Premier Medical Care's new website, he also happens to be my physician. http://premiermedicalcarepb.com.

tags: portfolio symphony

Oh, and Leopard too.

What a title. I recently needed to use G-Parted, but didn’t have any blank disc’s laying around, and the method they describe on the gparted wiki to do this with a USB disk doesn’t work on OSX. So, I used DD.

Open up terminal (from Applications/Utilities or use Spotlight) and type what follows substituting as necessary. My USB device was located at /dev/disk3. You can find the device name in Disk Utility by right-clicking on the device, and choosing ‘information’.

THIS WILL OVERWRITE WHATEVER’S ON THE DISK.

sudo dd if=/path/to/iso.iso.dmg.img of=/dev/disk3 bs=1024

And voila, you have a read-only replica of the iso on your usb device. Please note the emphasis on read-only in the case of an ISO.

To see a progress bar (of sorts), open up a new terminal window and type the following

ps auxww | grep " dd " | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}' | while read pid; do kill -SIGINFO $pid; done

I originally got the progress bit from here, but changed it to work with OSX.

tags: dd leopard snow leopard terminal unix

Below this is all tech-talk. To summarize, I used new stuff to make the site better, make it quicker, and more responsive. This is what I made.

In every project I do, I like to learn something new. This time, I just happened to learn quite a few new things, SASS, XSLT, and additional knowledge about PHP to name a few. Not that PHP is still anything amazing, but it can’t hurt to renew some knowledge of it.

The new keep flippin website is built using compass for the CSS (this is amazing), symphony, some extensions I created and GitHub to keep track of everything.

tags: keep flippin portfolio symphony

But have you seen jekyll?. It makes blogging seem like it might be fun. I bet the people at my hosting company would appreciate it too.

tags: cms jekyll ruby

Symphony doesn't natively supported pessimistic database locking, so I created an extension in symphony to handle it, both in the backend and the frontend. It's somewhat complicated to implement, but so far it works pretty great. I created it because one of the next big projects I'm working on will be used by many people at once, and I was considering using symphony to create it, as opposed to Rails.

You can get it here.

Report any issues at GitHub.

tags: concurrency database symphony symphony extension

Many CMS’ don’t offer a way to manage picture galleries easily, and neither does symphony out of the box. But, after playing with symphony some, I decided that I liked it and the next project I would do would be with symphony.

So I created a plugin (in symphony: extension) that allows you to upload multiple files, and create entries (in this example, gallery items, or rows in the database, etc) to allow you to accomplish this easily.

You can download it at Github.

tags: cms mass upload symphony symphony extension

I've been working on moving this to this. It's got a bit of a learning curve, but I would say it's like Rails for designers with a GUI. That's not a bad thing. The bad thing is that it uses XSLT 1.0. Which is the least powerful language ever written (spec was written 8 years ago). It's not a procedural language, and if you don't treat it as one, you'll be ok. Some posts about tutorials will follow.

tags: keep flippin symphony

8.2 either removed the two functions I used to manage article navigation at the bottom (move your eyes dowwwwn just above the comments), or I added them and thought they came for free. After looking at the date in the master repo the latter appears to be true!

#article_drop.rb

## this goes in app/drops/article_drop.rb
def next?
  !@source.next.blank?
end

def previous?
  !@source.previous.blank?
end

Then to use it, go to your liquid template and add the following somewhere important:

It would appear that the prev/next_article filters check to see if one exists, but I prefer to link back to home for usability purposes, and this lets me do that.

tags: mephisto next_article previous_article

On the right there’s a new link for ‘pictures’, I’m embedding a mobileme gallery within the frame of the extremely wide tesoriere.com layout. It’s not thaaaat terrible, but honestly, don’t most people use facebook now?

The relevant code is simple, and can be found through iWeb, but to save you the trouble:

You have to give it a big enough frame [w:855px,h:630px], or allow it to scroll.

PS. It’s also hosted on MobileMe with a CNAME pointing to web.me.com from me.tesoriere.com.

tags: mobileme pictures

Last year, I completed a simple commerce website where I used my own solution written in rails. It worked, but it was a very simple application, not much flare, not much ajax (which is omg exciting). So for this, it would've wound up being a little too simplistic, and to avoid having to reinvent the square wheel, I tried using substruct. Substruct is great for what it is, but it hasn't been updated in some time now, so I tried redoing it with spree, and that's where I am now. The transition has been pretty smooth since I had finished most of the views already. As far as the functionality, it seems like a winner! Huzzah.

tags: commerce portfolio spree substruct upcoming

The way mephisto works, you can’t have a static intro page (one article per page, a ‘paged’ section), and a blog in a subdirectory (ie. /journal). These options are found under the ‘sections’ tab.

The reason it breaks is because of the way mephisto uses permanent links. It won’t prefix permanent links with the URL associated with their section.

1. sneaky template manuvering (the solution I took described below)
2. changing the way permanent links are constructed in the mephisto code-base (seemingly the proper way) and submitting a patch to include it in future revisions
3. just moving the whole mephisto installation to a subdirectory. This has it’s problems because you wouldn’t have access to the articles at all to slap on your introduction page. I use them to represent the ‘portfolio’ on this website.

The first method is the quickest; using the templates to achieve this is fairly simple and straightforward. In your ‘layout.liquid’, which is the default template, you can add the following:

{% if @section != nil %}
{% include 'home' %}
{% else %}
{% include 'journal'%}
{% endif %}

There also exists a ‘_home.liquid’ and ‘_journal.liquid’ template with however you want them to be designed. And that’s it!

tags: mephisto

I started playing around with datamapper to see if I could model an many to many parent/child relationship (self-referential habtm?) for an upcoming project. The plan was to use sproutcore for the gui (once I figured it out!), and merb as a webservice that it interacts with.

Justin gave me a kickstart with datamapper, and I eventually came up with:

#Person.rb
class Person
  include DataMapper::Resource

  property :id, Integer, :serial => true

  has n, :relationships
  has n, :parents, :through => :relationships, :class_name => 'Person'
  has n, :children, :through => :relationships, :class_name => 'Person'

  # parent = Person.create()
  # child = Person.create()
  # relationship = Relationship.new(:parent => parent)
  # child.relationships << relationship
  # child.save

end

#Relationship.rb
class Relationship
  include DataMapper::Resource

  property :id, Integer, :serial => true
  belongs_to :person
  belongs_to :parent, :class_name => 'Person'
  belongs_to :child, :class_name => 'Person'
end

I’ll eventually write some spec’s for it.

tags: datamapper merb

There's a new design up today, and it came out pretty well. I still believe it needs more cowbell for it to truly shine. It runs on mephisto and uses slimbox for the lightbox popups.

tags: mephisto

I just finished the 2nd version of Dr. Stitsky's website to match his current marketing materials.

tags: portfolio

I just finished developing a website for Cheryl Maeder, for her business, Gardenhouse. They designed the majority of it, and I used textpattern to control the backend, using Slimbox to display pictures, and Slideshow 2.0 for the 'art' page. Everything worked out pretty well.

tags: portfolio textpattern