MentalReality is the place where I, Joe Turner, get to rant & rave about all things web.
You will also notice some general posts about anything else I take a fancy to, mainly Apple
products, cars, and any other cool or geeky stuff.
Now a little about me. I graduated from Aston University in Summer 2005, and since then have
been working commercially in the Web industry. I currently work for top 50 advertising agency
WAA, where I get to work with many household name brands.
My main strengths are PHP5, XHTML, CSS & Javascript, although I also dabble with
Ruby on Rails in my spare time. I also follow Javascript
frameworks such as Script aculous &
Moo-Tools.
I have been involved with open-source project PHP-WAX for around 2 years, which is a lightweight
PHP5 framework, which allows for development of websites in record time by taking care of all the
mundane tasks for you. To go with this is a CMS (Content Management System) plugin called WildFire
CMS. This coupled with the PHP-WAX PHP framework allows developers to concentrate on the the finer
details of web development.
Latest Article
Posted on 2nd October 2007
After 4 months, I though it was about time I gave an update on my experience so far of Sky HD. After purchasing a 'HD-Ready' panasonic LCD TV, I thought it was only fair to order HD to complement it. Installation was painless, partly due to there already being a digital dish hanging on the wall of our house, but the engineers arrived on time, and were quick at efficient at setting everything up. The HD box itself has an updated design to the old Sky+ box, with is black out casing, with silver highlighting along the front.
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Posted on 30th September 2007
In this day and age, if you are a developer and not using some kind of version control for your applications, then you need to give yourself a kick up the backside and start updating your skillset. I recommend starting with Subversion (SVN) as this offers complete control over your repository and is also widely used, so there are plenty of Blogs and articles knocking about on Google. First of all you need to install SVN on both your server and local machine.
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Latest News
Posted on 23rd October 2007
On Monday Apple released details of the last quarters sales. Profits rose 66% to $904 million, which equates to £1. 01 per diluted share, based on sales of $6. 22 billion for the three month period ending September 29th 2007. Steve Jobs said: Apple shipped 2,164,000 computere representing 34% growth on the same quarter last year. The Company sold 10,200,000 iPods during the quarter, representing 17
percent growth over the year-ago quarter. Quarterly iPhone sales were
1,119,000, bringing cumulative fiscal 2007 sales to 1,389,000.
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Posted on 16th October 2007
Apple today announced that OS X 10. 5 (Leopard) would be released at 6pm on October 26th at Apple retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers. Apple's online store is now taking pre-orders for the operating system. Steve Jobs is quoted in saying - The Apple website has also been updated with a new look, see here.
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Latest Work
Posted on 29th September 2007
A recent project was to create a full e-commerce solution for a local aquatic shop. They already had an online store, using a heavily butchered version of OsCommerce. The brief was quite vague, basically to recreate all the features they currently had, and also to improve the Search Engine Friendliness of the site. A design was signed off, and so the work could begin on Aquatic-Store. co. uk I have previously completed a couple of projects using Ruby on Rails, and thought this new project would be the perfect opportunity to create a e-commerce application using the powerful RoR framework.
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