Web Developer from Indiana
As I mentioned in the previous post, I’m excited about the idea of Progressive Web Apps. They allow client side caching of web content, intercepting of fetch requests, and other features that can provide an offline experience as well as a more performant online experience. Check out the presentation I did.
I took a couple short online classes last month:
I’ve mentioned that this site is built using the Jekyll preprocessor. It’s hosted on GitHub, which uses the Git source control manager, and the workflow is that you create a post or make other changes, commit the change to source control, and push (upload) the changes to a GitHub repository. GitHub recognizes that it’s a Jekyll site and generates the site content on the fly.
Trying to clean things up a bit. This site uses the Sass CSS preprocessor. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) defines the look of a web site. For example, before I made some changes, each post on this blog was rather generic looking. I modified the CSS so that it kind of looks like a computer terminal, with a header, green on black, and modified the font.
A Github Gist is a way to share a snippet or collection of snippets of code.I like to keep my desktop and laptop as kind of backups of each other, so I wrote a couple bash functions to help sync things up. https://gist.github.com/athill/886aa5d59e0d56c7d249
What does this do?
find . -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
Created a utility for bucket voting. A bucket vote is where a group is narrowing a list of options. For example, there could be 10 voters where 15 candidates are trying to fill 7 slots. In this case, each voter would be represented by a “bucket” and each candidate would be represented by an “item.” Each voter could bring 7 items into their bucket and then the 7 items in the most buckets would fill the slots.
I just realized I hadn’t posted for over a month. I’ve mostly been working on athill/PHP-Utils and websites utilizing it (athill/PHP-Utils-Demo, athill/informedelectorate.net, and athill/bucket-vote).
Via the the impressive wordpress-to-jekyll-exporter, I’ve managed to convert my codeblog WordPress blog to Jekyll.
Stay with me. Windows and Mac are both “operating systems”. When you click on a file and it opens in your editor, the operating system does that. In Windows and Mac, the operating system is generally coupled with what’s called the “desktop environment”. For example, imagine your Windows computer could look and feel like a Mac or vice-versa.
This would be a game changer. Shared hosts such as Bluehost and GoDaddy don’t currently offer Git (last time I checked) and there’s no root privileges, so you can’t install it that way, but it does allow
I knew this was possible, but my increasing use of git branches made me look into it: Displaying the current git branch at the command prompt.
It turns out most of what I did in my last post, Installing D3 TopoJSON us-states on Fedora, was unnecessary, but I did create an interactive state map using the D3, d3-tip, and jQuery libraries and the GeoJson encoding format. I did use ocr2ocr to convert census state data to GeoJson.
I’m trying to make maps of the (U.S.) states that can be shaded to reflect certain data (for example, tax levels by state) using D3.js. So I installed TopoJSON, which was straightforward enough, but that didn’t have the state boundary definitions, so I had to install us-atlas, which is where thing’s got interesting.
Clearly need to work on my Git workflow, but I currently often have test under source control and production under source control, but they are not connected. Further, I’d been slacking in commits on test, but moved a bunch of changes to production (via an Ant script). So I entered my commits on production, but test has better history and should be the repository template, imho.
I have a site that I inherited and at first, I just set up git repos in the subfolders I was working on, however, as time went on it seemed to be a better idea to have the entire site be one large repo. I didn’t formally set up submodules, but when I would run git status on the top level repository, it looked like this:
Finally updated my news page. For the uninitiated, it basically renders RSS feeds for various categories of news.
Upgraded to Fedora 18 last night using FedUp. Pretty smooth so far and I like the UI enhancements. However, Apache (web server) wouldn’t start. I slogged through several blog posts with limited success until someone mentioned rpmconf.
I gave a presentation on CF Meetup about Metaprogramming in ColdFusion (#236) on Thursday. Thanks to Charlie Arehart and the CF Meetup community for the opportunity.
Brilliant talk outlining the CSS border-radius property in great detail, from simple use to creating ovals and semi-circles among other things.
If you, like me, prefer ctrl+tab and ctrl+shift+tab to navigate through your tabs right and left, rather than the default stack-based navigation, add this to your your User keymap file. (Preferences -> Key Bindings – User):
Highlight current line, code folding arrows, etc.
Did a presentation at work trying to summarize the processes necessary to turn a URL into a webpage.
I have several sites that I’ve been tracking with Git on my desktop and want to be able to work on my laptop and keep it all in sync. Here’s what I did:
Lots of cool plugins, nicely organized and searchable.
From http://chrisgilligan.com/wordpress/chmod-recursive-files-only-directories-type/ ``` find . -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
Needed to get a grip on the file extensions in a large inherited project. Need to review my Perl, but you could do the same thing in another language. Regardless, nice one line pipe.
Find commit associated with tag:
git rev-list $TAG | head -n 1
For the past ten years this site had been hosted by Total Choice Hosting. They did a great job and I would recommend them to entry level users, but about 7 years ago they removed access to the command line and a couple months ago, I had finally had enough. I looked around and Midphase seemed to offer what I wanted. It’s been a rough road, but as of today, I believe I’m ready to cut the TCH umbilical cord. Here’s the story:
The problems with outdated code unfortunately doesn’t end with Cucumber. FactoryGirl also has new syntax. Here is my solution:
Working my way through Rails 3 in Action and am very impressed with the general idea. Unfortunately, much of the code related to Cucumber BDD testing is out of date since the Cucumber team has removed web_steps.rb, etc., which the code relies on. Thankfully, someone put together a “humble solution for getting through chapter 3 of this book using the latest Cucumber.” Thanks, Alexis!
Went to the North Carolina Developers Conference at NC State at Raleigh, NC last weekend. Very edifying.
So I copied my entire home directory (zipped) to my laptop and then jumped from Fedora 14 to 17 on my desktop, resulting in a semi-clean break and an opportunity to separate value from cruft and to organize the valued. I also used FEBE to backup my entire Firefox setup.
I wrote my first jQuery plugin. It’s nothing fancy, but I’ve got the boilerplate down for future plugins.
I have often wanted to extract a good clip from an audio file and publish it on YouTube. I finally got around to doing it and it was easier than I had imagined (once I figured it out). All I’m doing here is creating a video with a still picture and audio.
Probably a no-brainer for many, but I can never remember, and this seems to be best practice:
Sweet, but a little awkward. The good news is that PHP supports anonymous/lambda functions (that you can pass around, etc.), the bad news is you pass the function in as a string.OK, I admit the bad news isn’t that bad, but passing as a string could be a let-down if you’ve done much JavaScript.