Yo! How's everyone doing? I just got home from my second tattoo session with George and things are coming along awesomely. He got the color in the waves done and the shading done up top, and I'm going back for 1 (maybe 2) more session(s) to finish it up in a few weeks. Here's a not-so-great preview:

I'll get some better pictures of it up when it's not puffy, bloody, and wrapped in saran wrap.

We had an awesome time on our anniversary trip to Mexico! We spent 4 nights in Maroma Beach, which is about 30 minutes south of Cancun, at this awesome, beautiful new all-inclusive resort. Included in our activities was relaxing, sippin' drinks, visiting Chichen Itza, partially fishtailing our rental car before catching some air on a speed bump, etc. It was very relaxing and beautiful! Oh, and I can't stop talking about this—I'm not a big drinker, but while in Mexico, I tried "crema de tequila", and it's very delicious. I bought myself a bottle in fact, so if you get a chance to try it, I recommend it. Check out my lady's Flickr account to see some photos of the trip.

So I want to talk about a little something else that came along with our anniversary—as a gift to my wife, I made a nice illustration for her. Illustration is something I love and I'm always inspired by, and it's always been something I wish I was much better at. Especially when I look at all the stuff that my pals Josh and Colby make—very talented both as designers and illustrators. So I got a concept in mind for something I wanted to draw for Ashley for our anniversary. The way it was in my mind was awesome (of course) but I was extremely skeptical of whether or not I could pull something off that was half way decent. Here is my first stab at my concept in my sketchbook:

Pretty awesome, right? Not. I got a little discouraged after I finished this, but I showed it to Colby, he gave me some nice tips, I took a day while Ashley was away shooting a wedding, and I was actually very happy with the end result:

I did it on this 8.5" x 11" cardboard-ish paper that I really like using Micron pens and color pencils. It's pretty close to what I had in mind, Colby's suggestions helped me get it to look a bit more polished, and—the best part—Ashley loved it! So I'm going to try to work on improving my drawing here and there, and maybe post some more stuff on here in the future.

Howdy strangers, it's been a while! What's going on? A lot's been happening over on my end. I am fully entrenched into the iPhone and Twitter worlds of nerd-dom (things which were new to me in my last post). Eventually I'm sure I'll have some goofy thing on the site here where you can see my latest tweet, in case there's not enough useless stuff for you to look at on here.

You might have noticed a slight change in my header/navigation area—I decided it needed of slight touch of spiffing to make the nav a little clearer. Unfortunately though, I've been starting to get that 8-month-itch to redesign the whole damn site. I've been thinking of some ideas but if this site serves as any example, it will take years to pan out.

So you're probably wanting to hear the juicy goodness referenced in this post's title, so let's get down to it. I just recently turned the big 2-5 on August 16th and I've been wanting to get a tattoo for a while now so my lovely wife decided to make that her gift to me. The tattoo I decided to get is sort of a tribute to San Francisco and my love for the city. It's an awesome illustration done by my favorite San Francisco artist, Jeremy Fish.

Jeremy Fish's "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" piece. Photo borrowed from Fecal Face and taken from his Once Upon A Time book

I did a lot of searching to find the perfect artist to take care of it for me and, after some looking, found George Campise who works out of 7th Son Tattoo, which happens to be located within a couple blocks of the Cuban Council office. I found his portfolio online somehow and was really impressed with his work—especially his awesome coloring—so I made an appointment and I dropped off my copy of Jeremy Fish's 'Once Upon a Time' book with the piece in it, he traced it and added some sweet waves and turned it into a half sleeve. George turned out to be a very nice and super talented guy and he finished the black outline last Wednesday, August 20th, and I'll be dropping back in to start on the color in mid-September. Here's a peek just after getting it finished up:

Taken by guess who...

I'm totally stoked about it and can't wait to get it finished up!

The wife and I just had our 1 year anniversary on Monday (woo! high five wife!) and to celebrate, we've planned a trip to Mexico for a week starting September 7th. It should be really nice and relaxing and we're both looking forward to it.

I've been learning and experimenting a lot more than usual lately so I should have some more nerd-o code blogs coming up soon. Until then, let me know what you think of my tat and let me know if you might be getting any ink done soon. Bye!

As I sat in line outside of the Stonestown mall in San Francisco Friday evening, waiting to purchase the brand new iPhone 3G, I couldn't help but take a step back and look at myself from a 3rd person perspective. I thought of what I would think of myself if I were 5-6 years younger, back in the days when I was in a punk band and whatnot. I would definitely think my current self was a big tard. I've grown into a huge, flourishing nerd and that's OK.

I've never waited in a huge line for anything, not for new Nike shoes, not for an XBox or a Wii, nothing. So this was a first, and probably a last for me. I got in line at around 7pm and I was thinking, "If this line moves along nicely, I'll stay, otherwise I'm getting the hell out of here." We had tried going to the AT&T store by our house about 15 minutes before the store opened that morning. We waited til about 15 minutes after it opened, with no line movement with the 200+ person line, and left. After standing in line at Stonestown for about 15 minutes, I was told by a friendly Apple Store employee that I was the very last person that was going to receive an iPhone that night, and I was now accompanied by a security guard that was going to make sure of it. It was a sign, and I had to stay now! I was the chosen one!

The most entertaining and sad part of the night was all of the people who just couldn't believe the line was closed. It's truly amazing how selfish people can be! Apple Store employees are human after all, and need to go home—don't they? There must have been a good 50+ people who came and argued with the security guard and/or the Apple employees monitoring the line, things like: "But I called ahead and they told me to come down and it was only an hour wait", "But I drove here all the way from the northern part of the city (for any non-San Franciscans, that's a grueling 8.5 minute drive)", etc. I mean it's just a phone. And everyone who was complaining followed their complaint session with a cell phone call (a good 90% of whom made their calls with 1st gen. iPhones) to bitch to their friends about it, so it's not like they were in dire need of the phone.

You might be thinking, "Well Chris, you were waiting in the gigantor line, so you're as pathetic as those complaining people". No dude. I was the chosen one. And if they had told me the line was closed, I simply would have left and gone to eat at Chevy's, which was conveniently located within about 60 feet of the line. They have this really good corn stuff and Dos Equis Amber, mmm.

So we waited until 10:30pm, when we were about 15 people from the front of the line they announced, "Sorry folks, the AT&T servers are completely down". Lots of cursing, ooh-ing and aww-ing ensued, but thankfully they gave us front-of-the-line vouchers to use the next day. Woohoo! While waiting for our vouchers, me and the wife manage to thwart a few would-be line-dropper-inners who tried to grab the goods without waiting the 3.5 hours. Hi 5, wife.

So Saturday we took a nice leisurely morning, headed back to the Apple store around 12:30 and got right in line with about 5 people ahead of us and got our phones, woohoo! I have to say the iPhone is pretty amazing, and with all of the new apps, so very useful and fun! I've always resisted getting a Twitter account because it's just never seemed interesting to me, but as a result of my iPhone and the Twitterific app, I am now the nerdy owner of a spankin new Twitter account.

I'm not sure if it's because I'm already a Mac user, but it's crazy how easy and intuitive it is to use. Within hours of using it, I already felt like a pro. The one tricky part is the keyboard, but I'm sure I'll get used to it. I've already got the AIM app, Loopt, Twitterific, and I'm going to give Evernote a try since it has an app, and I've heard such good things about it from TUAW. Anyone else get a new iPhone? Any new apps that are rockin your world?

On an entirely unrelated note (or two), Juan stayed with us for the week and stole our toothpaste upon departure. We all went to Phil's (another fellow Cubano) wedding last Sunday, which was beautiful and awesome. We had the most delicious tacos in the world on Friday at La Taqueria, and it was bitter-sweet without Phil around. Normally we all do 2 tacos without going into a food coma but Phil always challenges us to a 3rd. He's usually the only one who accepts the challenge. He's in Jamaica with his lady, rockin' the ganj and getting dreadlocks. That's all for now folks, talk to you soon!

My pal and fellow Cubano, Juan has always hated how I track my links on this site. When I first started it up, I wanted to create a shared library on here, where I could sync up all of my links from del.icio.us in a table in my local database, and use those links all over, in my posts, etc., track their clicks, and then have a listing of all my links by tag, and, from tracking clicks, also be able to sort them by popularity. It still might happen eventually, but I haven't been thoroughly motivated to finish it up. I used to want to finish it really badly so I could use it for my own purposes. I use Firefox along with the Delicious plugin, and I always want to search links by all of the tags I enter. For example, if I put in 'Subversion Manual' (that combo is used a lot), I only want to see the links that have both of those tags, not either of them. Well it seems with the update to Firefox 3 there was also an update to the Delicious plugin that takes care of this for me. Motivation fully depleted.

Either way, I have been thinking of reworking the link tracking for quite some time. I've been using the format '/links/go/123' to track the links, rather than the URL itself. I think this frustrated Juan because he likes to see his status bar update at the foot of his browser and decide if he wants to go to that link or not. There have been a number of projects I've worked on where link tracking has been asked for by the client, so I decided to throw something together today.

I created a MooTools class called 'LinkTrack' that, in a simple 19 lines of code, scans the page for the links you specify, and, on the click event, sends the link information to a specified URL via AJAX. Here's what the class looks like:

var LinkTrack = {
    track: function(links, url) {        
        links.each(function(item) {
            item.addEvent('click', function() {
                var request = new Ajax(url, {
                    method: 'post', 
                    data: {
                        'url': item.getProperty('href'),
                        'title': item.getProperty('title')
                    },
                }).request();
            });
        });
    }
};

And here's what the function call looks like:

window.addEvent('domready', function() {
    LinkTrack.track($$('a[target=_blank]'), '/links/track/');
});

So here I passed in all 'a' tags with a '_blank' target, so I track every link leading away from the site. You could easily change this to track all links with the class 'link', or whatever else you can think up. I've got this site running in CakePHP, so I made a 'track' method in my 'links' controller that looks like this:

<?php

class LinksController extends AppController {
    
    ...
    
    function track() {
        $this->autoRender = false;
        if (preg_match('/http:\/\/(www\.)?ascendvisual.com(.*)/', $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']) && $this->RequestHandler->isAjax() && !empty($_POST['url'])) {
            
            $data = $_POST;

            if ($find = $this->Link->find(array('url' => $data['url'])) {
                $this->id = $find['Link']['id'];
                $out = $this->Link->saveField('clicks', ($find['Link']['clicks'] + 1));
            } else {
                $data['clicks'] = 1;
                $out = $this->Link->save($data);
            }
            
        }
    }
}

?>

I run a check to make sure the request is coming from my own site, that it's an AJAX request (using CakePHP's RequestHandler Component), and that a URL is set. The I scan my links table to see if that URL is already in there. If it is, I increment the click count, if not, the record is created with a click value of '1'. Pretty simple eh?

Feel free to let me know what you think, and, if you'd like, you can download the MooTools LinkTrack class I made by clicking here or over on the right under 'Related Snippets'. That's all for now folks, have a fantastic 4th of July weekend!

Hey folks! It's been a while! Sorry it's been a while but that's just how I roll. I've actually been thinking up all sorts of nerdy subject matter, it's just been crazy as always and I haven't forced myself to post. I finally got myself into a corner to post for you today, awesome right?

It's been live for a while now, but I finally got my wife Ashley's photography portfolio website launched, go check it out! Today I'm going to spill the beans on how I made it, and hopefully give some of you folks some good ideas. It was a fairly quick and simple build using CakePHP, the Flickr API and some MooTools magic.

So the coolest thing about the site is that it's all Flickr-fed. Ashley chose a set of categories she wanted to use and I had her create Flickr sets for each of them. Each category you click on references a specific Flickr set that's pulled in and cached via a nice, reusable table-less Flickr model I created for CakePHP. Why is that even cool you ask? Because I didn't have to worry about handling and storing uploads or anything—the site requires no admin interface at all—and it also works as a bit of extra exposure for her shots, being both on the Flickr site and her portfolio site. The Flickr model I've created has proven useful in a number of cases—I even use it on this very site for when user comments are posted. I basically just disable Cake's table linkage and used a few methods to access Flickr's various API methods.

The most challenging part of the site was the Javascript. If you check the site out, you can see that the image is preloaded (using the MooTools Assets class), the thumb menu is animated, and there are some nice fade transitions in there too. I accomplished it all in a custom MooTools class called 'Photoset'. It ended up being about 180 lines of code—not too bad—and handles all of the javascript on the site—the loading, fades, menu, everything. The load/fade transition was the trickiest part, but I used the Asset class along with MooTools chaining and did it in about 12 lines of code:

this.loader.start(1).chain(function() {
    new Asset.image(load, { 
        onload: function() {
            this.loader.start(0).chain(function() {
                this.photoFade.start(0).chain(function() {
                    this.photo.src = load;
                    this.photoFade.start(1);
                    this.showing.setText((index + 1));
                    this.loading = false;
                }.bind(this));
            }.bind(this));ˇ
        }.bind(this)
    });
}.bind(this));

Basically I fade in the 'loading' indicator, preload the image via Asset.image, fade out the loader, fade out the previous photo, change the photo source, and fade it back up. Whew! Chaining is a little tricky to structure in a nice, readable way, but so nice to use! With MooTools chaining, you can set a stack of time-based functions in line to occur one after the other. It's basically like using an onComplete event to call another function, just much easier and cleaner.

And that's all! Check out the site and you know where to go if you need a good (and sexy) photographer. Feel free to post comments if you have any questions and look out for plenty more updates coming soon.