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Hello and welcome to the porfolio and online presence of Ben Mitchell, an Australian born Bay Area web designer. I bring to the web my passion for design with a focus on web standards and accessability to create unique sites for clients.

October 20

BTSR Website Launches

After a very long summer and many hours in a dimly lit basement I'm proud to say that the new Black Tie Ski Rentals website (version 3) has officially launched. Check it out at BlackTieSkis.com.

Black Tie Ski Rentals new website

The site is by far the most important project I have done to date. It encompasses the 3rd iteration of a redesign lifecycle and was a time to really consolidate the branding and push out a new look and feel that not only reflected the company but synced all marketing and external facing media to a conclusive design.

It was very important to me make sure that this version of the website well surpassed their competition and to set a bar, both graphically and technically for others to follow. (more…)

September 29

Back From The Dead

Well its official, I have resurfaced after what has been one of the busiest times of my life. A wedding, visitors from the mother country, and the biggest project I have started to date..lets just say its been nuttier then squirrel shit and leave it at that.

First of all the wedding. Its funny, looking back on it all it seems like a distant memory or something I once read in a book rather then an actual experience that happened to me. I do remember that the wedding date all of a sudden came really fast and before we had a chance to ask each other if we had thought of everything I had my amazing parents fly in from Australia, followed shortly by my brother and his wife (and my little nephew Lachie), and my sister and her husband. A few days of catching up and showing them around our little slice of the American dream and it was back to the airport to pick up 6 of my best mates from Australia. A quick jaunt to Vegas (more…)

March 19

Design Groove Goes Live

Design Groove or some version of it has existed in my head for a very long time, so its only fitting that I put the time and effort in to finally see it live. I'm excited to finally have my own place in the web world and to officially have a site to direct potential clients and friends a like to see.

While the site itself is designed to act as an online portfolio for the projects I have worked on in the past, it will also hopefully allow me to use the virtual space to experiment on as well as a place to write articles on web related issues. I'm not in the business of being a professional writer but I've found that the best way to solidify learning is by attempting to teach other people. With that in mind I hope this blog space becomes a regular part of my working week and to provide people with a resource rich in web related content and tutorials. So much of what I have done since becoming a web professional has been self taught and as any one who has been through similar experiences can tell you, it can be a very frustrating and time consuming practice. I hope that some of the biggest lessons I've learnt can be talked about here as well as creating a forum for discussing other issues related to the topic in question.

That being said I am the first to admit that there are always other ways of approaching solutions and am always interested in alternatives or people pointing out incorrect or verbose coding or methodologies.

So without prattling along further I wanted to welcome you officially to my new site and hope that you enjoy what I have put together. Please feel free at any stage to contact me directly at ben@justagroove.net or to comment on any one of my articles.

Cheers and thanks for visiting,

Ben

March 15

XML-Based Photo Gallery (Part 2)

In the first part of this tutorial we looked at how to set up a generic XML document with image information and then link your page to it through the simpleXML function in php. Using this method it is easy then to exploit the information in the XML document to display rows of thumbnails and even dynamically link them to the full sized images.

What I want to show you now is my way of setting up a pseudo-random function to pick 6 images from the XML document and display them like I have in the side bar to my right. It may seem a little unorthodox to some but I came up with this method to ensure that the sample of 6 is not only random but also that the same image is not displayed twice.

<?php // set the XML file name as a PHP string $myPhotoList = "gallery/photos.xml" ; // load the XML file $xml = @simplexml_load_file($myPhotoList) or    die ("no file loaded") ; ?>

Lets Get Random

Now I want to start adding some code to define the range of image numbers. I also want to create the first 'random' number using the rand(firstNumber, lastNumber) function which picks a mathematically random number in the range given. Unfortunately to-date I have been unable to find a built-in function to calculate the number of nodes in an XML document so I'll be setting the minimum number and the maximum number of images in the xml document manually. This means that the dynamic advantage of only updating the XML document to add more images is greatly decreased since you will also need to change in the php the range of images your working from. Stay tuned for a re-working of this solutions portion of the code.

<?php ... $min = 0; $max = 39; //the number of pictures in the xml $num = rand($min, $max); ?>

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March 11

XML-Based Photo Gallery (Part 1)

With the addition of certain very helpful PHP functions that were released in version 5.0, the integration of XML and PHP is now simpler then ever.

Why XML over a database driven solution? I could discuss all the reasons for and against but at the end of the day in a case like a photo gallery it really comes down to personal preference. For me its all about ease of use and not adding complexity to something that at its core should be very easy and straight forward. XML offers accessibility, readability, flexibility and you don't need to start playing with database tables and fields to achieve results fast.

While I endeavor to write this for the common person the below article does assume a basic understanding of XML and PHP. If you want to understand more about either topic a good starting place is the w3Schools website which offers great free introductory tutorials on standard web technology.

Download Tutorial Files

The Basics

I'll be basing my photo gallery off a simple XML document, which I'll detail here. Please feel free to download a copy of the source files to follow along with me. Now I don't pretend to be an expert at writing XML, so feel free to suggest any changes in the comments section.

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