bensie.com

After not having my photo gallery online for about a year, I finally got around to getting it back.  I was previously self-hosting the gallery with Gallery2, but that software turned out to really just be a pain in the neck for my gallery and all the other galleries I host.

SmugMug came to the rescue!  Allison has been using SmugMug for her portrait photography lately, and it’s proven itself to be nothing short of awesome.  The site is very fast and responsive, the upload tools are great, slideshows work (fancy that), and the cost is reasonable.  If you want an account and want $5 off, use this referral code: sJz9wIbaT3urU

Check out my pictures at http://bensie.smugmug.com.

If you have forms around your site (logins, registrations, etc), you might want to automatically focus those fields so the user has less clicking around to do.  We want to do this unobtrusively, and don’t want to focus it if the field already has data in it (editing existing forms).  Here’s the jQuery code to pull it off:

Ever since Apple started up the App Store, I’ve been dying to dig in to Objective-C and write an application for the iPhone (no, I don’t own an iPhone yet).  I’m certainly not alone, as there are now like 100,000 apps available on the store.  I bought a book, read through a lot of the developer documentation, but finally something even better came along — Stanford is posting the lectures and slides on iTunes U for iPhone Application Programming.  While the lecturers are not the best speakers, the content of the class is fantastic so far.  I’ve watched 4 episodes and have grasped more by watching those than all of the prior reading I have done.

This isn’t the first time I’ve “taken classes” while not actually in school.  If you’re ever interested in taking a class on something that you didn’t want to take a grade on in undergrad, check out iTunes U and Academic Earth.

My first iPhone app will no doubt be very simple and probably not all that useful, but it’ll be an accomplishment.

Bensie.com needed another refresh. I’m also planning on using it as less of a personal blog, and more of a technical blog. So it will be more about the things I learn and encounter rather than, well, the useless nothing that it’s been for the past two years. I hope to focus it on the projects I work on, the code I write, and my opinions about it all.