.

If you know of any other similar videos or resources on mindfulness practice for beginners please leave a comment.

Recently I’ve fallen in love with Backbone.js. If you haven’t had a chance to check it out yet, I highly recommend it. It’s a framework for structuring javascript applications into models, views and collections. Yes collections. Just check it out.

Apparently, the way to learn any new javascript MVC framework is to study the todo list application built with it. (Check out this github repository to find the todo list app for your prefered framework.) The backbone todo list application is well documented in this split screen annotated source file that really helped me a lot. There is also a working example that I referenced quite a bit.

One thing that was obviously missing to me was the ability to drag and drop the todo items into a specific order. I did eventually find another version of the app that did have drag and drop but it looked to be implemented with mootools. Now I haven’t quite gotten around to learning mootools yet. Bad I know. I’m highly dependent on jQuery at this time so I wanted to figure out how to do it with jQuery and more specifically jQuery UI.

Googling didn’t lead me to any ready-made solutions so I decided to try to figure it out on my own. So here’s the solution I came up with.

I’m nearly finished with the form I set out to create using Zend_Form and I’ve only written one blog post about what I’ve learned so far. I want to try to get as much knowlege in writing as I can before it’s gone. I’m starting to find that I am only an “expert” at what I’m presently doing at the time. Everything else I have to re-learn at some point and that’s what I’m hoping blog posts like this will help me do when the time comes. That and it might actually help someone else. Who knows.

When I first got started learning Zend_Form, I really wanted to stop and try to understand more about the different ways to create elements. The more I looked at different resources online and in books, I was seeing different ways of creating and configuring elements. At first this was confusing but I came to see how this made form creation incredibly flexible.

I’ve been having a love/hate relationship with the Zend Framework as I attempt to learn how to use it. No doubt it is incredibly powerful but it may be overly complicated for my tastes. Maybe I was having a bad day or following bad instructions, but setting up an initial site using Zend for the first time took me HOURS! This is not the first PHP framework I’ve ever used either. I used to manage my personal site in Codeigniter and many years ago tried and loved Cake PHP. Anyway I’m not sure what the problem was, but by the time I got to the blue welcome screen I was exhausted and went no further.

More recently however, I had a need to develop an application on a server I knew had Zend installed on it. The thought of repeating the frustrations from several months earlier did not sound appealing so I have set out to experiment with using the Zend Framework without the Framework, or, in other words, the Zend classes without the MVC. Most of what I have learned so far has come from other posts on the Internet, so I now know I’m not the only one who’s ever attempted to do this.

Actually this turned out to be pretty easy. The rest of this post covers the creation of a very basic, standalone zend form.