My name is Clayton McIlrath and I am an entrepreneur currently living in CO. I personally enjoy the process of learning, exploring, and doing all things creative as well as sharing my experiences with others. Being an entrepreneur and business owner, I hope that my experiences may help someone else start their own venture and find success and freedom as I have! Feel free to contact me anytime for questions or opportunities.
As a developer, I’m always looking for ways to improve my coding practices and efficiency. In the programming world, I work almost completely with frameworks such as Zend and CodeIgnitor using MVC at it’s fullest. On the front-end, I’ve learned to use Blueprint CSS combined with semantic markup to standardize my layouts. But now, I’ve [...]
A while back, I developed an application to automate our workflow and gather information from potential clients before meeting with them. This was a pretty basic RFP form, but I had many people tell me how interested they were in it, and that they wanted to use it for themselves. Within a few weeks of launching that RFP we had finished our new brand and it was already outdated. Rather than updating and re-skinning I decided to start from scratch and share the old one with whoever wants it. You can customize this application as necessary, but please give credit to Chosen with a link back to this site or the main Chosen site.. even if the link is hidden, we still like it there for SEO.
I love learning new programming languages, especially if it solves a need that I have and automates my process a bit more. I spent a couple hours learning AppleScript which is a programming language for Mac that let’s you access the API and make basic function calls to cocoa based programs and applications. One such need that I had is compressing my JavaScript and CSS files before uploading to the web server. There are many applications and ways to this online, but they all are three or more steps to get the compressed file. A while back I downloaded the YUI java applet to do the compression on my desktop via Terminal, which sped up my process a bit, but since I only used it once in a great while, I’d always have to look up the parameters that I needed to pass to it. So today when I went to look it up, I decided I was going to be adventurous and try something new. That adventure led me to a solution that I’m happy with, and you may enjoy as well.
Wordpress is jam-packed with some great features out of the box, and has been developed to make customization simple. However, Wordpress started out as a blogging CMS, and still has a way to go before some features are one-click or drag-n-drop easy. One such feature, custom fields, are a powerful and great tool to make your WP theme a little more creative. However, to take advantage of custom fields, you’ll need to get dirty with the code.
The guys over at Chosen Creative have given us yet another awesome way to make are lives easier! This script generates a list of all files in a directory using a PHP function to read the directory files starting with the underscore _ character, and then it outputs them into a JQuery styled accordion menu!
Here’s [...]
