Designers & Developers for MDA
“We’re known as sticklers for standards, purveyors of good design and creators of beautiful things on the web, but do they know us for being supporters of a great cause?”
“Designers & Developers for MDA”:http://ryanirelan.com/donate-mda
A challenge to the web community from Ryan Irelan to raise money for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. If you have a few spare dollars, please help out this great cause and donate. If not, please at least link to “this page”:http://ryanirelan.com/donate-mda) on Ryan’s site.
Simplelog Redirection Plugin
Prior to my switch to Simplelog as my blogging platform, I had built up a decent readership at this site. After the switch, a my feed URL changed, so naturally I popped on over to Feedburner and updated my URL. In the following weeks, I noticed that the number of readers of my feed had been almost cut in half. I was pretty sure I hadn’t written anything that would have offended that many people, so I started investigating a little further. Then it hit me, there were probably a lot of people that were still subscribed to my (very old) feed URL from my Wordpress days that was being redirected toward my Feedburner URL. I just needed to find a way to graceful 301 redirect this URL to Feedburner. Since there was no way to do this (currently) in Simplelog interface, I wrote my own plugin to suit my needs. It was a relatively simple task, and using my routing method that I had used in the “Contact Mailer Plugin”:http://from-away.net/archives/2007/4/18/simplelog_contact_mailer_plugin/ made the configuration of this new plugin dead easy. This plugin is not only useful for redirecting feed urls. It can be configured to redirect any URL relative to your Simplelog domain (including files, static HTML, and PHP).
Schedule Local Backups With iCal and Automator
A while back “Matt Brett”:http://mattbrett.com posted a “message on twitter”:http://twitter.com/mattbrett/statuses/3134673 that he was looking for a simple backup/sync solution for OSX. I dropped him an email with my backup solution and thought to myself that it would be a good idea to post it here as well. Of course, time passed and I still hadn’t gotten around to getting anything written up, until “Matt posted an article on his site”:http://mattbrett.com/archives/2007/05/the-power-of-twitter/ about the power of twitter, and mentioned my backup script. Since then I’ve had a constant stream of emails flowing into my inbox about my backup script, so finally, here it is.The first thing to do is grab the example Automator workflow here 
.
* Please note that this is vastly updated from my network backup workflow that I posted a couple of years back.
Joost Invites
“Joost is a new way of watching TV on the internet. With Joost, you get all the things you love about TV, including a high-quality full-screen picture, hundreds of full-length shows and easy channel-flipping.”I’ve got a ton of Joost invites to give away (read unlimited). If you haven’t tried out the service yet and are interested in this new media phenomena, drop a line to joost@from-away.net with a quick note including the email address you’d like the invite sent to.
I Took It!
I just finished taking the First Annual A List Apart Web Design Survey.
The survey took me less than five minutes to complete, and because I offered my name and email address at the end of the survey, I’ve been entered to win a free ticket to An Event Apart event, an Apple 30GB video iPod, an Event Apart jump drive, or an A List Apart T-shirt.
Personally, I’m very curious to see the results of this survey, especially with all of the recent discussion surrounding gender diversity at web conferences, and the industry in general.
So, if you’ve got 5 spare minutes and would like the chance to win some cool prizes, make sure to take the survey.
Simplelog Contact Mailer Plugin
After following the conversation surrounding the Contact Mailer plugin offered by Harold Emsheimer at the Simplelog Forums, I decided to download and install it on my own site.
I found the plugin easy enough to install and after playing around with it for a bit, I decided to hack it apart a bit and make it even easier to install, and clean up the URL’s the plugin uses.
The first thing that I did was adding routing to the init.rb file of the plugin. Routing seemed to be the thing that people were having the biggest problem with over at the Simplelog forums. After that was taken care of, I cleaned up the routes a bit, and now we’ve got the Simplelog Contact Mailer Plugin.
Download Simplog Contact Mailer Plugin
All of the instructions for getting it set up on your own Simplelog installation are included in the README file.
Many thanks to Harold for offering this up to us over at the forums, and for giving me the go-ahead to pass along my modified version.
My Home Office
Seeing Garrett’s post made me realize that I haven’t posted a recent shot of my office since I started working from home either. I’m fascinated with seeing other people’s workspace as a means to add to or improve my own. So, if you’ve got a recent shot of your own home office link to it in the comments. See the photos after the jump.
Installing Simplelog on A Small Orange
Having recently installed Simplelog on my A Small Orange hosting account, I thought I’d go through the install process here for the benefit of those that might be running into problems getting it set up. I’ll also throw in a few other general tips and tricks for those that may be setting it up on a similar setup. First things first, you’ll need to download the latest version of Simplelog from the Simplelog website: or, if you’re feeling adventurous you can download the latest development version from Simplelog SVN: using the username and password ‘anonymous’. Next, you’ll want to set up a new database for Simplelog by logging into cPanel and creating a new database in the MySQL area. Make sure to take note of your DB name, username, and password, we’ll need these a little later on. Now we’re going to set the chmod (permissions) for a few files and configure Simplelog. Personally, I like to do both of these steps before I upload Simplelog to my server even though I have SSH access. If you have SSH access or now how to set permissions using your FTP program of choice, you could do it after uploading Simplog. For setting permissions, I’m going to use Terminal (since I’m using OSX) and navigate to the folder that I’ve downloaded/unzipped Simplelog on my local machine.
Computer:~/Downloads/simplelog_2.0.2 username$ chmod 755 log/
Computer:~/Downloads/simplelog_2.0.2 username$ chmod 755 theme_backup/
Computer:~/Downloads/simplelog_2.0.2 username$ chmod 755 public/dispatch.fcgi
Input the above commands into Terminal (or your command line tool of choice) while in the unzipped Simplelog directory.
Next we’re going to set up our database and configuration settings. First, open config/database.yml and edit it to match your database details (using the DB name, username, and password we set up earlier). For those that are setting up Simplelog on a host other than A Small Orange (or those wanting to use a PostgresSQL DB) there are a couple of other example database.yml files in the config directory. If your MySQL server address is anything other than ‘localhost’, you’ll want to use the database_dreamhost.yml for your example. It contains a ‘host’ field that will allow you to type in a named MySQL address for your server (i.e. mysql.mydomain.com).
One last thing before we upload everything to our A Small Orange server, since ASO is running Rails through FCGI, we’ll need to force Simplelog to run in production mode. Running in production mode will speed things up for us and will put a lot less strain on our shared server (Rails apps should always be run in production mode on your shared server, development should be done locally or on your own development server). So to force production mode, we’re going to open up the environment.rb file in the config directory and add this line to it around line 39: ENV['RAILS_ENV'] ||= 'production'.
Another step that you’ll notice that I’ve skipped (that you would normally have to take care of for most Rails apps) is opening the .htaccess file in the public folder of Simplelog to point to dispatch.fcgi instead of dispatch.cgi. The reason that I’ve skipped over this is because Simplelog is already configured this way when downloaded, so you don’t have to worry about it.
Now that we’ve done all this, we’ll upload Simplelog to our server. Since this isn’t a normal HTML/PHP/etc. application, we’re going to be uploading it to our main user directory (/home/username/). I prefer to keep all my Rails applications in one directory by themselves, so I’ve created a rails folder in my home directory. Change to that folder and upload the Simplelog folder from your local machine.
Once everything is finished uploading, we’re going to SSH into the server to bootstrap our database (bootstrapping includes importing the database schema and a bit of sample data). To bootstrap our database we’ll want to run these commands once we’re logged in to our server:
username@Server [~]# cd rails/simplelog_2.0.2
username@Server [~]# rake simplelog:install
You should now get a message that rake tasks have been completed if the install was successful.
Just one last step before we can start blogging using Simplelog. Since we’ve put Simplelog somewhere other than in our public_html folder, we need to create a symbolic link to the public folder of Simplelog so that visitors will see something when they reach our website.
This next step will delete all of the data that currently resides in your public_html directory. Make sure to make a complete backup of public_html before continuing with the next step!
While still logged in to our server via SSH, we’re going to cd back to our home directory:
username@Server [~]# cd ../..
After making a complete backup of our public_html folder we’ll run the following commands:
rm -rf ~/public_html
ln -sf ~/rails/simplelog/public ~/public_html
There, now we can log out of our server and visit our website (http://yourdomain.com/) to make sure that everything went as it should. The first time that you visit your Simplelog install, it will take a little longer than normal for your site to load. This is because Simplelog is running through FCGI, so the extra load time is to wait for the dispatch.fcgi process to start up. After a brief wait you should see the default template for Simplelog show up and now you can visit http://yourdomain.com/admin and log in using the default email/password for Simplelog: Email: temp@email.com/Password: !@gonow (make sure to change this when you log in for the first time).
Now we’re all set to start blogging!
This article is merely a guide. If you’re having problems getting Simplelog installed properly, please visit the Simplelog Wiki or the Simplelog Forums for more help and support.
- Simplelog Version: 2.0.2
- Last Updated: March 26, 2007
Resume Broadcast
Well, after an absense that was entirely too long to be called temporary, From Away is back in full swing. As you can tell from this post, I was a bit disillusioned with the whole web industry and decided that I needed to give myself a bit of a break from maintaining this website and extra-curricular web work in general. But, in light of the events of the last couple of months, I’m back and quite refreshed.
The New Gig
My biggest motivating factor for getting this website back up and running again has definitely been my new job. For the last year or so, Derek Featherstone and I had been talking on and off about me doing some contract work for him during my freelance time. Timing never seemed to be quite right for either of us to jump on a project together, but around Christmas time Derek and I had a discussion about me leaving my full time job and spending my time working on projects for his company, Further Ahead. We both decided (based on Derek’s 80% rule, which I also base a lot of decisions on) that it was time. I gave my notice at my old job the first week of February and started working with Further Ahead on February 19th. I’ve really been enjoying the work that I’ve been doing so far, and hopefully before too long we’ll be able to take the wraps off some of the projects that Derek and I have been working on together the past few weeks. This job has really renewed my enthusiasm in my career, my stress levels have never been lower, and my productivity has never been higher. So many thanks to Derek, I’m very happy to be a member of the Further Ahead team!Web Directions North
I was also lucky enough to be able to attend Web Directions North. It was quite an experience, this being my first conference. I found it a bit overwhelming at first because I knew absolutely no one there previous to the conference. But, once I got over myself, and started meeting people, I had a great time. I ran into Daniel Burka who is the designer for Digg and is also a former Islander. We got to talking about the old school music scene on the Island and found out that we knew a lot of the same people and ran in a few of the same circles of friends. I also had a great roomate in Jon Snook who I tagged along with on a couple of occasions and introduced me to lots of great folk. I met so many other people during the four days that I was in Vancouver that I had trouble remembering names, etc. So, my apologies if we me and I didn’t mention you here. Being at WDN also gave Derek and I a chance to sit down and get to know each other a bit over a few beers and some great food. After chatting with Derek and his wife for a couple of hours, I knew that had definitely made the right decision about my employment situation.Up to Speed
So that gives kind of a whirl-wind tour of my life from the last few months. Posting will once again become a regular thing around here. I’ve got two or three posts lined up that are Mac related and I’m sure more will come along with time. Make sure to keep an eye on my Ma.gnolia feed on the front page as I post a couple of links every day via Ma.gnolia rather than reblogging them here in the main stream of consciousness.Waivering…
I’m currently feeling very restless in my position of employment. I say currently, but I’ve had this feeling for quite a few months now. Mind you, I really like the people I work with (and I love developing websites and web apps - but every project in my current job is starting to feel the same), but I have this feeling that there are other, much more exciting projects out there that I’d love to be spending my working hours on. I’d really love to go back to freelancing which would allow me to manage my own work/hours, and would also give me more time to work on my own projects, of which I only seem to have 3 to 4 hours a week to work on now. A lot of time that I used to spend on my own projects is now being spent on more important things, like actually getting away from my desk and enjoying the summer with Krista and some friends from the Maritimes that have recently relocated to Alberta. That being said, I cannot seem to get ahead of financial roadblocks that would allow me to freelance full time. Monthly bills, wanting to buy a home, doing a bit of travelling (time allowing), and other expenses seem to prevent me from setting aside enough of a security blanket to keep us comfortable while I make the transition to freelance and do a bit of marketing for myself. I’ve spoken with a number of different companies since the start of the year regarding some new and exciting projects that I’d love to be a part of 1, but no one seems to be able to give me any certainty on the duration of employment/contracts outside of two or three months. Two or three months would be great if I knew I’d have something else to move on to for sure at the outset. But, because of the reasons I listed above, I just don’t feel comfortable taking the chance that I could be doing this all over again when the project is completed. Maybe with this career that I’ve chosen in web development, I just need to quit whining and get used to the idea that nothing in this industry is certain or secure, and unless I switch to a different career (or take a job that is secure, but so boring and stagnant that I can hardly take it), I’m just going to have to suck it up, live with it, and take a few chances, even if it means that things could get tough for us again financially. I’d love to hear opinions from any of you, or if I’m just being a big wuss about the whole thing, just give me a swift kick in the ass!
1 I should note that I’m also somewhat picky about team situations in these new opportunities. I don’t relish working with a large team, because in my experience, large teams often breed politics, which is something I can’t stand. I also find that the fewer cooks in the pot, the better the result. Thus, my considerations so far have been limited to smaller teams of around 5 people. Back
This is the home of Jeff Smith, a web developer, designer, and craft beer connoisseur living in Amherst, Nova Scotia. This blog was formerly known as "From Away".You can find out more about me by viewing my work, following my tweets, or by following my growing photography skills. Feel free to get in touch if you'd like to chat about anything.
