In April and May, I spent some time working on database design for a complete rewrite of my company’s software. The schema is very complex and presented lots of interesting challenges.

In May, I started building the system – with my coworkers – using the symfony framework and Doctrine ORM. I tested out several other frameworks and ORM’s, but ultimately we decided on symfony and Doctrine. The symfony framework is very mature and easily extensible. Doctrine, on the other hand, is quirky and a little bloated. It just so happens that symfony is built for Doctrine or Propel ORM and Doctrine seemed the lesser of two evils.

In October, I started building a ubiquitous chat component using XMPP for my company’s software. The chat is based on Openfire and Strophe. The chat itself is similar to Facebook’s chat.

In November, I attended the first WordCamp Phoenix. Throughout the day, there were some good speakers (Jim Christian, John Hawkins, Brent Spore, Dave Moyer, Merlin Mann) and some that were awful (Lorelle VanFossen and Jayson Cote). My friend’s sister-in-law (both attended WordCamp) knows Matt Mullenweg (the creator of WordPress), so we all had lunch together. It was a pretty cool experience overall.

Also in November, I put an online store together for a client using Magento. I didn’t have much time to dive into it because the project had such a quick turnaround time, but I could do some pretty awesome things with it. I’m looking for reasons to play around with it more.

I wrote a number of cool jQuery plugins in 2009:

• Undoable: handles undo and redo
• AJAXList: Create a very customizable autocomplete list via AJAX
• Caret: Cursor selection getter and setter
• FakeSelect: Creates a <select>-like dropdown menu from a <ul> element
• Tristate: Creates a tri-state input (checked, unchecked, default) for forms
• IP Address: Creates an IP address input for forms

I’m hoping 2010 is just as great as 2009 was.

I browsed through the gallery, looking for anything that might be useful to me and my normal browsing experience. I found a couple good ones: Google Alerter, RSS Subscription Extension and Docs PDF/PowerPoint Viewer (by Google).

I searched for a Facebook ad blocker, but the one I found only blocked profile ads – not very useful. So I tried writing my own and found that it was much simpler than I expected.

There were really only two files that I needed to create: manifest.json (a manifest file that tells Google Chrome important info about your extension) and facebook.css (a content script that hides the ads using CSS, obviously).

The manifest.json file looks like this:

I used Chrome’s Developer Tools (Ctrl-Shift-I or Page menu > Developer > Developer Tools) to find good CSS rules for blocking the sponsored ads on the homepage, profile page and app pages. I also had to fix the profile page, which broke when I hid the ad sidebar there. Here’s what facebook.css looks like:

After saving the two files to an empty directory, I opened chrome://extensions in Chrome. Under “Developer mode”, I hit the Load unpacked extension… button and navigated to that directory. Chrome added the plugin and I could refresh it if I needed to make a change to the CSS or manifest.json file.

After everything was tested and working, I packed the extension and was done. Overall, I think the whole process took about 15 minutes, but most of that was looking at documentation.

Here’s the extension, if you want to play around with it.