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So it’s been a while since this site has seen any love but now I am dusting the covers and will try to not neglect it as much in the future. As I return I’m looking at how this site looks and think it’s time for a new dress. I’m thinking on what direction to go as well as actually complete the things I intended to add originally – like the project page. Working with Drupal more and more has opened my eyes to many new features and module which I’d like to use, not to mention a lot of cool javascript wizardry like Processing.js. These changes will happen sometime in the next couple months, just have to sit and plan a good approach to it.

Now, what have I been up to? Well actually if you’ve looked at my github you would notice a great many things. Firstly I’m working on an activity stream plugin for rails with the intention of being dead easy to capture activities. I would say it’s pretty near completion though I still have to work out some kinks in capturing the indirect object in associations, might need to rethink how it’s currently done.

Secondly, I’ve been working on my most handiest rails plugin, retrieve resource. This baby I like and I like it a lot. Essentially it is a handy macro to fetch your active record models in your controllers instead of having the write the same functions in each controller over and over again. There are a few scenarios I’ve come across which don’t work as ellegantly as I’d like it to, so I’m planning on a rewrite for version 2. This will be a big change and might break your app should you’ve done any overrides. You’ve been warned.

The next beauty is a collection of jQuery UI widgets that I find very handy, such as a multi-file uploader (Firefox 3.6 only), image cropper and an auto-completer. These haven’t been fully tested so careful when you use them.

Lastly, how is Bandalive coming along? Well the short answer is it is. The long answer is it’s getting there. And the very long answer is I’m currently working on uploading audio files. What you can do now if create an account (and I’m proud of how this process is done, not to gloat), create a band and invite members, add gigs to a band, upload photos (with my handy multi-file uploader) and select your band’s profile picture. Doesn’t seem much but it’s a slow process because I’m trying to make it as simple as can be for people to use. Once the music uploader is done I will work on the band profile and listing pages, attending gigs and the notifications and then launch an alpha release. So stay tuned, it is coming.