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I Am Not the Boss of Me but Indeed I Am

2009-02-11T09:52:00-06:00

I Am Not the Boss of Me but Indeed I Am

February 11, 2009 by carmelyne

Funny title but does say it all.

Here at my site. I am the boss. What I say goes. That's right! I will not support IE6 with Version 4 .0 of this site. I am taking that stand once again. Remember in the late 90's - early 2000's when web designers/developers stood up for web standards and if not for that, web standards wouldn't be main stream like it is now.

Doesn't it seem like a bad decision to not support IE6 since this is an extension of how I present my work? It's a risk I am willing to take. I've had my share of IE hacking. There are options available to users nowadays.

If you're on IE6 and below, you'll hit my D.R.A.O.K page. It's free to upgrade your browsers. Please upgrade.

Tags: Boss, IE6, DRAOK

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This post talks about:

No IE 6 Support
Version 4

Word Press MU Installation Woes

2009-02-19T01:27:50-06:00

Word Press MU Installation Woes

February 19, 2009 by carmelyne

Word Press Mu -- one word: awesome

I've been playing around with Word Press MU and encountered some issues during the installation.

Till I finally figured out the fix:

Dont manually create a .htaccess file and dont manually create a wp-config.php file either.
Just make sure you create a DB. Know the db name/db user /db password. Make sure your user has the proper permissions for the db you created.
CHMOD 777 on "public" and "wp-contents" if the site root is where you uploaded your base files.
Go to http://yourdomain.com/wp-contents/install.php
Go ahead and click button to create config file.
Then just plug in the information needed.
Once set up CHMOD 755 "public" and "wp-contents"

That's all you need to set up WPMU. Hope that helps someone else.

Tags: Playground, Word Press Mu

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This post talks about:

Word Press MU version 2.7

Setting Git Remote for Ubuntu Dapper

2009-01-18T03:57:12-06:00

Setting Git Remote for Ubuntu Dapper

January 18, 2009 by carmelyne

I love hosted git. I have a slice on slicehost that's not being fully utilized so I will install git on it and set it up as a Git Remote server.

My slice is a little old so it's running on the following stack primarily for rails:

That's a simple rails stack to run this blog on Mephisto 0.7.3.

As I was doing search for ways to set up git on Ubuntu Dapper, not very many came up, and most of them were for Ubuntu Intrepid. I found Installing git on your slicehost and managing it with gitosis as the closest candidate but it required Gitosis that required some Python dependencies. Clearly, I don't need another layer nor more dependencies just to set up git on my slice. Then a recommendation on the comment came up: Setting up a Git Server which is exactly what I was looking for. Then the latter blog post fell short of describing the necessary steps to install Git on Ubuntu Dapper.

Then I tried using the former blog post commands to install git:

The command above to build the dependencies for git-core just gave me 404s or "obsoletes" and that's most likely due to Dapper being a really old version. I've even updated my etc/apt/source/list. No such luck. It would just throw out:

Bad bad evil archive, I say.

That's where this post comes in so here we go:

If an error pops in while you're doing install git-core just apt-get install the missing little sucker dependencies individually and I think I ran onto 1 or two of them.

After you've successfully installed Git, run:

git --version

It should atleast say "git version 1.5.4.5". Ok, yay!

While logged in as a sudoer, create a new user and add the password.

sudo adduser git

Log out and log in as git.

While you're still logged in as a git user do:

Let's do out first commit:

Great! That's all we need as an alternative for a remote Git on your own slice.

On a side note, when the time comes, I will most likely do a clean install for the most recent Ubuntu on my slice and start over a Rails stack at which point I'd have to figure out how to move my Git remotes or how to handle that part. I'm sure it's not going to be a difficult. Cross fingers.

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This post talks about:

RubyGem 0.9.8
Ubuntu Dapper
Git Remote Setup
SSH public key setup
Slicehost
Rails 1.2.3

Version 4.0

2009-02-10T18:52:20-06:00

Version 4.0

February 10, 2009 by carmelyne

Hello site, welcome to 2009!

Goals for the redesign:

Learn from the whole process
Update back-end server stack
Change from LiteSpeed to Apache + Passenger
Protype/Scriptaculous to jQuery
Liquid to Haml
Add an iPhone Specific CSS
Move Feedburner to Google Account
Fresher design
New Section to Showcase work
Move the short about me block to the header area
Improve blog post structure
- Make embedded code snippets more readable and ported to Gist
- Add the "This post talks about" section
- Port comments to Disgus

Approximately every 12-15 mos, I update the design and back-end technology that runs this site. The constant keeping up with back-end server technology is usually my driving force when I update my site. Server administration and front-end development are both my comfort zones so I'm usually eager and always looking forward to this yearly change.

It was an absolute delight to set up the server from a clean install. Now I'm running on Ubuntu Intrepid with MySql, Apache + Passenger, Ruby 1.8.7/Rails 2.2.2 as opposed to the old stack: Ubuntu Dapper/MySql/LiteSpeed/Ruby 1.8.4/ Rails 1.2.3. The Virtual Host setup for Apache on Intrepid is quite similar to Nginx which I found refreshing. I was also able to set up my private Git. I went to town and maximized what I can play with on a mere 256 Slice.

I changed from a Mephisto 0.7.3. blog on LiteSpeed to a Webby powered site on Apache + Passenger. In retrospect, I would have chosen another alternative over Webby because porting from a database driven content system to file system seemed like a backward step but no blog nor CMS supported Haml except for Webby. I must admit the pages are rendered blazingly faster without a dependency on any caching systems. Another plus on using webby was the little to no overhead so it can co-exist with another rails app on the same slice.

The design is not much. It took some photoshop pen tool-ing to create the flower. I stuck with my 3 personal brand colors: Red, Cream and Green. Pink is the in color for 2009. Kidding, I just like Pink. :)

I made a usability improvement with my own blog post. Tags are so 2005 so I added a section for every blog post called "This post talks about". I'd like the viewer to see right away what technology/version is being discussed without having to comb through the post/article. That's two birds with one stone: having the "This post talks about" also increases my keyword density in legitimate ways so that's an SEO win.

I've also made it a point for the Blog Nav to have all blog post titles + link available on a blanket nav. I've called it a blanket nav since it takes up a pretty big space and blankets over. It's just a simple div toggling. If you turn off the CSS for this site, it becomes a simple navigational list for all the blog post/articles. It makes it easier for bots to index the site as well cause when bots hit the homepage, all the links are extractable -- less one page to drill down to. The blog's blanket nav is due for a second iteration already -- meaning more improvements. That topic will be for another blog post so stay tuned.

The 2007 content is still in the process of being ported to this new set up so I do apologize if you're looking for my old posts.

Tags: Design, Thoughts, Playground, Back-end

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This post talks about:

Redesign
Goals of the redesign
Process and decisions
Information Architecture