Today it was decided to put the cjfay.com forums to rest – for good. I figured after almost a year of zero usage, including myself, that it was providing little more than a vulnerability into my hosting space. The forums were started almost four years ago as a means to help our family communicate just a bit more, which failed miserably, then turned into a dumping ground for little notes and reminders of sites I’d been to. Over time, I [...]

Have you ever met someone, seen a picture, read a book, heard a song, that for some reason or another made you feel like you did when heading back to school Monday morning after a good camping trip? You know, that nostalgic unsettling feeling of life passing into memory when you wish it wouldn’t. For the most part, I don’t notice it happening – the days slip by without consideration of the tally gaining on me, the cost of living [...]

Thank God for Google Reader and subsequently RSS for that matter. Sure, like probably most other’s my feed list is becoming a behemoth mess growing limbs and swiftly on its way to consuming the world with black hole’esk gravitational mass, but who cares? It’s my digital coffee in the morning and the red bull that fuels my late night spidering towards becoming a better designer and developer – for that I am grateful.

As most designers and developers can attest [...]

Just wanted to post an update regarding AdRavage as it has been a while since the last significant changes to the site aesthetically and/or functionally. The UI has been completely redesigned with hopes of making things easier to find, use, and just overall more intuitive. The last design was based on a template and figured it was about time I put together my own design for the site – hence the updates.

I also updated the codebase with some timezone [...]

EnvatoTracker is a Windows desktop tool that polls the Envato API for any new sales and notifies you if one is found either via email, tray popup (with a customizable alert sound), or both.

download: EnvatoTracker (416.07KB)
added: 05/01/2009
clicks: 99
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So I figured I’d combine the testing of my newly upgrade Wordpress 2.7 install with a blazingly interesting blog post. OK, maybe blazingly interesting could be applied to many things none of which include the post you are now reading. Regardless, I type on….

I recently discovered that Craigslist’s rss feeds leave much to be desired in terms of well formed xml. A large portion of the AdRavage back-end magic works by parsing the rss results of searches, and the bulk of this is achieved through Magpie RSS. Unfortunately, when returned feeds contain invalid encoding or have structural issues they become virtually impossible to parse – at least by default.

Fortunately one of my users created a search that returned parsing errors of this nature [...]