After over three years of development with a huge number of contributors, the Django Project Team has officially released Django 1.0 for public/production consumption.

For anyone that isn’t in the know, Django is an open-source Python framework for rapid development of web applications.

Personally, I’ve used Django to develop a number of projects and it has been amazing to watch the framework grow over the last three years. The amount of contributions by the community at large has been absolutely incredible. Not to mention that working with Django is an absolute joy and makes my life a lot easier as a developer.

I look forward to seeing the continued growth of the community and hopefully I’ll get around to contributing some code to the project at some point.

On another note, this site should be relaunching at some point in the future on a Django-based CMS that I’m developing to run all of my sites. So I haven’t given up here completely, there’s more to come.

Rest assured, this site isn’t dead. I’m working on a redesign and a new content management system in my spare time, which is pretty limited these days.

$ history|awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
  230	cd
  138	ls
   54	ps
   51	vi
   45	/etc/init.d/httpd
   42	svn
   38	exit
   38	apachectl
   32	stoprails
   29	thin

I found this one by way of James Bennet’s site. Feel free to post your own in the comments or link your own post up.

There’s a ton of data in the report, but I think it will be very interesting to peruse. It gives a pretty decent look at the skill levels and such in the industry today.

Findings from the ALA Web Design Survey

Designers & Developers for MDA

A challenge to the web community from Ryan Irelan to raise money for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. If you have a few spare dollars, please help out this great cause and donate. If not, please at least link to this page) on Ryan’s site.

Then it hit me, there were probably a lot of people that were still subscribed to my (very old) feed URL from my Wordpress days that was being redirected toward my Feedburner URL. I just needed to find a way to graceful 301 redirect this URL to Feedburner. Since there was no way to do this (currently) in Simplelog interface, I wrote my own plugin to suit my needs.

It was a relatively simple task, and using my routing method that I had used in the Contact Mailer Plugin made the configuration of this new plugin dead easy.

This plugin is not only useful for redirecting feed urls. It can be configured to redirect any URL relative to your Simplelog domain (including files, static HTML, and PHP).

Simply download, unzip this file, and drop the folder into your vendor/plugins directory and follow the instructions in the included README file.

Next, open the script in Automator and in Step 1, add the path to the folder that you want to back up. ’~/”Local Folder”‘ is the folder that is in my home directory that I want to back up and “/Volumes/DiskName/Backup” is the back up folder on my external drive that I want to copy the files to.  You can repeat that command on a new line for other folders that you want to back up and it will copy them to the Backup folder on your external drive. The particular rsync command that I’m using here will only copy over changed files so that it doesn’t have to copy every single file over to your backup every day. For more information on other rsync commands, type “man rsync” in the Terminal, or “[“view the manual online”:http://everythinglinux.org/rsync/. You might want to look into the ‘–delete’ parameter if you like file to be deleted on your backup drive as you delete them from your local folders.

Step 2 pops up a growl notification when the backup process is complete. If you haven’t installed growl yet, definitely give it a try, it’s a very handy little app. You could also have the workflow send you an email when the backup is done, if you prefer. The one caveat here is that you won’t get confirmation if the backup was actually successful, this notification will display even if the rsync command fails (which it shouldn’t unless your external drive isn’t mounted, or if you have errors in some of your folder paths above).

After you get that all set up, head to “File > Save As Plug-in, change the “Plug-in for” format to “iCal Alarm”, enter a name like “Local Backup” and save.

After the new plug-in is saved, iCal should open automatically and create a new calendar event on the current day in your default calendar. This part is a personal preference, but I like to keep all of my scheduled scripts in a calendar by themselves (called Backups) just for organization’s sake. Now, the choice is up to you how often you’d like your backup to run and at what time, change the repeat field to be whatever you’d like it to be (I set mine to daily), adjust the time that the script is executed (I set mine to a time I know I won’t be using my computer — 4:30am), and you should be good to go for local backups.

Something else to note is that you can use this method in iCal to run just about any type of application/process/script you wish, it’s just a matter of changing the alarm time for an event to “Open file” or “Run script”. A new field right below that will appear to allow you to select the file you’d like to run.

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll show you how I use this method to back up my local files to a remote server, as well as how I grab daily MySQL backups from my webserver. Feel free to leave any questions in the comments below if I’ve left anything out, or if you get stuck with the process.

I’ve got a ton of Joost invites to give away (read unlimited). If you haven’t tried out the service yet and are interested in this new media phenomena, drop a line to joost@from-away.net with a quick note including the email address you’d like the invite sent to.

The survey took me less than five minutes to complete, and because I offered my name and email address at the end of the survey, I’ve been entered to win a free ticket to An Event Apart event, an Apple 30GB video iPod, an Event Apart jump drive, or an A List Apart T-shirt.

Personally, I’m very curious to see the results of this survey, especially with all of the recent discussion surrounding gender diversity at web conferences, and the industry in general.

So, if you’ve got 5 spare minutes and would like the chance to win some cool prizes, make sure to take the survey.

I found the plugin easy enough to install and after playing around with it for a bit, I decided to hack it apart a bit and make it even easier to install, and clean up the URL’s the plugin uses.

The first thing that I did was adding routing to the init.rb file of the plugin. Routing seemed to be the thing that people were having the biggest problem with over at the Simplelog forums. After that was taken care of, I cleaned up the routes a bit, and now we’ve got the Simplelog Contact Mailer Plugin.

Download Simplog Contact Mailer Plugin

All of the instructions for getting it set up on your own Simplelog installation are included in the README file.

Many thanks to Harold for offering this up to us over at the forums, and for giving me the go-ahead to pass along my modified version.

I’m fascinated with seeing other people’s workspace as a means to add to or improve my own. So, if you’ve got a recent shot of your own home office link to it in the comments.

See the photos after the jump.

As always, the larger versions of the photos are linked above and are available in my Flickr photostream.

First things first, you’ll need to download the latest version of Simplelog from the Simplelog website: or, if you’re feeling adventurous you can download the latest development version from Simplelog SVN: using the username and password ‘anonymous’.

Next, you’ll want to set up a new database for Simplelog by logging into cPanel and creating a new database in the MySQL area. Make sure to take note of your DB name, username, and password, we’ll need these a little later on.

Now we’re going to set the chmod (permissions) for a few files and configure Simplelog. Personally, I like to do both of these steps before I upload Simplelog to my server even though I have SSH access. If you have SSH access or now how to set permissions using your FTP program of choice, you could do it after uploading Simplog. For setting permissions, I’m going to use Terminal (since I’m using OSX) and navigate to the folder that I’ve downloaded/unzipped Simplelog on my local machine.

Input the above commands into Terminal (or your command line tool of choice) while in the unzipped Simplelog directory.

Next we’re going to set up our database and configuration settings. First, open config/database.yml and edit it to match your database details (using the DB name, username, and password we set up earlier). For those that are setting up Simplelog on a host other than A Small Orange (or those wanting to use a PostgresSQL DB) there are a couple of other example database.yml files in the config directory. If your MySQL server address is anything other than ‘localhost’, you’ll want to use the database_dreamhost.yml for your example. It contains a ‘host’ field that will allow you to type in a named MySQL address for your server (i.e. mysql.mydomain.com).

One last thing before we upload everything to our A Small Orange server, since ASO is running Rails through FCGI, we’ll need to force Simplelog to run in production mode. Running in production mode will speed things up for us and will put a lot less strain on our shared server (Rails apps should always be run in production mode on your shared server, development should be done locally or on your own development server). So to force production mode, we’re going to open up the environment.rb file in the config directory and add this line to it around line 39: ENV['RAILS_ENV'] ||= 'production'.

Another step that you’ll notice that I’ve skipped (that you would normally have to take care of for most Rails apps) is opening the .htaccess file in the public folder of Simplelog to point to dispatch.fcgi instead of dispatch.cgi. The reason that I’ve skipped over this is because Simplelog is already configured this way when downloaded, so you don’t have to worry about it.

Now that we’ve done all this, we’ll upload Simplelog to our server. Since this isn’t a normal HTML/PHP/etc. application, we’re going to be uploading it to our main user directory (/home/username/). I prefer to keep all my Rails applications in one directory by themselves, so I’ve created a rails folder in my home directory. Change to that folder and upload the Simplelog folder from your local machine.

Once everything is finished uploading, we’re going to SSH into the server to bootstrap our database (bootstrapping includes importing the database schema and a bit of sample data). To bootstrap our database we’ll want to run these commands once we’re logged in to our server:

You should now get a message that rake tasks have been completed if the install was successful.

Just one last step before we can start blogging using Simplelog. Since we’ve put Simplelog somewhere other than in our public_html folder, we need to create a symbolic link to the public folder of Simplelog so that visitors will see something when they reach our website.

This next step will delete all of the data that currently resides in your public_html directory. Make sure to make a complete backup of public_html before continuing with the next step!

While still logged in to our server via SSH, we’re going to cd back to our home directory:

After making a complete backup of our public_html folder we’ll run the following commands:

There, now we can log out of our server and visit our website (http://yourdomain.com/) to make sure that everything went as it should. The first time that you visit your Simplelog install, it will take a little longer than normal for your site to load. This is because Simplelog is running through FCGI, so the extra load time is to wait for the dispatch.fcgi process to start up. After a brief wait you should see the default template for Simplelog show up and now you can visit http://yourdomain.com/admin and log in using the default email/password for Simplelog: Email: temp@email.com/Password: !@gonow (make sure to change this when you log in for the first time).

Now we’re all set to start blogging!

The New Gig

For the last year or so, Derek Featherstone and I had been talking on and off about me doing some contract work for him during my freelance time. Timing never seemed to be quite right for either of us to jump on a project together, but around Christmas time Derek and I had a discussion about me leaving my full time job and spending my time working on projects for his company, Further Ahead. We both decided (based on Derek’s 80% rule, which I also base a lot of decisions on) that it was time.

I gave my notice at my old job the first week of February and started working with Further Ahead on February 19th. I’ve really been enjoying the work that I’ve been doing so far, and hopefully before too long we’ll be able to take the wraps off some of the projects that Derek and I have been working on together the past few weeks. This job has really renewed my enthusiasm in my career, my stress levels have never been lower, and my productivity has never been higher.

So many thanks to Derek, I’m very happy to be a member of the Further Ahead team!

Web Directions North

I also had a great roomate in Jon Snook who I tagged along with on a couple of occasions and introduced me to lots of great folk. I met so many other people during the four days that I was in Vancouver that I had trouble remembering names, etc. So, my apologies if we me and I didn’t mention you here.

Being at WDN also gave Derek and I a chance to sit down and get to know each other a bit over a few beers and some great food. After chatting with Derek and his wife for a couple of hours, I knew that had definitely made the right decision about my employment situation.

Up to Speed

I’d really love to go back to freelancing which would allow me to manage my own work/hours, and would also give me more time to work on my own projects, of which I only seem to have 3 to 4 hours a week to work on now. A lot of time that I used to spend on my own projects is now being spent on more important things, like actually getting away from my desk and enjoying the summer with Krista and some friends from the Maritimes that have recently relocated to Alberta. That being said, I cannot seem to get ahead of financial roadblocks that would allow me to freelance full time. Monthly bills, wanting to buy a home, doing a bit of travelling (time allowing), and other expenses seem to prevent me from setting aside enough of a security blanket to keep us comfortable while I make the transition to freelance and do a bit of marketing for myself.

I’ve spoken with a number of different companies since the start of the year regarding some new and exciting projects that I’d love to be a part of ¹, but no one seems to be able to give me any certainty on the duration of employment/contracts outside of two or three months. Two or three months would be great if I knew I’d have something else to move on to for sure at the outset. But, because of the reasons I listed above, I just don’t feel comfortable taking the chance that I could be doing this all over again when the project is completed.

Maybe with this career that I’ve chosen in web development, I just need to quit whining and get used to the idea that nothing in this industry is certain or secure, and unless I switch to a different career (or take a job that is secure, but so boring and stagnant that I can hardly take it), I’m just going to have to suck it up, live with it, and take a few chances, even if it means that things could get tough for us again financially.

I’d love to hear opinions from any of you, or if I’m just being a big wuss about the whole thing, just give me a swift kick in the ass!

¹ I should note that I’m also somewhat picky about team situations in these new opportunities. I don’t relish working with a large team, because in my experience, large teams often breed politics, which is something I can’t stand. I also find that the fewer cooks in the pot, the better the result. Thus, my considerations so far have been limited to smaller teams of around 5 people. Back

Update: I’ve successfully installed Windows XP on my iMac with no major issues and it runs flawlessly.  I installed Battlefield 2 last night to do a bit of testing with games and was surprised just how well it ran.  I’ll be outlining my experience in a little more detail here this weekend along with a few gaming benchmarks.
Wow, this is just what I’ve been waiting for. Being a new owner of an Intel iMac, I have been anxiously watching the dual boot scene until a safe alternative came about.

My work on the redesign, along with a couple of other projects is the reason for my absense for the last little bit. I’ve got a couple of projects that will be rolling out before the end of April, both of which are turning out quite well so far.

My resolve to write more regularly here is still strong, and I’ll try to post a little here and there while trying to get things wrapped up for the CSS Reboot, so “stay tuned”.

I’m glad this one lived to see the light of day, I’m sure I’ll be making extensive use of it. Cheers for the hard work guys.

Found via Greg.

John Gruber explains the exploit in this post: The Safari Shell Script Execution Exploit

I decided that if I entered the CSS Reboot I would be able to give myself a bit more time to complete the design. And hopefully I’ll be able to give it that little extra touch that I wouldn’t have time for if the design was pushed out the door in a hurry.

So, keep an eye on my profile at CSS Reboot…Something good is coming on May 1st. In the meantime though, I plan to try to keep up the regular posting here. Even if it is these short little posts I’ve been tossing up the last week or so.