Now I’ve polished off version 1.3.0 Beta of Form Tools, I’m freed up to work on some freelance gigs. Here’s some of the highlights:

• Boston Pizza. Actually, this one doesn’t start until October or November, but it’s great to have it lined up. I’ll be developing them an online registration system, much like I’ve done in the past for the Hartford Financial Group and British Petroleum (BP).
• ProBono Law of BC. This is now reaching its final stages. I just have to add a fourth layer of access for lawyers / legal professionals to be able to view appropriate opportunities and request being assigned to them. Pretty simple – and the code is all ready for it. Nice to wrap this one up!
• Salvation Army. This one is particularly interesting. The first part of the work is very much like the work I did for the PBLBC – a backend CMS. The second part is awful fun: they need a Google Maps-driven application to allow people to view local resources within their neighbourhood.
• BC Athletics. Last year I wrote them a ColdFusion application to manage registrants for their Haney-to-Harrison relay race and a couple of other events. This year, it’s back! Mainly it’s just making minor improvements to the system. That plus integrating it with a new credit-card processing company by the name of PSIGATE (I believe…).

From talking with some fellow nerds who were more familiar with blogging than I, I learned that there were several programs of interest, but most notably: WordPress, Movable Type and TextPattern. I didn’t really give Movable Type enough of a chance to impress me since I’d heard a horror story about it. Possibly hearsay, possibly true. Either way, I should have given it more time.

Anyway, I went and installed WordPress and TextPattern and spent some time tinkering. Both were pretty cool, but I ended up settling on WordPress. TextPattern was very elegant, but I couldn’t shed the sense that they placed too much emphasis on style over functionality and usage. Plus it was designed as a content management system, so much of its functionality was useless to me.

WordPress, however, struck me as consistently sound. The UI is clear, there’s amples of documentation and the templates are few and easy to edit. Overall: two very enthusiastic thumbs up; fine family fun.

So, Wordpress it is.

Integrating it into my site confounded all my expectations and took very little time indeed. Once I’ve spent more time with it I’ll post a more informed evaluation. I’ve begun noticing a few little annoyances that, over time, will no doubt grow into full blown aggravations. Still, it’s excellent on the whole.

I thought I’d document the problems I encountered while building this site in case any other poor sap stumbles across the same issues.

Problem: Scriptaculous’s Effect.Appear prevents links from working in firefox when link is in floated div that is underneath a div in the page that the function is making appear.

Oof. That was a mouthful.

Here, this’ll make it clearer. I’ve put a test page here to demonstrate:
http://www.benjaminkeen.com/about/bug.php

I’ve posted the problem on the Ruby on Rails forum (associated with scriptaculous).

As described in the test page, the only way I can find to get around it is by placing the floated div ABOVE the Effect.Appear-ed divs. Yuck…