Quit Being Comfortable!
Life treating you nicely? Everything going well at work? Having fun on the weekends? Feeling, comfy? Watch out! Sooner or later that warm blanket sense of security you get from your daily grind will start grinding on your happiness. If you’re not careful you’ll slip into a dip of comfort and satisfaction, risking little, gaining little. If you’re heading towards that dip, or feel like you’ve been stuck there for a while, fear not, it’s easy to shake yourself out of it. Put yourself on the line and increase your expectations.
PHP Deployment With Capistrano
If you’ve ever used Capistrano to deploy your Rails application you know how simple the process is. With a little configuration you have a respectable deployment strategy that integrates nicely with your source control system and deployment server. If you’re stuck writing your apps in PHP you might think that you are restricted to using rsync, scp or plain old FTP. Fear not! Getting Capistrano deploying your PHP apps is a lot easier than you might think.
If You Want IE6 to Die, Kill it
Internet Explorer causes web developers a lot of problems. Specifically supporting older, less CSS/standards friendly versions like 6.0. Internet Explorer 6 still requires a lot of hacks and fixes to get working properly and in some cases can limit your design. Complaints about Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) in the web development community are a dime a dozen, everyone wants to complain about IE6 but nobody seems willing to do anything about it. If IE6 needs to go away, let’s do our part to help, stop supporting it.
Designer v Developer Death Match
There’s been some interesting buzz going around about the role of designers and developers in the modern web development process. The demi-gods at 37Signals sparked some controversy when they posted about why they skip photoshop. Andy Rutledge posted an entry on his Design View blog about how to be an employable designer. James Bennett summed everything up nicely with his Designers and Developers: FIGHT! entry.
I’m surprised (and not at the same time) from the reaction from both designers and developers. Both want to keep their “I know something you don’t know” status while insisting that their jobs and skills are important. However, once we inject some professionalism into the debate it becomes clear why combining talents is the best scenario.
The Secret to Greedy (but ethical) Hourly Billing
The typical client project goes something like this:
- Provide estimate
- Complete work
- ???
- Bill time spent
- Profit
So why do so many people insist on killing their projects profitability with endless tweaks and free-bees? Take a page out of Gordon Gecko’s playbook and get a little greedy with your billing, your bank account will thank you later.
Sculpting Your PPC Campaign with Negative Keywords
When painting you start with nothing, add material, and have something. Conversely, when sculpting you remove material and have something. The average Pay-Per-Click campaign only focuses on the painting aspect (adding keywords) and ignores the sculpting aspect (negative keywords). Unfortunately this strategy results in low click through rates and inefficient budgets. By defining your campaign as what it is not you can get into the sculptor’s mindset.
Who Needs The Show Action Anyway
We all know that Rails has seven standard REST actions, index, show, new, create, edit, update and delete. Usually there are only views associated with four of them, index, show, new and edit with new and edit usually being the same. This all makes perfect sense for the public facing part of the application, but what about the administration portion of your app? Do you really need that show action? Are you going to be displaying the information in the same way as the public facing side of things? I’m starting to think that skipping the show action in the administration portion of the application is not a bad idea.
Blog Improvements and Updates
Tonight was the night of much needed updates and improvements to this here blog. It’s been a while since I spent a considerable amount of time doing anything major, but I did make some kinda-sorta-major updates, but those were mainly to the back end system. Hope everyone who’s visiting keeps enjoying it!
Paperclip and Amazon S3
I recently added the ability to give each one of my posts a photo. It makes the entire site a bit less boring and gives it some human feel. I found the excellent paperclip plugin from the thoughtbot guys. This allowed me to easily attach pictures, have them resized and display them along side my posts. However, I ran into some problems with managing the upload files, no worries, Amazon S3 to the rescue.
Fostering Successful Twitter Relationships
At a basic level, most prosperous relationships are a two-way exchange of value. If one party is neglecting the other and the balance of value gets out of whack the relationship becomes damaged and potentially fails. With this in mind I’ve been evaluating how I use twitter to interact with those who follow me and also those who I am following.
Adaptive, Iterative and Agile Development is Fantastic
The ability to work in short bursts of agility leads to amazing results. The ability to quickly adapt to changing needs brings satisfaction. The ability to combine all of these with Ruby on Rails makes for a happy developer. Adaptive, iterative and agile development with ruby on rails is fantastic!
Low Barriers Of Friendship on Twitter
You don’t use twitter? You silly luddite! Okay actually I just started using it yesterday, I’ve had an account for a while but I never really understood what I was supposed to do with it. The idea that other people care what I’m doing at the moment seemed like a joke, however I’ve realized that there’s more to it than that.
NiftyCube Corners and IE7
I recently started on a project that called for rounded corners. Some areas where supposed to be “fluid” which present a problem with my usual rounded corners method. However I’ve used NiftyCube Corners in the past so I was able to find an easy solution.
Learning Best Practices, Idioms and New Languages
A few days ago I was listening to an episode of the StackOverflow Podcast and Jeff Atwood said something interesting about how he did a lot of reading as a kid but didn’t do much discussing about said reading with other people. The problem being that he had a lot of words that he wasn’t sure how to pronounce outside of how he had originally determined they should be pronounced.
The Battle Between the Right Way and The Working Way
I’ve this got awesome full stack framework at my disposal, various books, videos, articles and open source examples, yet rolling my own commenting system was a challenge in and of itself (otsn: is this the same as ‘unto itself’). I thought I had things working for me with my nested routes and simplistic system, however I guess it goes to show you that even the simplest systems can be massively complicated and confusing in the right hands.
Goals and Personal Accountability
I was watching a show over memorial day weekend on the National Geographic channel about recruits training to become Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputies. These people go through what appears to be a fairly intense eighteen weeks of physical training, classroom work and weapons training. They didn’t really go over the barriers to entry as far as applying goes, but from the looks of it, they were not too stringent. One thing that was interesting were the varying levels of dedication that each recruit had toward the end goal of graduating and becoming an actual Deputy.
Acting on Ideas
I’ve got a lot of ideas for various web applications, online communities and business opportunities. When I started writing these all down about a year ago I figured it would be something I’d stick with temporarily, but lose track of. Luckily I haven’t and I’ve managed to grow my list from a few concepts to about a dozen very well thought out ideas.
Dead on Arrival Deadlines
If you’ve done even a small amount of project management for a web development project you have probably been responsible for and have issued a number of deadlines. Deadlines make sense, they feel right, there’s just something about them that says “productivity”.
Paging Dr. Cache
When I launched this blog last week I thought it was slow because of my small (256MB) Slice at Slicehost. Then I read about people optimizing their rails installations, so I optimized and it got a bit faster. But, it was still slow. So I read up on optimizing the speed and memory usage of Phusion Passenger aka mod_rails. I made some enhancements and it got a bit better. Problem was, it was still REALLY slow.
Cox Bundled Service (Permission Not Included)
I’ve got cable internet and digital cable through Cox Communications, and so far have been quite happy with it. The internet is always up, super fast and the cable server hardly has any problems. Usually Cox is great when it comes to customer service, they’re always friendly on the phone and quick to answer questions. However, when I called earlier tonight to ask about a CableCard™ for my new Tivo™ the guy I spoke with was a departure from what I’m used to.
Instant Gratification through Unanswered Posts
I’ve been a member of Rails Forum for over a year now, since January 2007 to be exact. In my first year and 3 months I managed to make about 90 posts. Looking back these are mostly “newb” questions and solicitations for getting on the right track. This was when I was casually using rails and getting up to speed.
Learning Rails: Namespaced Controllers
A common requirement of a visitor facing web application is that the administration component of the app is behind a login with a different layout, style sheet and feel. Rails 2.0 makes this very simple with namespaced controllers. On a recent project the specs called for the administration to live under an /admin path, simple enough.
Reinventing Wheels
It’s been about two weeks since I started writing the ruby on rails app for this blog. I recently took a look at some of the established RoR blogging engines and this feels more like a somewhat circular rock. Even though this app is lacking a lot of the regular features of a blog, I’m extremely happy with how it turned out.
