AKA Design Solutions Blog

Reinstalling Your Backed-Up Files Using Carbon Copy Cloner

2007-07-02T18:04:01+00:00

My last post discusses my recent catastrophic hard drive failure on my Macbook. There was nothing to be done to save it and so 4 days after the event, my Macbook was returned to me from the Apple shop with a new hard drive with OS X freshly installed. Luckily I had used Carbon Copy Cloner to make a backup of my hard drive to an external disk drive and all that remained was to retrieve the backup and reset my Mac to its previous state. The process was actually very simple in the end but it took about an hour’s worth of Googling and piecing info together for me to to feel confidant enough to start. Losing your hard drive tends to make one cautious! So here is my step by step guide of how I completed the process. Start with your computer switched off and plug in your external hard drive (or wherever you have you backup saved). Turn on the computer and hold down the Option key at the same time (for Mac newbies like me, the Option key is the Alt key). This will bring you into Startup Manager mode, where you can select where you would like to boot the computer from. In order to reinstall the backup files you want to boot from your external drive - double click on this icon. The computer will now start up from the external drive - login using your password details from when you made the backup. Open up Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC), click on Preferences and then Disk Utility. Now you need to erase the current hard drive to make way for the backed-up version. Select the Macintosh HD in the left-hand pane and click on the Erase tab, followed by the Erase button at the bottom of the screen. Close Disk Utility and return to the CCC program. Select your backup drive as the source disk and your hard drive, Macintosh HD, as the target disk. Click on the padlock button and enter your password to unlock the clone button. You’re ready! Click on the Clone button and just wait for the program to work its magic. Once the clone is complete, shutdown the computer and remove the external drive. Boot up as normal and you’ll find your Mac restored to its previous state. * Disclaimer: Follow this at your own risk, this is what worked for me but there is no doubt a better way to do it. Please let me know in the comments if you think I’ve got anything wrong.

One of Life’s Lessons: Backup, Backup, Backup

2007-06-27T14:47:00+00:00

My worst case scenerio happened last night when my beloved Macbook crashed and refused to reboot. I then spent the next four hours on my desktop PC searching through all of the Apple support documents to try and resolve the problem. I never knew there was so many combinations of keys you could press on a Mac to try and start it up: I tried Power + Option, Power + C, Power + Command + Option + Shift, Power + P + R, Power + F + U + C ... well you get the picture. All to no avail. So I booked myself an appointment at the Genius Bar of my local Apple store for lunchtime today, where they confirmed that my hard drive has indeed gone to Macbook heaven. None of the data can be retrieved but luckily as it is still under warranty Apple will replace my hard drive and reinstall my default software without any charge. The moral of the tale Although the inconvenience of being without my Macbook for 7-10 days is annoying, knowing that I have backed up my data to an external hard drive makes the pain easier to bear. Admittedly the backup is from about a month ago, but as I’ve been on holiday and had various other things to keep me busy over that month I shouldn’t have lost too much data. Also as I used Carbon Copy Cloner to backup it should apparently be fairly straightforward to reinstall everything (although I’ve never done it before so only time will tell). All things considered my investment in an external hard drive plus the donation to the makers of Carbon Copy Cloner, which I will now most definately be making, have certainly been worth it. As a freelancer, when you think of all the client work that could potentially have been lost, it could have all been so much worse.

Live Streaming that Works: BBC Wimbledon Coverage

2007-06-25T18:49:00+00:00

One of the reasons that I love working on the web is because it is always full of surprises. Over the last couple of years I have attempted to watch several live streaming broadcasts only to be frustrated by the grainy, stuttering image that made viewing unbearable. This evening I came home from work, excited by the prospect of watching the first day’s coverage of Wimbledon, to discover that the inclement weather has completely knocked out my satellite signal and left me without any television. So it was with some scepticism that I went to the BBC website to access their live coverage online ... but its fantastic! The picture is crystal clear at the default size and even pretty watchable at full screen too. The sound hasn’t faltered once and the visuals are so good that I’m even able to follow the ball despite the speed at which the men hit it at. Well done to the BBC and hopefully the quality of the tennis will match the quality of the online broadcasts!

Bug Fixing My Expression Engine Site Part 1: Template not embeded on some pages

2007-06-25T17:46:00+00:00

After setting up my initial site with Expression Engine in an afternoon, I was left with a couple of outstanding bugs that needed to be resolved at a later date. The first of these bugs was the non-appearance of my embedded sidebar template on certain pages. The ‘General Interest’ links in the sidebar are drawn from a weblog which I called featured_links. While they were present and correct on most pages, for some reason on the individual blog entry pages they returned as an empty list. After several hours of stumbling around through the User Guide I finally discovered the answer in the weblog:entries parameters list. By adding a simple dynamic="off” parameter to the weblog entries tag, the problem was resolved: {exp:weblog:entries weblog="featured_links" limit="4" dynamic="off”} The user guide says: “The weblog display engine sets some parameters dynamically, based on what is in the URL. There are times, however, where you do not want the parameters affected by what the URL contains. To override the dynamic nature of the weblog tag, use dynamic="off". This is often useful if you want to list entries in a “sidebar” on your site and have them always be the same ones regardless of which page on your site you visit (main page, archives, comments, etc.). By setting dynamic="off" you will ensure that the list is not affected by anything passed in the URL.”

Can a Site be Implemented with Expression Engine in An Afternoon?

2007-03-16T12:56:01+00:00

There’s come a time in a web designer’s life when he/she must accept that hand-coding every single page of their own site is no longer a practical solution. A decision must be made – for those that can, it’s very tempting to believe that a hand-crafted content management solution is the way forward. And so they begin, working evenings and weekends - because client work must take priority - to write the best CMS ever known to mankind. Its going to be easy-to-use but be adaptable to cover all the different types of content and design templates that make up the designer’s site. Its going to be so brillant that people will be knocking down his/her doors to get their own copy of ‘CMS Utopia’. Fast-forward six months later. The designer’s other half is threatening divorce on the ground of abandonment and the designer themselves feels like crying every time they look at the length of their to-do list before the CMS even reaches a workable copy. There must be a better way .... Well indeed there is. Not that the story above holds any truth for me I hasten to add, I never even got to the starting point! After hearing much talk from various respected bloggers about using a CMS called Expression Engine, I decided it was time to see what all the fuss was about. I set myself a task of seeing if I could recreate my existing site, plus adding in a blog with the ability for readers to add comments, within an afternoon. So off I trotted to the Expression Engine website and purchased myself a commercial licence for the princely sum of £132.20 ($249.95). This had better be good, I though to myself, for that price. The most I’ve ever paid for software before was £56 for Parallels Desktop for Mac, and that was only when I realised there was no other solution if I wanted to work on a Mac (although now I don’t know how I ever survived without it). I should point out that there is a free Core version available for personal use for those that prefer to try before you buy. For my purposes I wanted to test it on my live system so the Commercial licence was the way to go. Download and installation was a cinch. I downloaded the files, changed a few file permissions in accordance with the instruction manual and created my database. Then it was a simple matter of pointing my browser to the install.php script in my root directory. EE comes installed with sample templates so its worth backing these up to use later as a reference. EE works on a system of templates and ‘weblogs’. Weblogs is the term used by default but essentially these are sections of your site. If, like me, different sections of your site use different design layouts then this is a powerful and easy way of implementing this. I’m not going to go into the details of EE tags in this article as it would complicate issues at this stage. The test here is to see if I could pick up enough knowledge of the structure of EE to convert my site in an afternoon. After playing around with the existing sample content for a while I began to understand that I needed to create a weblog for each section of my site: Home, About, Contact, Portfolio and finally Articles. Each weblog had its own template group with a template for each different page design within that section. I could set up the CSS file as a css template which would save me from editing in a text editor and uploading via FTP. I discovered that EE can embed templates into others, a concept that PHP developers will understand well as we frequently use the include (foo.php) code to include header/footer files in a site. So with this in mind I created a new template group with a separate template file for each of the recurring parts of the design: header, footer, sidebar. I could set up custom entry fields for each weblog which meant that for the Portfolio section I could add an image field for the image of each website and a field to enter the website’s address with appropriate link text. My mind began spinning with possibilites – if I could create a weblog for my Portfolio page then surely I could do the same for the ‘General Interest’ links that appear in the sidebar. Sure enough, five minutes and one more weblog with custom entry fields later, it was done. Adding content couldn’t be simpler. By clicking on Publish and picking the appropriate weblog, I filled out the entry form, clicked submit and voila! After spending another hour adding all the content to the site I was running out of time. My deadline of 5.30 was approaching and I hadn’t even begun to tackle the Articles templates or the Comments function. I decided to quit while the going was good and reviewed what I had already achieved. I had indeed recreating my existing site (the Articles was a new section) in an unbelievable FOUR hours! Overall the concept of how to structure a site in EE was very easy to understand and quick to achieve. My first impressions after working with the CMS for an afternoon is that it is software which looks to show promise for its hefty price tag (by my standards at least). I’ll be spending the next few weeks exploring it further and trying to get to grips with some of its advanced features.

Firebug 1.0 Beta

2006-12-11T08:52:00+00:00

There’s a lot of buzz (no pun intended) around the latest beta release of the Firebug extension for Firefox. Amongst its nifty features is the ability to measure and display CSS margins, padding and borders. I’ve always used the great MeasureIt extension in the past to measure approximate space on a page but now Firebug should make it even easier. In fact there are so many features to this extension that I may have to break a habit of a lifetime and read the documentation. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to get the extension to run properly on my PC version of Firefox due to a known bug but thankfully as ever my trusty Macbook hasn’t let me down.

Redesign of AKA Design Solutions

2006-11-23T08:49:00+00:00

The redesign of AKADesignSolutions.co.uk has gone live. It’s been on the backburner for a few months now because of working on client sites but after a a determined effort over the last few days, I’ve finally got something I’m happy with. It’s a bit of a work in progress at the moment and the plan is to add some finishing touches over the next week and to generally expand the site in the coming months.