Entries Tagged with: blobbing
Tools I use
Because everyone is doing it. Kenny Meyers and Jeff Croft posted about what tools they use on a daily basis. I want to join the crowd. So here are the tools/programs I use on a daily basis.
I have to earn my keep somehow. This is the perfect tool to track my time and make sure I'm billing fairly. At my first go-around at an agency, time keeping was the bane of my existence. Harvest makes it stupidly easy and I'm not wasting billable time keeping track of my time.
Terminal.app
A good part of ...
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Drama...sigh
Be a part of the solution
Ah, it's winter. (side note: I seriously need to get the winter theme up and going on my site.) It's that time of year where the ExpressionEngine user-base starts to get restless. Oh, who am I kidding, it can happen at any time of year. So a recent comment on Kenny's article over at The Nerdary got me thinking, and I decided to dust off my long ignored blog.
I don't think users of ExpressionEngine have any clue what it's like to be a developer at EllisLab, what it entails, or what the fuck they ...
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Simple Desktops for the Mac!
I'm completely stoked that the Simple Desktops app for the Mac is now available in the App Store. I took over the reigns of site development from Kenny Meyers in early 2011. Since then, Tom Watson and I have been trucking along making a lot of small tweaks leading up to this app.
I introduced Tom to Justin Voss who by day is a Java Programmer at a very large Enterprise here in Columbia, MO, but by night is an amazing Cocoa and Django developer. The collaboration on this was a ball. Tom had the vision, Justin made it ...
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Bust 'yo cache!
If you're using a CDN such as the one we have setup at EngineHosting, it is possible that your cache will get "stale" since the nodes will hold on to your static assets for as long as the expires headers you send tell them to. There are a couple of different methods we can employ to ensure when you push a new build of your site, the CDN will always come back to your origin servers and get the right versions of files.
I've been over this before, but a real key to success here is managing your ...
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CodeIgniter Conference 2011 Roundup
It's 3:30am, and I'm waiting to take a car to the airport after my weekend in New York for the CICon 2011 Conference. To help trick my body into not wanting to sleep, I decided to do a write up about my weekend experiences.
First, hats off to Adam Fairholm, Kenny Katzgrau and Phil Sturgeon with the the great job they did organizing the conference. I'm extremely pleased and impressed with the amazing venue, accommodations, speakers and overall experience they provided for us.
I was honored to announce to the community two things I think are ...
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Ch-ch-ch changes
Professionally, I consider myself one of the luckiest people on the planet. I started learning HTML/CSS and ExpressionEngine when I was 27, learning PHP at 28, and had the honor of joining the ExpressionEngine dev team at 29. I spent hour after hour studying and trying to get better, and continue to do so. With my background in music, I try to approach a programming task in a similar fashion to learning a new tune. I got an extremely late start in this industry, considering someone like Pascal started programming before he was 10. My approach is that the ...
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Learning is fun
Earlier this year, I read Pragmatic Thinking and Learning, and the thing that most resonated with me the most is the stages of professional development, and the general attitude you may have in each stage.
The most interesting stage to me is "advanced beginner". They aren't quite up to the tasks an intermediate-level person, and most importantly sometimes fail to realize what they do not know. Admitting you have/had that problem is the first step to recovery, at least it was for me.
As a saxophone player, I had this problem in high school. I was good, and ...
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PATH_INFO on Nginx
Thanks to Karl Blessing over at http://kbeezie.com for his how-to on properly supporting PATH_INFO with Nginx/PHP-FPM.
Thanks for figuring out what I've been too frustrated to try.
Check it out
Also read this post about possible security issues and how to deal with them.
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Art Matters and why I'm Saddened for Kansas
An open Letter to Governor Brownback
I was born and spent my formidable years being raised in the great State of Kansas. Friends of mine on either coast will poke fun at me for being from the Mid-West, but I'm proud. I'm a Jayhawk through and through. I live in the "Tiger's Den" of Columbia, MO. I married a Mizzou gal--we do have an understanding when it comes to collegiate sports though.
As a former resident of Lawrence, Topeka and Overland Park I, like thousands of my fellow students, participated or enjoyed numerous programs the Arts Commission assisted.
I can truly say that ...
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How about a soft launch on a Friday?
Check Out Pkg.io!
At SXSW this year, Marcus Neto and I wanted to build something. Our fearless leader Leslie Camacho bet us we couldn't. Well, it was on like donkey kong. We enlisted the help of Pascal, started brainstorming, and came up with pkg.io.
At this time, it's an addon skeleton maker for ExpressionEngine developers. What we're most happy with, is someone with no knowledge of PHP will be able to make an accessory to use on their client sites. We think we have some fun things in store, but wanted to get something out now.
Since we code ...
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Kids These Days
I love being an EllisLab developer. There is a plethora of amazing designers using our products. There are even high schoolers who pick on me on the twitterwebs. I like it..keeps me on my toes. ;)
Me, according to Kyle Cotter
and the real one.
Nice work, Kyle.
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Updates!
Spring time is here, so it's time for spring cleaning on my site. Dave Gnojek and I had planned on doing seasonal designs for the site, but we've both been too busy to really work on it over the last year. Well, Dave had time, and hit me up with spring and summer designs today, so I got cracking!
So if you care, here's what we have planned for the summer:
And for the different Twitter Birds. I love the orange one. :)
I have been coding straight HTML into my blog posts. For code samples, I've ...
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Site Updates
I pushed some updates to my site here earlier this week. Updated to Django rev 14870, implemented Xapian with Haystack, ditched categories and moved to django-taggit.
So here's a quick and simple Django template tag I came up with that reads the file modification time of css/javascript files and appends a v=n query string.
from django import template
from django.conf import settings
from os.path import join, getmtime
register = template.Library()
@register.simple_tag
def static_asset(filename):
"""
{% load static_asset %}
<link rel="stylesheet" href="{% static_asset "css/main.css" %}" type="text/css">
Renders a link like:
<link rel="stylesheet ...Read More
The new year will mean learning new things
what languages should I learn next year?
I'm stumped.
2010 has been my year of Python. I've loved it. Especially coming from PHP, it's been a joy to see object oriented programming handled properly. I'm even getting to the point that I start accidentally writing Python while trudging through PHP code. It's been immensely helpful in making my life as a sysadmin easier, when I'm not using Chef.
I have decided I'm going to focus on two languages in 2010. I started learning HTML/CSS/ExpressionEngine in 2008, and started hitting PHP late that year through '09. So I think ...
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Knowing the 'top' command doesn't make you a sysadmin
But you should still know how to provision a server
By definition, designers and developers are not sysadmins. However, most good designers have a good idea as to what takes to be a good developer, and most developers I know (present company included) are usually pretty opinionated about design and have some idea how to design. Even if it's not at a professional level. So, following that logic, you have no excuse not being able to provision a server and be able to launch a website on it. Plesk, cPanel and/or your hosting control panel are not allowed. In fact, you should all be adept enough to realize ...
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New Digs
I've been working over the past week or so to move the site here from Tornado over to Django. Spending so much time in PHP and ExpressionEngine during the day, it's fun to play in Python at night. It also makes me better at my job on the EllisLab Dev Team seeing what other successful frameworks do.
With Tornado, I found maintaining my own admin area a pain in the ass, and there were enough things I wanted to to that warranted a move to something else. Tornado is awesome, was a great learning tool for me, but ...
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With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility
How the decisions you make in your ExpressionEngine templates affect site performance.
A lot of us are drawn to ExpressionEngine because PHP isn't pre-requisite knowledge to make a kick-ass dynamic website. If we need to roll our own PHP we can if absolutely needed. PHP directly in the templates is fantastic for small chunks. I do want to illustrate the kind of issues that may arise if you are putting too much PHP into your templates, and show alternatives.
First, I need to do a custom query and want to use some CodeIgniter Helpers and Libraries too. If we were in straight CI, this would look pretty simple if broken between ...
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New Blob
So I have a new blob blog. I never really got into blogging before, so time will tell if I actually keep up on this. I had some comments in moderation, but since I wasn't sure what I wanted to be doing, I never logged in to approve/reject. So, this is me attempting to turn over a new leaf. We'll see how it goes.
I've been spending my free time learning Python over the past several months, and boy is it a fun language. It helps that friends like Seth and Kenny are always there to ...
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