New Host! New Home!

My new setup is quite comfortable. Hosting by Joyent running on a Shared Accelerator using Mongrel proxyied through Apache to run a Rails application known as SimpleLog with a green inspired simple style theme created by Myself using a new CSS framework called Blueprint.

From the time my DNS change went through it took only about an hour to get the whole thing up and running. Although while typing this I am still waiting for a Mongrel port, running Mongrel by hand works just fine.

The setup was good timing because Andrea is working late and I am still trying to wrap my head around all the upcoming decisions needed to be made about wayne.edu. I am now the Interim Web Manager in the Marketing Department. With the new position comes some new goals and I am currently putting them together and hope to bring my experience with high load shared server environments in some upcoming articles.

Eventually all my old archived articles from my blogger account will get moved over, I just need the motivation to do it.

New Blog URL: nickdenardis.com

Planning a Future

Making Connections. Helping Out. Advancing. Upgrading. Living.

Life is too short to sit and let it pass you by, get noticed and stand out.

It will be worth it, don't look back while moving forward.

Bumps Road Moving to TextDrive

So I thought moving was easy... I thought wrong. Yesterday I decided although my new site was not fully complete in development that I would sign up for TextDrive (Joyent) hosting and get everything setup so in the next week I would be all ready to launch the new site. I picked my plan, put in my CC info and then waited... three minutes to be exact, and I was not surprised to see a large "Opps something went wrong" page. After checking my email I noticed that I did get an email saying my CC was charged but what was odd was their was no invoice number. Fearing I would be double charged I didn't resubmit my CC info and clicked their friendly Help link. I submitted a ticket outlining all my steps and intentions and waited...

My current host (not blogger) but for my client work always respond within 30 minutes with at least a We see the issue and we will get someone working on it. But every hosting company is different so I thought I would just wait it out. Well it is 24 hours later and still no response. All that has changed was it was assigned to a "Chris Morris". So I put in a response confirming that 24 hours have gone by and asking if they had an estimated time frame for responding to issues. That was three hours ago and still no response.

So I am trying my best to keep it positive but if this is the way a hosting company treats its potential customers they better have some damn good servers and uptime.

Working with Blueprint: A CSS Framework

So I decided to change my blogging software, from no software (Blogger) to SimpleLog. I setup everything up in my dev environment and it was by far the easiest setup I have seen so far. Took about 10 minutes including setting up the virtual hosts.

While getting super interested in my blog again I was looking for some nice examples of css blogs to get inspired I stumbled upon Blueprint, which is a css framework so I decided to give it a whirl.

First impressions it is super lightweight and non-intrusive, just two lines that have to be added. to the head which includes the style sheets. My only gripe so far was that they just include one grid option which is 14 columns, its not a big deal all that I think it needs is a few other background images to show the options of columns from the grid. Like 7 columns, 3x8x3 and so forth.

So I hit up Photoshop and came up with a basic color scheme and outline for the new blog. Took about a day of going back and forth on how much I wanted to add to the site but being inspired by rails iterative approach to programming I decided to stick with the simple and expand from there.

Back to Blueprint, with my design it ended up being very easy to implement in blueprint. It doesn't have anything nested tho which I was really interested in since it looked to handle nesting very gracefully. I tried as hard as I could to make this design fit into a 14 column grid but I made the design decision to keep the width at 780 instead of Blueprints default of 960. But not to fear we are just working with css here all I did was just override two of their default widths in my screen.css to keep the integrity of their files in case I decided to upgrade them in the future it will be fully degradable.

Their reset.css worked great, I am use to using Eric Meyers reset.css and then creating everything from there. But Blueprint had an unexpected typography.css which setup quite a bit of the default typography. Which was a huge time saver, because Eric's just leaves you out in the cold to setup everything on your own which is totally cool if your project warrants it but sometimes there are elements that get introduced and have no control over.

So setting up a new template in SimpleLog was easy and I started editing the site.rhtml layout to use the naming conventions per Blueprint. Just a few class changes and I removed some default SimpleLog items that I didn't include in my final design and boom! We have an outline!

Fast forward through time, 26 css declarations and 3 images later and my homepage was almost done. Time in total was about 2 hours to copy and setup an entire new template with SimpleLog and Blueprint. I was amazed, usually I hate when things try to be "smart" and assume they know what options and action you are going to preform but Blueprint didn't get in my way at all. Since everything for the base elements was already setup I just used my ID's and Classes to extend the base and life was good.

Although I was just concentrating on the homepage today flipping through all the other pages they didn't look that bad by default. SimpleLog uses a lot of the same css names and conventions throughout their pages meshed with Blueprints base styles and my overrides the only things left to do were the specifics of the page.

Last but not least, my current host is not very Rails friendly so I am looking for a new host for my blog. While doing that I will continue to update here and work on the new version on my dev server. So far:

SimpleLog: A+

• Ton of features and rock solid. Easy install and great documentation. I have not looked into any extensions or plugins yet but there are a few areas where I can see a few more helper functions. But for getting a blog up quick and painless SimpleLog is the way to go.
• SimpleLog Website
  

Blueprint: A-

• For just being at 0.3 release it is a huge time saver, its not just the resets for cross browser compatibility but it also includes a good typography and print styles which I have always been looking to create. I hate going through and trying to think of all the HTML elements a client could potentially use and make sure they are set accordingly. Blueprint defiantly has a future in my web development life and releasing it to the community will only make it better.
• Blueprint CSS Framework Website
  

Dial Up North

Dialup sucks, everyone knows it, but it is cheap, free in most cases. Recently MichNet cut all its subscribers off of their dial up internet service which Wayne State was part of so we were in the market for a dial up service to connect to the net upnorth. I decided on NetZero mainly because it was free. My review of the software is that it Sucks. I have used dialup for a while now upnorth but this service is the pits, the free one installs a toolbar on IE, for a while I could not get any other application to connect to the net besides IE which is a real bummer if you need to use SSH or an IM client. But eventually like magic applications began to come online, I cannot explain it but it made me happy.

It really put things into perspective for me again on how a lot of people still view the net. It was so slow at some times that I eventually disabled images and then things were flying quite well, but it really showed off which developers have the skill to accommodate this slow pace world. Some things I noticed that really helped were:

• Using a background-color approximately the same color as an image background. This way if the image background does not load then the text on top still have a background color to contrast against.
• Combining images and use background positioning to put them in place. This dramatically reduces the number of images to load. Like I mentioned before images were the real killer of speed when using dial up. Better yet if you can use background colors instead of images it really speeds things up without loosing design points.
  
• Combining Javascript files and using a compressor. This is a no brainier it take almost no effort and helps with slow and fast connections. JS files can get large and they don't have to be, I recommend using an automated compression tool called Minify. Really easy to use and
  
• AJAX. It is odd but it really kept me on sites with AJAX for a longer period of time because the site seemed snappier and I didn't have to wait for the whole page to load over and over again.
• If you have image/flash ads on your site really sit back and think if slowing down the information on your site to a portion of internet users is really worth the few cents you may get from them clicking on the ads. Content is king, if a dial up user cannot get to your content because of a large flash or image ad on your site they will more than likely go someplace else that is dial up friendly.

Slowing things down really puts the little things into perspective. And it is the little things that matter in life.

IP Changed :-?

So we have had cable internet for probably 12 years now, it first started out with Excite@Home and which got bought out by Comcast. Well in those 12 years I have only had two IP's, one for Excite which was pretty much static 24.*.*.* Those were the good old days when there were no limits and they did not try to control everything. And one for Comcast which is essentially dynamic but i have had to reset my router a few times and it has always come up with the same IP 68.*.*.* Well all of a sudden yesterday of all days they decide to change my IP randomly, without me even renewing it from the router. They changed the whole IP even, doesn't even start with the same A class 69.*.*.*! Now it is more complicated and I have to change all my hosts files on my machines to match :-/ What a hassle, im done venting...

Blogged with Flock

PHPSimpl 0.8.2 Feature Update

Just keep adding features
So after some time working with the current release we noticed some areas where improvement was needed. So what did we do? We improved in all the wonderful ways below:

• Added a debug.log file to debug a live site in real time, best used with "tail -f"
  
• Added the ErrorMessages() function to summarize a forms errors, similar to Rails.
• Added the SetConditions() function so querying for >, <, <=, LIKE and OR's are all possible now.
• Added a Get and Set Folder name functions in the Folder Class.
• DisplayList() now uses the options of a field to display in the list.
  
• RowsAffected() now works like it should.
  
• Fixed the Debug Query to work again.
  

Its a Recommended Update

• Download PHPSimpl 0.8.2 (97Kb)
• Install Guide
• API and Examples

Questions or Comments? Feel free to leave them in the PHPSimpl Group. There is always someone to help available. By the way we love feature requests, keep them coming.