After a great, great deal of thought, I’ve decided to make a few changes this year. A bit late for New Year’s resolutions, I’ll admit, but perhaps that just makes the decision the more legitimate.

For the last two years, I’ve been devoting almost all of my time to Form Tools, a PHP/MySQL script that I’ve worked on as a hobby for – good lord… almost seven years. It’s exceedingly cool. Very big, very advanced, and even after all this time I only feel that it’s starting to become the script I want. I could happily pour all my energies into that script for years to come. But when I take a step back, I realize all my other interests have fell by the wayside. Poor generatedata.com, for example, has fell into relative obscurity. It’s a great script, and the beta version – which I finished over 2 years ago – never got fully released. This website, which I was at one point fairly pleased with, is now so desperately in need of an overhaul it’s positively embarrassing. The various open source scripts I release on this site need updating and pruning; the ones that still have value need moving to github. Basically I have a lot of other stuff I need to get to, and Form Tools is getting in the way. Sad, but true.

So for the next few months I’ll be finishing up work with Form Tools to get it to the point where it’s relatively stable and won’t need too much attention. I’ll never leave it entirely alone, but it will be put largely on the back-burners for a year or so.

Come June I’ll be job hunting. This has been a terrific year, but the benefits of having a day job ultimately outweigh the drawbacks of working independently – despite the mobility… And on that note: I’m off traveling! Tomorrow I’m off to Fiji, NZ and Australia for a few weeks, then Costa Rica in late March. For April/May I’m toying between Alaska and Europe. Probably Europe, I think… we’ll see. I want to cram in as much traveling I can before returning to work.

Anyway, the point is: times they are a changin’. Except a great deal more activity on this site the coming year.

@lensco made an excellent post a couple of days ago that showed off a simple, but elegant responsive design test page that loads the same content into multiple iframes for easy viewing. See:
http://bricss.net/post/16538278376/simple-responsive-design-test-page?e8b52b40

Great idea. Here’s a bookmarklet version of the same code that lets you use it on any webpage:
http://benjaminkeen.com/misc/bricss/

Hi all,

Demo time! Ordinarily I post screenshots of upcoming features and modules for our Form Tools script, but this time we thought I’d utilize some of this crazy ”modern video technology” I keep hearing so much about.

Click the image to the right to watch a quick intro and demo to the Form Builder, showing how it can be used to create a simple “Contact Us” form on your site.

It’s a REALLY exciting new module, and the demo only touches on the base functionality. There wasn’t time to cram in all the really cool stuff (multi-page forms, validation, cool field types), so if people want more info, I can always do more videos.

Also, depending on what people think of them, I could start using them more in the documentation to explain and demonstrate the various Form Tools functionality. Personally, I think they’re a pretty great way to explain things – far better than mere screenshots. The one drawback, of course, is that you have to listen to me drone on and on, but hey, there’s always a downside.

View Demo

- Ben

Apparently it’s using Webkit. Phew, indeed. Not sure I could cope with another rendering engine, assuming it’s even feasible to start one from scratch these days.
http://mikemainguy.blogspot.com/2011/09/amazon-silk-using-webkit-and-spdy.html

This was something I wanted to work on since starting Form Tools, many many years ago. Great to see it finally out there!


Check it out.

- Ben

Boy it’s great to be back. New York was great, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

Productive month. Lots of Form Tools updates.
http://www.formtools.org