Cage Data, Inc.

Here at Cage I have started the process of moving one of our older sites into Mura. The organization is an educational non-profit so needless to say they have a lot of involvement in educational functions. One page on their website is a calendar of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) events throughout the state of Connecticut and with that they will have a calendar navigation content object on the home page so that people can quickly see if events are coming up.

One problem with the calendar navigation component as is is that it does not display the title of the calendar so people can’t see what they are looking at. If we just blindly throw the title onto it for every page then we will show it on the Calendar page (if the content object is displayed there) which causes a bit of unnecessary redundancy. So I came up with a solution that was surprisingly quick as you will see in the following post.

The Evergreen America Corporation has now officially launched their website with us here at Cage Data.  We are extremely excited about their website hosting with us.

Over the past couple of months Cage Data's web team with the assistance of Lui Nobrege of Spring Innovation has worked on building a full website and e-commerce site for Evergreen and we are proud to announce that as of today, August 6th 2010, we have launched their website to the public.

You can see Evergreen's main website here at www.evergreenamerica.com.

You can also find the products that they sell here at store.evergreenamerica.com.

On behalf of myself and the rest of the team at Cage Data we thank Evergreen America for joining our family.

Sometimes just having text for your sub navigation just isn't enough.  I recently had a client who wanted their sub-navigation to use logos for the two product families as the links and then have the products within the two product families to be displayed below that as plain text links. Normally in website design this would be pretty simple; just use CSS to give the text an indent of something like -9999px or something like that, and use a background image setting the width, height, and block display of the anchor element.  The problem however is that this was within Mura CMS, which out of the box does not give individual IDs to elements in the navigation.

So I realized that I needed to tweak Mura a little bit to get this to work.

Buttons are used everywhere on the web today, whether it be to submit a form or draw attention to a link.  The problem with good looking buttons is that they are images, which can be difficult to make, and even more difficult to add animations to (such as making the button look different when hovered over.  The problem with the HTML button tag (or input tag with type of button) is that without good styling you still need to know how to do a JavaScript location function and have an ugly gray button.

Before we start this tutorial I will point out that the CSS is mainly in CSS3, so it will work on most browsers except IE8 or lower.

So first lets go through the HTML as that is only one line of code (not only that but one tag).  The HTML is simply an anchor tag that we gave a class of btn_pretty. I also added an image inside my link to add a little bit more to the button.

Today I decided that my iPhone 3G just wasn't cutting it with iOS4.  Not only did Apply severely limit the features for the 3G (which I now understand why) but the battery life was just terrible.  I was down to charging it overnight every night and generally half way through the day having to put a charge on it again, which is alright when I am in the office, as I normally just left it plugged in, but on the weekends when my goal is normally to get out of the house as much as possible it just wouldn't work.  So I went to the AT&T store and played with both phones for well over an hour and asked way too many questions to the clerk, that I believe some were over his head.  I was very interested to hear though that many AT&T employees actually recommended the Aria over the iPhone 4, especially for a developer that 1) doesn't run on a mac and B) doesn't want to pay a small fortune to run on a mac and join the Apple Developer community.

So the HTC Aria is a really nice little phone.  It is small enough that you feel like you are actually carrying a phone again, but not to small that you can't do or see anything on it.  The preloaded apps are also pretty nice.  You have your email client, calendar, and your usual AT&T apps (Mobile Banking, MobiTV, etc), but it also comes with some other nice apps like Peep, a pretty nice mobile Twitter client; Facebook; and FriendStream, an app to get notifications from Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr.

One thing that is really nice about the Android OS is that you can set your own Scenes, which are organization of your apps on the 7 home screens you have.  It is a really nice feature if you have a set of apps that you use during the work for work and a separate set of apps that you use during the weekend.  It is a nice feature to keep your work life and your personal life separate.  I personally don't foresee myself using the feature too much, but it is a nice one to have.

Another nice feature is that they separated Gmail into it's own app separate from the traditional email app. This is one feature that seems small, but I am really excited about.  My biggest problem with the iPhone, was that Gmail showed up terribly in the Mail app.  I love using label in Gmail rather than folders, and the iPhone mail app just didn't organize it well enough.  I found myself seeing new email come in and going to the mobile website to read the email.

The phone and video camera aren't as good as the iPhone 4, but they still are pretty good.  I have never been one to take many pictures with my phone, but I may find myself doing it more now with the 5 megapixel camera that is built in to the Aria.

The battery life on the Aria so far surpasses the iPhone by well a lot.  I don't have experience with how the iPhone 4's battery is, but as far as what I have heard about the 3GS and my own 3G the Aria so far has been running all day with me constantly using it, like a kid with their new toy, and the battery is showing 75% battery life.

Just wanted to post here a code snippet that I wrote for creating Modal Windows with jQuery and CSS.  Below is the JavaScript and CSS to create the windows.  The source can also be found at http://gist.github.com/442551 or cloned from git://gist.github.com/442551.git. 

Well everyone I (David) am back from Uganda.  My wife and I did 1 week of missions and then took a 1 week honeymoon on safari.  It was a beatuiful 2 weeks working with children at Kampala Childrens Centre in Kampala, Uganda.  Our work was focused on meeting with children in the community and helping them to understand more about being creative and how to use the gifts God gave them.  I returned to work in the office today, Tuesday, May 1^st.