Feeding the bigga

March 6, 2012 //
0

Having now less commute and more time to do various other things than being sat on trains, I thought I’d dig the sourdough bread starter out of the fridge and feed it up with a view to baking some bread over the weekend.

In theory… I’m meant to feed this every 2/3 weeks to keep the thing from going rancid and dying. However, I’m lazy, and I’ve got it on good authority that it can endure several months of neglect – which this has had.

The brown liquid is basically moonshine – not very tasty (of course I tried) – but indeed alcoholic (…of course I tried).

So, I poured this off, and the starters’ gone pretty thick – as you can see. You can pretty much tell by the smell that all’s well here, so I fed it. Warm water + 100g of flour. Whisked it up, and I’ll take a photo again in the morning where I expect to see some hardcore bubble action.

EDIT: Added the bubbling… See the last image.

Springloops – GIT hosting with deployments

February 25, 2012 //
0

Since leaving my last job for freelance – where I had a lot of support from 2 talented SysAdmins, I’ve been wondering how I’d like to manage what will likely be a growing array of client sites, and the prospect of setting up a lot of things that I hitherto took for granted. Things like the SVN server, the dev and UAT environments, the firewalls, the proxys, the puppet servers… all of this useful stuff that I knew how to use, but unfortunately have little idea how to configure.

I’ve also got the prospect of working with some developers who haven’t really cut their teeth in a collaborative coding environment, and haven’t yet arrived at the point whereby they instinctively know that version-control is a good thing, and haven’t really known anything better than simply using FTP to get stuff done.

Some of that infrastructure I’ve used in the past, was used to manage around 200 websites. We’re not going to be operating anywhere near that level, and I also don’t want to scare the shit out of my new co-workers when they suddenly realise that there is indeed a learning curve, and what was once a 5 minute tweak in a WordPress plugin to make CURL work, now will now involve learning puppet, logging into puppet, making the changes, testing the changes, and then and only then can they make that WordPress plugin get past the firewall.

It can’t be like that, especially as we’re such a small team, it can’t really afford to be crippled by infrastructure that people aren’t confident enough to use, and I also refuse to be the silo of that knowledge.

Version Control

Some things however, like version control, can not/should not be removed from this equation. The benefits of GIT or SVN far outweigh the time involved in getting to grips with it, and since there’s a whole range of GUI interfaces for the two of them out there these days, it’s not even strictly necessary to scare yet more shit out of people with the command line.

Deploying

In the past with Rails, I’ve had experience using Capistrano to move sites between dev, uat and live environments. The last 3 years or so, I’ve been using YUM packages to control and role back versions. This was all well and good, but still required a few extra steps (and yet another server) to create your package, and then also to having to maintain spec files. This wasn’t such a hardship as we were generally dealing with production-line sites – they were all built on the same framework, and all shared common code-bases. Now though, we’ll be dealing with all sorts. Off the top of my head there’s already WordPress, Concrete5, Magento and some CodeIgnitor. Attempting to encourage the use of building YUM packages under these circumstances, whilst already insisting on learning the basics of GIT, isn’t going to make me any friends, and will most definitely get in the way of GTD.

So, this is where Springloops comes in. In most respects, it’s a bit of a Github clone, except that it also does deployments. You can basically set up a project (using either SVN or GIT), and then under each project you can define any number of servers, with particular roles (development, testing, live and so on), and using a particular branch. You can give Springloops access to the servers via FTP, SFTP, and (and this is a nice touch) Amazon S3. When you deploy for the first time, Springloops basically sends up the entire repo. When you then make subsequent deployments, it works a bit like rSync and only updates new/modified files. The result? It’s pretty bloody quick.

Of course at this point, you do start to wonder about where these details are going, and how well Springloops are going to treat them. At this point, I have no reason not to trust them, and the few support inquiries I’ve made have had a swift response. Having said all that though, I really wouldn’t recommend just using a root SSH account for this. It’s not that I don’t want to trust the staff, but more than I wonder what could go wrong if a bug ever sneaks through. Better to just to give Springloops an account with limited permissions, and in theory only the site will ever get damaged – not the entire server.

If all goes well, I will certainly post back here on Springloops with an update on how it all works in practice. My gut feeling though, is that having a GUI to help people manage deployments without forcing them into steep learning curves is going to be a good thing. It’s going to be a quicker route to that feeling of control and empowerment that a decent deployment process gives you, and I’m absolutely convinced that they will never fire up their FTP client again, and will never have that sinking feeling when it goes horribly wrong.

Rollback, and code-on.

Concrete5 – Giving each block an HTML wrapper

February 25, 2012 //
0

No, you do no need to use custom templates to do this.

Looking at the C5 area documentation, you will find these two methods available to you;

$area->setBlockWrapperStart($html)
//The passed $html will be printed out before every block in the area.

$area->setBlockWrapperEnd($html)
//The passed $html will be printed out after every block in the area.

Fairly self explanatory – just make sure you call them after you instantiate the new class;

$heading = new Area('Heading');
$heading->setBlockWrapperStart('<div class="heading">');
$heading->setBlockWrapperEnd('</div>');
$heading->display($c);

Concrete5 Areas – Setting default content when empty

February 25, 2012 //
0

I’ve promised a few people that I would collate various snippets of useful Concrete5 code that I’ve used over the years. I feel somewhat obliged to since it seems that an awful lot of people have taken to this CMS on my recommendation.

You might notice the irony of posting this on a WordPress blog. I’m not happy about it, but the theme was just about acceptable and so that sold it. It will be migrated to a C5 instance in the near future.

On to the code.

If you have used C5, you will know what an area is and how it works. Let’s say you want to show some default content while that area contains no blocks, and then hide that content once someone has added some content.

$a= new Area('Main'); 

if ($c->isEditMode() || $a->getTotalBlocksInArea($c) > 0 )
{
    $a->display($c);
}
else
{
    echo 'This area is empty';
}

A wee quote.

February 19, 2012 //
0

“everyone gets to make one big mistake. and if your waiting on me well i guess your gonna have to wait. cus im saving mine up for a very very special day. when i can fuck it all up in the most spectacular way.”

Formating JSON for jQuery UI Autocomplete

February 16, 2012 //
0

I’ll be honest, I thought this was going to be a 5 minute job to a add nice be of autocompleteness to a project. However, if the requirement to pass 3 parameters as your data array (id, value, label) was in the documentation, I missed it.

The JSON, should look like this;

{"response":"true","message":[{"value":"CSS3","label":"CSS3","id":"3"},{"value":"Slider","label":"Slider","id":"4"},{"value":"PSD","label":"PSD","id":"5"},{"value":"CSS","label":"CSS","id":"7"}]}

I was using CodeIngiter, so my controller looks like this (ignoring the DB selects which should be moved to a model). Also, ensure that you output the correct headers (application/json), otherwise you’ll just be setting yourself up for a whole load of new, difficult to spot problems;


function get_tags_as_json()
{
$tag = $_REQUEST['term']; //get term parameter sent via text field.

$this->db->select('*');
$this->db->from('tags');
$this->db->like('tag', $tag);
$this->db->limit('5');
$query = $this->db->get();

if ($query->num_rows() > 0)
{
$data['response'] = 'true';
$data['message'] = array();

foreach ($query->result() as $row)
{
$data['message'][] = array(
'value' => $row->tag,
'label' => $row->tag,
'id' => $row->id
);
}

}
else
{
$data['response'] = 'false';
}
header("Content-type: application/json");
echo json_encode($data);
}

and then my jQuery;


$(function() {
$( "#tags" ).autocomplete({
source: function( request, response ) {
$.ajax({
url: "http://linkspro.dev/admin/get_tags_as_json",
dataType: "json",
data: request,
success: function(data){
if(data.response == 'true') {
response(data.message);
}
}
});
},
minLength: 1

});
});

Tank Auth logging you out?

February 6, 2012 //
0

I’ve been using Tank Auth for a few CodeIgniter projects recently which, if you haven’t checked out, is a great way to get started quickly and securely with some simple user authentication.

For my future reference as much as anything else, I was having some problems with it quite randomly logging me out, and after a lot of digging I arrived at pining the blame on my use of the Google jQuery CDN. Not entirely sure why that is causing the problem, but since removing it, so far so good.

Hopefully I will post back with a bit more info once I’ve had time to dig further.

The abyss

January 8, 2012 //
0

Last week, I resigned from my job. Not an easy thing to do when your best friend lectures you about the recession and the fact that you haven’t actually got anything at all lined up.

However, I’m firm believer in just having a good bit of faith in myself, and that generally, when needed to and when either jumping or stepping into the abyss, it’s worth remembering that it only ever comes up to your knees.

So what am I to do now? I’m a web developer. In fact, to describe myself as just a web developer really doesn’t do justice to what it is I’m good at.

I’m at my best working across disciplines, directly with customers and businesses who not only require sound web design and development, but also need advice about how people might use and engage with their products. I like to think that I might change the way people will do business, and show them better ways to realise their ideas.

In recent years, I’ve helped bring a small design agency into the world of digital design and development, and seen that company grow so invaluable to it’s clients, that it was acquired by one.

Before that, I had the good fortune to blend work and pleasure by helping to found a unique music industry startup – from the heady days of planning it in the pub, the UI planning and design, and finding and working with a small team of talented Rails developers – this was the most fun you could have in a rented loft.

I’ve managed development teams – both my native PHP fellows, and also Rails developers. I’m also perfectly happy and resourceful enough to work on my own – knowing enough to bring a project to life from scoping, through to deployment.

I’ve built and managed e-commerce sites, price comparison services, download stores, blogs and much more.

Most good things start over coffee or a pint, so if I sound like someone you’d like to work with, then please get in touch.

Not polaroid polaroids

July 6, 2011 //
0

Whilst tidying up some files on the MacBook, I started going through some old People’s Music Store stuff that I had saved for posterity. People’s Music Store was a digital music download service with a difference. We charged the users with creating the store fronts, picking the stock, reviewing the music, and selling it in their own customisable store front. In another universe, I am certain it toppled iTunes from up on it’s sterile, transparent roost.

Anyway, for our launch, we rewarded every early adopter who was willing to share their postal address with a welcome package. We gave them art, sweets, poetry, stickers, and some photographic inspiration. I was in charge of the FujiFilm Instamax (yeah – doesn’t quite have the same ring to it as “polariod”).

These are actual scans of the highly prized shots that made it into the welcome packages. Probably worth thousands now I’m famous…

Well, it was this or twitter.

July 3, 2011 //
0

Quite honestly, there wasn’t much in it. I’d like to think that I have more to say than I can fit on one line, and I’d like to think that I have a bigger attention span than twitter seems to want to impose on me. Every time I try and keep up with it, I end up feeling like I’ve gorged on too much internet.

So I installed WordPress (which, as a developer, makes me feel like I’ve gorged on yesterdays’ dominos pizza, and will likely wake up with a slice attached to my face. But that’s another post).