iUI consists of Javascript/CSS/images that allow you to build a mobile version of your app that looks and feels just like a native iPhone app

PhoneGap lets you create an iPhone application (that can be submitted to the app store) that displays a framed mobile version of your site

To build your iPhone app:

1. Make an iPhone/iPod Touch friendly version of your site with iUI (which your users can access in mobile safari)

2. Bundle it as an iPhone application (so the user has an app store version they can install) using PhoneGap and submit it to the app store. What’s even better is that with PhoneGap you can also target Blackberry and Android devices.

As a web developer I’m not sure how they could make it any easier for me, sweet! Plus you get the double exposure of the app store or when users visit your site with their iPhones they get the mobile version of your site.

To that end one of the tools I want to give a shout out to is the MySQL Performance Tuning Primer Script. You download and run it against a production system (that has preferably been running under normal load for a day or two so that it’s gathered stats). It’s a read-only script so you don’t need to worry about it changing anything but it makes some great recommendations about which tuning parameters may need adjustment. Here’s a snippet from from a production server:

KEY BUFFER
Current MyISAM index space = 173 M
Current key_buffer_size = 1 G
Key cache miss rate is 1 : 1003
Key buffer fill ratio = 7.00 %
Your key_buffer_size seems to be too high.
Perhaps you can use these resources elsewhere
…
…
…

It’s no replacement for a DBA but if you want to get a somewhat sane my.cnf going for your particular application it’s a great place to start!

Selenium Selenese Continuous Integration Runner

on GitHub in the hopes that it will save other people time when trying to get their Selenese tests running from a continuous integration server. It’s very simple but one thing I battled with was that I had to patch the selenium JAR to get it to work with Firefox 3.0. It should work fine in any continuous integration server regardless if it’s Hudson, Cruise, Cruise Control, Bamboo, etc.

The functional testing products I’ve used that drive a real browser include Test Complete (commercial), Selenium, and Watir. I think all 3 do a good job but one thing I like about Selenium is that it’s dirt simple to get a user productive with the Selenium IDE Firefox plugin. However, that benefit is also the most limiting factor of the Selenium IDE which is that to be able to re-open tests in Selenium IDE you have to save them as Selenese (which is the most limited of the testing languages that Selenium supports). Still, I think Selenese is a reasonable choice for a lot of organizations that need a moderately sophisticated functional test suite.

In my work managing websites I end up working in Ruby, Java, and PHP. In everything but Rails managing the schema requires rolling your own solution. As a result I’ve started using Rails migrations in non-Rails projects to manage the schema. It’s not much code but I figured others might benefit from it so I created a little Github project called standalone migrations.

It’s based on Lincoln Stoll’s blog post titled Stand-alone ActiveRecord migrations and David Welton’s blog post titled Using Migrations Outside of Rails.

Assuming you have Ruby and Gem installed on your machine, here’s how to use it:

gem install -y activerecord rake mysql
wget http://github.com/thuss/standalone-migrations/zipball/master (or fetch it using git)
unzip it, and mv to something like my_non_rails_project/db
cd my_non_rails_project/db/ (or wherever you put it)
cp config/database_sample.yml config/database.yml
vi config/database.yml
./new_migration some_user_story
vi migrations/*_some_user_story.rb
rake db:migrate (this applies your newly created migration)

I’m pleased to say that after 3 hours I had the install done and all of my software installed and working including Jetbrains IDEA, Netbeans, Skype, VirtualBox, Flash plugin, Java plugin, Web Developer Toolbar, and Firebug. Apparently things have gotten a little better for 64 bit Linux over the past year and a half! However, I’m still running into odd issues every now and again related to both Sun’s 64 bit Java (IDE and Jetty occasionally hangs) and the the Open JDK browser plugin which is still buggy. Hopefully future updates will help address these issues. Anyhow, I thought I’d throw out the links I used to get everything working:

Fonts
Howto: Install Mac Fonts on Ubuntu
Make Firefox in Ubuntu look much better

Skype
Add the Medibuntu repository
sudo apt-get install skype-static

Flash plugin
Install Flash 10 Under Ubuntu Linux 64 bit Edition

Java plugin
sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jre icedtea-gcjwebplugin

October 4th, 2007 was my last day as the VP of Technology at GreatSchools when I handed the reigns over to Chris Pickslay so that Susan, Sequoia, and I could take off on our sailboat to Mexico for 6-12 months. It was a great 4 years leading the tech team at GreatSchools and I was sad to leave such a terrific job and group of people but both Susan and I were really feeling the itch for some adventure under sail. Our plan was to explore the Baja peninsula, mainland Mexico, and of course the lovely Sea of Cortez.

8 months have passed and we had some great fun and adventures which you can read about on our sailing blog if you’re interested, it all starts here when we moved aboard the boat. However, with hurricane season approaching we decided to put the boat into dry storage in San Carlos Mexico for the summer and return home for 6 months to work and catch up with friends and family.

Starting June 10th I’ll be back at GreatSchools 3 days a week as a contractor until we go back to Mexico and this time I’ll be working for Chris instead of the other way around!

Having worked with a lot of front-end developers I can confirm that almost all of them would benefit from this book since most still

• use floats for layout as opposed to position absolute (which is easily misunderstood because it’s positioning relative to the containing block)
• few seem to regularly run their XHTML through a validator (a pet peeve of mine)
• and even fewer seem to know to employ the concept of a CSS reset

It’s hard to convey all of the great stuff in this book but I can almost guarantee that if you work with CSS this book will open your eyes to a better way of doing things.

Publishing dynamic content on your website in a format that you can style with CSS has gotten a whole lot easier with Google’s simple JSON based Javascript API’s. The two I’ve found myself playing with lately are the Google Ajax Feed API for publishing RSS and Atom feeds and the Google Spreadsheet API
for publishing little snippets of text that should be easily editable.

Say you want a simple headline on your homepage that you can change daily. Here’s how you’d do it with the Google Spreadsheet API:

1. Create a spreadsheet making the first row the column headers (important because you’ll refer to the cell by the column header):

2. Go to the publish tab and publish the spreadsheet: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pouqRkV5D_eZT_VdOKu7CQA. Note in this example the key is pouqRkV5D_eZT_VdOKu7CQA

3. Use a simple container div and some javascript to display the field:

<div id="headline"></div>
<script type="text/javascript">
function displayContent(json) { document.getElementById('headline').innerHTML = json.feed.entry[0].gsx$html.$t; }
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/list/pouqRkV5D_eZT_VdOKu7CQA/od6/public/values?alt=json-in-script&callback=displayContent">
</script>

Note: the spreadsheet key in the URL that needs to be replaced. Also, entry[0] refers to row 2 in the spreadsheet (because row 1 contains the column headers and is not considered an entry):

4. The text appears dynamically on the page:

Palm releases Linux based Foleo

5. When it’s time to update, make your changes to the spreadsheet, go the publish tab, and republish it and the changes will appear on your site!

The only real downside I can think of with this simple approach is that it’s not SEO friendly so if you want all search engine crawlers to follow those links you publish, you’re better off with a non-javascript solution. The Spreadsheets API google group is a good resource and Pamela Fox has some examples to look at.

We currently front our site with 3 caching proxy servers to offload static content from the web servers and we haven’t found the right solution yet. We’ve tried a number of solutions including Oops and Apache with mod_cache (which we’re currently running) but they are either missing a critical feature, have buggy caching behavior, or crash under heavy load. The main features I’m looking for are:

1. Caches static content and pages and respects the expires header
2. Can gzip content on the fly (this saves us a bundle in bandwidth costs)
3. Can easily clear the cache when we move a new release live

I’d prefer an open-source product but if we end up needing to go with a commercial solution as a last resort I’m open to that as well, thanks for your suggestions or help!

State landing page (now called Research and Compare)

The school profile overview page:

The city page: