Lucas Wojciechowski

FaceBook Hackathon

lucas — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 13:19:19 +0000

I think I’ve just recovered enough from the 24 hour facebook hackathon to attempt a coherent story of my journey. Facebook went to great lengths to ensure everyone had a great time by providing tons of food, ripsticks, nerf guns, and facebook swag but it was the intangibles that really made the night such a success. Spending such a long period of time with 200 of the greatest hackers at the best schools in Canada, a handful of facebook engineers and Rasmus Lerdorf was simultaneously humbling and empowering.

My project (I seem to have missed the memo on the “hack” part of the competition) was a simple web application which can suggest randomized afternoon activities for you that are both geolocated and targeted to your interests. Its quick and simple but relatively well polished (and has already managed over 100 unique visitors). Check it out and let me know if you manage to break it!

ClassyNote Progress

lucas — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 00:27:58 +0000

It has been a long time since my original post on ClassyNote. Despite my silence, the project is still very much alive, albeit on the back burner for the moment; In working on the node.js backend for ClassyNote, I became very excited about what’s happening in the Server Side Javascript community and stumbled across some really interesting ideas but, I digress, that is another blog post (coming soon).

What I really wanted to write about is a ClassyNote UI prototype that I have built using my Nested Sortables jQuery plugin and some contentEditable goodness. This is my take on what an online note editor for students could look like

Strict hierarchy
Easy to edit and rearrange
Efficient keyboard shortcuts
Unobtrusive minimalist design

One thing that isn’t immediately apparent with the current iteration is that new notecards can be added by clicking the blank space between existing cards. I’m thinking about adding an expanding animation in the future to make it slightly more apparent.

The demo is online over here.

Classynote

lucas — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 00:18:54 +0000

Over the course of studying for mid-terms, I create a little ruby on rails application designed to help students collaboratively take notes and study. Its still in a really early stage of development, but I found it immensely useful in preparation for my mid-terms this year. Heres a little sneak peak at the homepage — expect more to come.

[EDIT] This project has since been renamed “Classynote” and is now online at http://classynote.com

jQuery UI Nested Sortables 2

lucas — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 22:27:39 +0000

Working on a recent project, I needed a jQuery plugin that would me to visually rearrange a hierarchy of HTML elements. Although I did find a couple possible solutions in the jQuery plugin directory, all the existing solutions made the nesting algorithm extremely jumpy and temperamental. I did, however, stumble across a plugin written for the deprecated jQuery Interface library called Nested Sortables. This plugin had the exact behavior I was looking for — nested sortables with a threshold that kept the nesting very smooth. Unfortunately, the outdated library which this code relied on made it an inelegant solutoin. Over a weekend, I decided to port the module over to jQuery UI, a process which eventually led me to rewrite everything except for the nesting algorithm itself. Although I took out many of the old plugin’s features in the process (namely, RTL support), the final product is very stable and lightweight. In hopes that someone else might find the code useful, check out the project’s github repo for the latest source, download the source directly or mess around with the demo.

The options you must pass to this plugin are:
indent: (default: 30) – The horizontal distance (in px) between levels of child nestables, usually the “margin-left” or “padding-left” of the lists which contain the child elements.

The options you may pass to this plugin are:
nestable: (default: ‘li’) – A selector which identifies the draggable and nestable elements within the list
container: (default: ‘ul’) – Each “nestable” element must have a container inside it for accepting children. This selector identifies that sub-list
start: A function to run on when dragging begins
stop: A function to run when the dragging ends
drag: A function to run at each movement of the mouse
handle: – A selector identifying a drag handle
opacity: (default: 1) – The opacity of the dragged element’s helper
placeholderClass: (default: ‘placeholder’) – The class of the placeholder – the temporary element created to show the final position of the helper as you drag it across the list.
maxDepth: (default: null) – The maximum depth at which items can be nested.

The HTML must be set up like this for the plugin to work:

List Item Content

DSU Web Design Club

lucas — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 15:02:00 +0000

A few months ago, I started a web design club for middle schoolers at my school district’s student union. Because middle school was the time that I became fascinated with computer programming I was excited about the idea of exposing some young kids to the challenges and joys of web design. After four weeks of meetings, I’m proud to post their first little web page online. Everyone involved seemed to enjoy themselves and I hope that basics they learned will enable them to experiment with more advanced topics on their own.

Duxbury National Honor Society

lucas — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 22:23:19 +0000

I have spent the last few days learning Ruby on Rails. Armed with the famous “Agile Development with Rails” and a long weekend, I had no difficulty getting a feel for the language and framework; however I knew I would not truly understand Rails until I created a sample application with it. Finding an unusual lack of projects to work on, I decided to build (completely unbeknownst to them) a prototype of a management tool for a National Honor Society chapter.

Currently, I would assume most NHS programs are entirely paper/email based which I speculate would create an enormous amount of work for those in charge. The tool I allows a chapter to handle meeting attendance, news distribution, volunteer hours, and an events calender (with RSVP) in a simple and clean online interface. Although my school is unlikely to deploy this software, I’d love to help out anyone who’s interested.

Rails itself is amazing. Coming from a background of unwieldy and verbose PHP applications, its clean syntax is a breath of fresh air. Concise, small, and elegant, the Ruby language makes programming so much fun; I can see why ROR has become such a popular framework so quickly.

Bohdan Wojciechowski

lucas — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 11:59:26 +0000

My grandfather, a retired chemical engineering professor, thinks about the future. In the past five years, he has written several social commentary books about his vision of the extrapolated long-term progress of the human race. His books needed a distribution platform, and centralized place on the internet, so I designed and built this web site. The design was inspired by the family crest, seen in the upper righthand corner, which he proudly displayed on the cover of most of these books. Working with only one or two low-resolution images of the Jelita crest, I created a scalable vector version ready for the 21st century. The image below the crest, although it is now static, will rotate through a library of historic, and modern, family photographs which will be linked to their appropriate section on the family history time line.

The web site is in the final stages of approval, so stay tuned for links.

My Vision for Ambrosia CMS

lucas — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 02:29:38 +0000

They say that all new technology begins as a science and ends as an art. On the surface, web design seems to be a poster child for this cliché: what was once a rarity requiring a large amount of technical knowledge is now a key component of any business or organization. If you’re not on the web, you do not exist to the modern consumer. Like any revolution, the rush to the internet has fostered an enormous market for software and services which aid small organizations who could not otherwise afford a web site. I am sure there are thousands of organizations who are perfectly happy making their own web sites with these tools but my experience in the world of web design tells a different story.

Despite their enticing claims, all the tools currently on the market fit into one of two buckets:

Easy to use but rigid (WordPress, Weebly, Tango CMS, TYPOlite, Wix, Joomla)
Complex and technical yet flexible (Drupal, CMS Made Simple, MODx, Expression Engine)

Every software package is either designed for the non-technical user or the developer. In reality, however, a website is almost always the result of collaboration between three major groups of people and any tool will alienate at least one of them:

The client
The web developer
The designer

Ideally, the client would take on all three roles themselves; however current tools are too complex for even a lone professional. Most professional designers do not know how to code a web site and most developers cannot design a high quality web page.

In the same way that the millions of nonchalant cell phone users were floored when they first saw the iPhone, I believe the web site industry needs to be turned on its head. Like the cell phones of yesteryear, today’s web site creation tools are clunky, outdated, and not terribly innovative. Like pre-iPhone cell phones, every single tool offers more or less the same functionality crammed behind a lackluster interface. A web site management tool should not be a necessary evil! It should be easy, even fun, to use.

Personally, I am dissatisfied with the current selection. So dissatisfied, in fact, I am going to write my own. I’m not worried about how my tool will fit into the market or who my target demographic is because I have a personal need to fulfill and I know I am not alone. Web designers often talk about the “mom test” as the ultimate benchmark of usability: if your mom could figure out how to use the interface without any help from you, its easy to use. I need a tool that can simultaneously pass the mom test while empowering me, the developer, feel free to build extremely complex interactive web sites.

This is my vision for Ambrosia CMS.

[Edit] Expect a more detailed run down on the specifics of how Ambrosia CMS will work over the next few days.

Stocks API

lucas — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 02:21:59 +0000

Problem: My dad likes to manage his stock portfolio by hand. To do this, he has a complex excel spreadsheet he uses to track and analyze the price fluctuations for each of the stocks he owns. Unfortunately, as his portfolio has grown, the labor of manually updating these spreadsheets has grown overwhelming and using someone else’s commercial software was not an option.

Solution: Faced with this technical dilemma, he did what any reasonable person would do faced with a technical challenge: run to the nearest computer geek. In this case, I happened to be closest. Upon hearing the problem, I instinctively assumed this was a common enough problem that it had been solved before — maybe it was even built into Excel. As it turns out, you can fetch the current stock price for any given stock through excel, but you cannot get the long term historical prices which we needed. In an hour, I turned out a small PHP script which can fetch the most recent 200 stock proces from Yahoo and format them into an excel-friendly XML feed.

Check it out! Open up Excel 2007 (I’m sure this works with earlier versions, but I’m not sure how) and create a new spreadsheet. Click on the “Data” tab on the ribbon then on the icon that says From Web. In the address bar, type http://stocks.lucaswoj.com/SYM (remplace SYM with the stock symbol). Press import and voilà, automatically updating, daily stock prices.

Heres the PHP that makes it happen:

// Get requested frequency (daily or weekly)
if (isset($_GET['frequency']) && ($_GET['frequency'] == 'weekly' || $_GET['frequency'] == 'daily')) {
$frequency = $_GET['frequency'];
} else {
$frequency = 'daily';
}
// Number of entires to get
$number = 201;
// Pick start end end dates. We have to overshoot a little because of weekends, holidays, etc.
$endDate = time();
if ($frequency == 'daily') {
$startDate = $endDate - 60*60*24*400;
} else if ($frequency == 'weekly') {
$startDate = $endDate - 60*60*24*5*400;
}
// Parse dates to get the parts we need for communications with Yahoo
$endDay = date("Y", $endDate);
$endMonth = date("n", $endDate);
$endDay = date("j", $endDate);
$startYear = date("Y", $startDate);
$startMonth = date("n", $startDate);
$startDay = date("j", $startDate);
// Get the symbol requested from the URL
$symbol = $_GET['symbol'];
// Put together the request URL
if ($frequency == 'daily') {
$url = "http://ichart.finance.yahoo.com/table.csv?s=$symbol&d=$endMonth&e=$endDay&f=$endYear&g=d&a=$startMonth&b=$startDay&c=$startYear&ignore=.csv";
} else if ($frequency == 'weekly') {
$url = "http://ichart.finance.yahoo.com/table.csv?s=$symbol&d=$endMonth&e=$endDay&f=$endYear&g=w&a=$startMonth&b=$startDay&c=$startYear&ignore=.csv";
} else {
die();
}
// Open the request URL
$handle = fopen($url, 'r');
// Move the internal pointer past the first row of column lables
fgetcsv($handle, 50);
// Parse the CSV file into an array
$days = array();
while(($day = fgetcsv($handle, 50)) && $number > 0) {
if($day[0]) {
$days[] = $day;
$number–;
}
}
// Put days in reverse order
$days = array_reverse($days);
// Print XML document
echo "\"1.0\"?>\n";
echo "\n";
foreach($days as $day) {
$date = date("Y/n/j", strtotime($day[0]));
echo "\t\n";
echo "\t\t$day[0]\n";
echo "\t\t$day[1]\n";
echo "\t\t$day[2]\n";
echo "\t\t$day[3]\n";
echo "\t\t$day[4]\n";
echo "\t\t$day[5]\n";
echo "\t\n";
}
echo "";
?>

… and a bit of mod_rewrite magic

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-f

RewriteRule ^([_1-9A-Za-z.]+)/?([_1-9A-Za-z]*)$ index.php?symbol=$1&frequency=$2 [NC]

Feel free to steal re-use any of this code!

DuxNews

lucas — Wed, 06 May 2009 03:14:02 +0000

Although my high school has a couple of excellent media classes (namely the news paper journalism and TV station) it lacks a good distribution medium. The news paper is still handed out once a month by hand and all of the video news segments are put up on local access cable TV. It is fun to recieve a paper newspaper, and seeing yourself on real cable TV is pretty cool but neither is terribly practical. The newsprint costs money and creates litter. Almost nobody thinks to check the local cable access channel every week to see if anything new is up. Besides, this is the 21st century!

With this in mind, I began playing around with the open source content management system Drupal and my imagination was running wild! I envisioned a web portal for all students to share news, have discussions, and even coordinate events! With the excitement that grips all web developers when they delve into web 2.0 projects, I single handedly designed and coded a prototype website and rallied support among the teachers who would be affected by this project. Needless to say the design went through many iterations but the final result is pretty slick.

You can play around with a demo here, but I warn you, its a little slow.