Power & Light: Category Geek Speak

Typo: The end is nigh // Job // Plagiarism // GM4.0

Aiden Bordner — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 22:50:00 -0800

Typo: The end is nigh

Not for Typo on a whole, mind you. Just here.

I’m preparing the first sketches on the long-overdue development of my personal site and one of the major components is going to be a completely overhauled blog presentation. And, when that happens, I’ll be switching to Mephisto due to the unnecessary weight of Typo and it’s sluggishness on this shared server.

The new system will employ much AJAX and DHTML goodness. Don’t worry: not a bunch of useless crap. I’m working on the wireframes now for a novel way to look at a blog. Admittedly, there’s not a lot you can do with a blog, but I’m asking questions of myself as to how people really interact with blogs, the differences between posts like this, which are dated and time-specific, and posts for longevity. The result is I think that there should be more user control over what is on the screen at any time, and fortunately JavaScript, CSS and the DOM will let me do that to some extent (at least I hope).

I’ll be using the moo.fx animation framework due to it’s “superlightweight ultratiny” footprint of 3kb, as well as prototype.js. Best of all, I’ll be releasing the finished product for everyone under Creative Commons, so feel free to port it to Typo and Wordpress and the like. I’ll probably break out any custom Flikr or other modules as well.

Should be done sometime between now and the end of time. Stay tuned.

Job

I need a job. Full time. The fuller the better. The best looking opportunity I’ve seen in some time just slipped away due to the cruel winds of fate.

I’m tired of freelancing (mostly because if I was as bad at making websites as I am at selling them I’d be out of business). I’m willing to relocate. Preferably to San Francisco or Seattle. Hire me! ... current TV, this means you. :)

Plagiarism

Although many of you may know this, Karthik Kastury of 33rockers.com is a plagiarist, both of the written word and design. His site is ripped off from the Mephisto theme without credit and described as “heavily modified” (it is not), and he has ripped off – verbatim – several blog posts across the internet. I almost expect to see my seminal blog hit “How to get Typo 4.0 running on Dreamhost” on his blog soon.

For more information, see the very detailed expose on Kirk Montgomery’s excellent MaxPower.

Additional note: He’s also a damn liar. Note his Nov. 30 post about how he’s selling the site because of personal reasons. How about because the DMCA complaints cost him his Google AdSense. Thief!

GravityMusic 4.0 Continues…

For those who just love sneak peaks… here’s one.

Simple is my business, and business is good. Backend dev starts tomorrow in Rails. We’re only a week or so away from first launch. Hope it goes well!

That’s all she wrote for this night. See you all again soon!

Gravitymusic.com 4.0

Aiden Bordner — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 14:26:00 -0800

First of all, allow me to make a brief announcement regarding my seemingly permanent absence from the blogosphere: I’ve been really crazy busy and had no internet connection for a bit in Indianapolis, but now I am back.

Without further ado, the news at hand:

gravitymusic.com is getting it’s third facelift! The site that is currently up is some of my oldest work that I still mention (circa 2002) and it’s soon to be gone making way for a new Ruby on Rails powered web presence.

Gone will be:

• Flash-based MP3 player that intermittently decides not to work on XP
• Tables (eek!)
• I-Frames (EEGADS!)

New will be:

• Ruby on Rails (oooh!)
• DHTML and AJAX [via prototype and moo.fx] in news and music display (oooh la la!)
• “Web 2.0”-ie graphic shite, like reflections and starburst badges and a shitload of gradients (... em, TIRED?... yeah ok, but it looks hot.)

Just see for yourself! (Warning: Spoiler alert.)

(What’s this? News…?)

(Hmm… How “Web 2.0” (lol))

(Hmm, Quicktime? Well That should be reliable… is that a three-column navigation like the OS X finder I see?)

Tune in in a couple of weeks to find out. ;)

Getting Typo 4 running on DreamHost

Aiden Bordner — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 16:37:00 -0700

This has been an interesting day, attempting to get a fresh build of Typo 4.0.1 installed on a shared hosting account with DreamHost.

The reason for this, predominantly, was to practice deploying a Rails application on DreamHost in preparation for the launch of Witnessing Life which I’m currently spending my days (and nights) thinking about.

Without further ado, here’s the rundown of how I achieved my goal.

Disclaimer: I am not well versed in server configuration, ruby, rails or typo. This is simply a documentation of the steps I took to get typo up and running on my page. I am a newbie with the intention of helping other newbies get their feet wet. If things go wrong, see the list of related links at the bottom and seek assistance at #typo on irc.freenode.net, but more importantly please let me know what went wrong so I can correct this information for the future.

Another Note: This post is under the assumption you’re installing your blog as a subdomain, like this blog, e.g.: blog.yourdomain.com.)

1. Install using Subversion (not gems)

Although the Typo folks were kind enough to create a RubyGems installer, you can’t install your own gems (easily) with DreamHost. (To do so requires creating your own gems install on your account. I followed the DreamHost wiki to this effect, but it did not work properly; I think a misconfiguration in the bash_config). Regardless. it proved easier to use subversion and install from the typo trunk. Use your terminal to SSH to your server (e.g., ssh yourusername@your.website.com) and enter the following into the command line at the dreamhost server.


svn checkout svn://typosphere.org/typo/trunk typo

This is going to take a while. Bounce over to your browser and go on to step 2 (or get a sandwich).

2. DreamHost Setup

You need to configure a subdomain for Typo. Under the DreamHost Control Panel choose “Domains > Manage Domains” on the left hand side. Then configure a subdomain with blog.yourdomain.com as the domain, FastCGI enabled and a directory of home/username/typo/public. Save your settings.

You also need to create a database where typo is going to store your posts, etc. I’m using MySQL. Under “Goodies > Manage MySQL” you can create a new database, for instance “typo_db” with a username of typo and a subdomain of mysql.yourdomain.com Create an original and strong password and save it for the next step.

It’s going to take a 10 or so minutes for your new subdomains to propagate on the dreamhost DNS servers, and some of the following steps to work properly (namely for typo to find the database, since DreamHost wont accept localhost for a MySQL server). If you haven’t already had that sandwhich, now might be the time.

3. Configuring Typo

The next step is to configure typo to work with your account. Enter the following in the command line:

cd ~/typo
pico config/database.yml.example

This is an example version of the database.yml for mysql. You want to edit this file to match the settings you just created.

Under the ‘login’ callout, change host to mysql.yourdomain.com, change the username to typo (or whatever you set the mysql user to be in step 2) and enter the strong password from the end of step two where it says password.

You also need to change the name of the database (marked database) under each of the three application modes (development, test, production) to your newly created db, typo_db.

Type ‘Control-X’ to exit. When it prompts you to “save modified buffer”, type Y. Pico will then prompt you for a name for the changed file. Remove the .example from the end of the filename, naming the file database.yml.

Next, at the command line, type:

pico config/environment.rb

On the fifth line, uncomment the line that reads ‘ENV[‘RAILS_ENV’] = ‘production’ (remove the ‘#’ from before the line). It should look like this:

This will force rails into production mode for DreamHost. When complete, type ‘Control-X’ to exit and save the file with the same name.

Finally, back at the command line, type:

rake migrate RAILS_ENV=production

This will take a while, but it will get the database schema configured on the typo_db MySQL database.

Note: If you have problems here and the output indicates the rake script was looking for a typo_dev database, you need to restart your rails processes on your dreamhost account. To do this, try ‘killall ruby’ and try again.

4. DreamHost Tweaking

If everything has been going ok so far, there’s just a few more things to do for you to be Typo Powered.

We need to edit a couple more documents:

pico public/dispatch.fcgi

First of all, change the top line that reads ’#!/usr/bin/env ruby’ to ‘#!/usr/bin/ruby’. This, called the “shebang” line, is the path to ruby, and DreamHost’s path is slightly different than the default.

Next, scroll down to the bottom of the document and look for the line that reads ‘require fcgi_handler’. Underneath that line, add the following code:

class RailsFCGIHandler
  private
    def frao_handler(signal)
      dispatcher_log :info, "asked to terminate immediately" 
      dispatcher_log :info, "frao handler working its magic!" 
      restart_handler(signal)
    end
    alias_method :exit_now_handler, :frao_handler
end

This is a method of dealing with intermittant 500 errors at DreamHost devised by Alex Young. When you’re done, the file should look like this:

Hit ‘Control-X’ and save your changes again. Now we do the same shebang line change to dispatch.rb:

pico public/dispatch.rb

Again, if the top line reads ’#!/usr/bin/env ruby’ change it to ‘#!/usr/bin/ruby’. Close and save.

Finally, we have just a few permissions to set. At the command line:

chmod 755 public
chmod 755 public/dispatch.fcgi
chmod 755 public/dispatch.rb

And you’re done! At this point you should be able to go to blog.yourdomain.com and create your first user. Note that, at first, the response of the system may be a bit sluggish. This is because the first time the controllers are accessed they haven’t yet been cached. You should notice a performance increase quickly through use.

Again, I am a Ruby/Rails/Typo amature myself, so if these instructions don’t work, my appologies. Please let me know and I’ll revise them. Additionally if you are a pro at this and notice I’m doing something wrong, please let me know and I’ll happily correct it.

That said, my experiences were based on trial and error and a lot of help from the following:

DreamHost 2.6 Installation on TypoTrac
Official DreamHost Wiki for Typo
Alex Young’s DreamHost 500-error fix