Now Live!

I was very careful to offer the full access and functionality while still formatting it for the small screen real-estate of the iPhone. I can’t stand sites that offer limited functionality on the iPhone version. Usually I'd rather just have the full site when that happens. So I think I have avoided that on this mobile version of the site.

And the nice thing is, you don’t have to visit a special URL. All the URLs are the same. I’m detecting the browser type with PHP. If the browser loading the page identifies itself with “iPhone” or “iPod” in the string, the page is served up in mobile format. If the browser does not identify itself as one of those two, the normal site loads. This is great because it prevents confusion and preserves permalinks etc.

To you Android users, I'm sorry! I thought the mobile version would work on Android, but I had a friend load it up on his Android phone and said it didn’t work right at all. So for now I'm serving the regular desktop version of the site to you Android users. Unfortunately I simply can't afford to get an Android device just for testing websites so I can’t develop an Android version at this time.

The rest of this post may get a bit geeky so if you do not have an inner geek, please feel free to ignore the rest. You have been warned.

So I'm kinda excited seeing as how I really am not any good at PHP programing and despise it in general (don't get me wrong, I think PHP is a good thing, I'm just more of an HTML/CSS person). The code was actually fairly simple to implement. And believe it or not, I didn’t actually even find this exact code, I found the principle and modified it to fit my needs. So here's what it looks like:

<?php

$iphone = strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],"iPhone");
$ipod = strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],"iPod");
if ($iphone||$ipod == true) { echo 'Mobile Code Goes Here'; }

else { echo 'Normal Code Goes Here'; }
?>

It's actually fairly straight forward. The first two lines find out if the browser is identifying itself as iPhone or iPod, the second line says, if either one of those is true ( the double vertical bar means “or") then use the code in the “echo” section.

And of course “else” delivers the desktop version of the site. I must admit it took me about a week of evenings to get it just right, but I got it none the less. Now I have a few other sites I'd like to implement this on!

First, God gave us Allen:

Then God gave us Natasha:

And now we are excited to say that God has chosen to bless us with number 3! We expect this new bundle of joy to make an appearance around the first of next year!

Yeah, this is going to be a lame post just to say that I’ve updated some stuff about the site and therefore have now “almost” finished the clean up from the changeover to the 3.0 design.

Here’s the changes:

• Added my 4 latest tweets from Twitter to the sidebar.


• Updated the about page with current information. Including some subtle changes to some of the text to make the theology section more clear.

Yes, I know I still need to actually do the portfolio page. I’ll get to it… eventually…

Welcome to the 3.0 design of TJDraper.com! You will find things have been cleaned up in general. And with the two pillar side bars instead of just one, there is less scrolling to see everything in the sidebars. The Sidebar on the left is for blog utility related items like Recent Posts, Categories, Monthly Archives etc. The sidebar on the left is for stuff I want to put there, like site info, blog roll etc.

Also, for those who care, the core coding will validate, and all CSS validates with the W3C validator. You will run into some archive pages that won’t validate simply because a picture I posted a while back didn’t have the alt= attribute assigned to the img tag.

This is also my first website that will not work in IE 6. But that’s okay because it’s very hard to write code that works in modern browsers and validates, as well as works in IE6. So if any of my readers are still using IE6 I urge you to upgrade, preferably crossgrade even to Safari.

So not only have my ninja skills improved for writing code that validates, but my speed has also improved. I did this re-design in 6 hours. Granted I based the graphic design off the previous look so I didn’t sit around too much racking my brain for color schemes and stuff, and I did recycle (copy and paste) some of the Expression Engine specific code that makes the blog work. But still, it only took me 6 hours.

Me Happy!

Wait, I have a blog?!? Say it ain’t so! If I had a blog I would keep it up to date. I would certainly NEVER allow two months to go by without a single post on said blog...

Okay, okay, so I’ve been a bit busy. But I will try to find some time to post a little more often.

I’ve downloaded a cool new iPhone app called iBlogger so I can post easily from my phone.

This is a test to make sure it works. If you are reading this then it does.