Cage Data Blog

Help Cage Decide on a Design for the New CT Academy Home Page

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 10:20:00 -0400

Recently I started migrating a site into Mura CMS, a great Content Management System built by the Blueriver Interactive Group. We were keeping most of the site design the same with a few minor changes. One page we are changing though is the home page. We want it to be more user friendly. We have come down to two layouts for the page.

Showing the Title in a Calendar Navigation Object When Not On the Calendar Page

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 15:44:00 -0400

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.

New Website Launched

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 09:33:00 -0400

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.

Adding CSS IDs to your Navigation Elements in Mura CMS

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 15:18:00 -0400

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.

Embedding TrueType Fonts Using Only CSS

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 14:43:00 -0400

Just a quick tutorial today. We all know that we have been able to embed Portable Font Resources and Embeddable Open Type fonts into websites since CSS1, but who has ever been successful at converting and embedding their fonts? Today I found a way to embed TrueType fonts (.TTF) into web pages. Unfortunetly it only seems to work in Mozilla, Webkit (Chrome and Safari) and Opera. IE… catch up on the times

Review of the HTC Aria on AT&T

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 14:42:00 -0400

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.

Creating Great Looking Buttons Using CSS3

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 14:41:00 -0400

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.

Upgrades to Cage Data's email hosting services

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 10:44:00 -0400

To all of our wonderful clients utilizing our email hosting services:

Have you noticed something new about your web interface when you logged into your email this past week? We are currently in the process of upgrading our email hosting servers to run on iMail 11. So far we have managed to do the largest part of the upgrade with very minimal downtime, something that our hosting team has always been proud of.

If you notice and problems connecting to your email please either call Cage Data's office at (203) 774-0294 or you can email us atsupport@cagedata.com. You can also keep up with the rest of the update progress on Twitter (@cagedata) and Facebook

Modal-Window Code Snippet

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 14:52:00 -0400

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.

David is Back from Uganda

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 14:11:00 -0400

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.

Using Taskill to End a Process Without Task Manager

Thu, 13 May 2010 22:07:00 -0400

Ever had that annoying situation where you cannot stop something from happening that just keeps on happening over and over again. Recently while working on a client computer which was infected with malicious software (MalWare) I needed to stop a process but the Task Manager didn’t have any tabs on the top so I could not click on the process tab. So reaching back into the depths of memory I recalled there has to be a way to do this. And sure enough there is. So below is republished information on how to kill a system process from the command prompt. Taskkill is a windows command line utility to allow you to stop and force stop a running process from command line.
Taskkill - Ends one or more tasks or processes. Processes can be killed by process ID or image name.

20 Years of War & Heartache

Tue, 04 May 2010 17:14:00 -0400

Over the past 20 years there has been much need for support in Uganda. Joseph Kony has been kidnapping children throughout Northern Ugandan and forcing them to fight in his rebel army (the Lords Resistance Army, or LRA). Children to young to know anything about the world around them have been forced to kill their very own parents. This war, as you can guess, has left Northern Uganda very tattered. Invisible Children is an amazing group out to spread awareness and bring support for Northern Uganda. To read more about the LRA, Northern Uganda, and Invisible Children please visit http://www.invisiblechildren.com/about/history/.

DR Mission Team

Tue, 04 May 2010 16:41:00 -0400

For the past 20 years, a local church in Wallingford, CT has been leading yearly mission/work trips down to La Romana, Dominican Republic. The first group went in 1990 with just a handful of people. This year, 85 people will board two buses on July 2nd and travel to JFK to catch a plane to spend a week down to the DR.