I humbly offer my meager contribution to the multitude of Hot Wing recipes.

Steve’s Grill/Pot Hot Wings

So as always I work myself to death to integrate my design and application into very author-friendly web sites with a strong tendency to provide greater flexibility and scalability than likely the customer will ever use. My good friend Mark Thoney of Wyolution.com often asks me, “are they really going to use that?” or “do you think they will really need that level of automation?” (well, I have paraphrased here. He’s typically a little more abusive as college buddies can be) My common response is “No *sigh*, but but..” but they “may” need it some day and when they do I don’t want to have to revisit the code in two years when they become the next Amazon or MySpace (oh a definite liklihood…. I often suffer from allusions of grandeur). …So when I come to my senses, pull myself back, and focus more on driving the car over building it I realize I can let myself off the hook on the “required” level of complexity I am building.

Every customer is different for sure but they do have a common thread of not being veteran web developers who are just happy to see any content about their world on the internet. It does not have to be hard to meet expectations when I combine the low bar requirements of the customer (or at least my customers) with what I personally like when navigating and reading a web site. As an example, building an N-tier site navigation tree is not only complex but is no fun to navigate as a user. Unless what you are delivering is some deep online catalog site then it could be warranted, however even then user tendencies (my tendencies) are to break into searching before I am willing to drill down over 2 to 3 levels.

What seems to be at the core of my drivers in development is how much training and support do I want or have time to do. Regardless of how feature rich the end solution is does the end product allow the author to input their content easily and happily. My mode is that the easier I can make it the less they will need to call me. In trying to find a balance I have to look to proven web authoring tools that have strong community acceptance or hope to write my own to directly meet my customer’s need. Of course the latter is the harder and has never proven to get me out support and training issues. In my current generation of tools (Wordpress, etc.) I am hoping to capitalize on the former.

I will always battle how to make it easier for the author without making it harder for me and am certain I will wage that war for as long as I continue to do this work. “Keep it simple stupid” echoes often in my head (the result of many years of the afore mentioned abuse from said college buddy) as this mantra does for all web developers. My hope is that what I create in the end is not “simply stupid”.

Using simple recursion to traverse up the tree of the page hierarchy I was able to accurately land the top page or parent from any location in the site. I say “simple” as it was “simple” to write after I spent three hours researching the Wordpress object model and function library, not to mention the contortionist like bending I had to do with my brain to efficiently and safely write the recursive loop.

So now that I could go up and down the tree with ease my second big issue was being able to pull page objects by name and not ID. Add a dash of Google and a smidgen of forum browsing and walla! you find the “Get-a-post” plugin. Just a simple PHP function include plugin that builds out a post object by querying the WP database by slug name instead of ID. Awfully clever… but hats off to the WP engineers for such a dynamically rich API that allows for such customization. With this plugin and a minor modification or two I am now able to fetch aside text for any page in the site or default to the aside text of the top most parent page.

Now to add blinking text…