Aldenta: Web Nourishment

It’s official. WordPress 2.5 is now out with a crisp new admin interface and great new features. They’ve even redone the website. Here are some of my favorite changes:

• A beautiful new admin interface.
• A much more intuitive flow when making a post.
• Multiple instant file uploads.
• Thumbnail, medium and full-sized image options (and you can change the image dimensions in Settings).
• A quick way to display your photos as a gallery
• Easily add/edit tags so no more plugins are needed.
• A visual editor that doesn’t break your code (this one is great for my clients).
• Search now looks at posts and pages.

I’ve always thought that WordPress is one of the best blogging and content management systems. It’s incredibly intuitive for the user (even more so now) and extremely flexible for developers.

Thanks so much to everyone who has helped with WordPress!

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Do you have a website you’re thinking about building? Want suggestions on how to make your site better? Stumped on a technical project? Have a web related question? Want to hear what questions other people are asking?

Bring your questions and ideas to the next meetup because we’ll be giving our free professional (and personal) advise. We’ll answer questions, give pointers, and get feedback from the rest of the group. We’ll try to give 10-15 minutes per question to get through as many as we can. Any web related (or technology related) question is welcome!

Even if you’re not asking a question make sure you join because it’s a great opportunity to hear website tips, design tricks, suggestions and expand your thinking.

What: Free Web Consultation
When: February, 13th 2008 7:00pm - 8:30pm
Where: High Point University, Congdon Hall - Room 138 (it’s the building with the purple awnings and signs will be posted to help guide you to the room)
RSVP: Triad Web Meetup

These events are always free and everyone is welcome so please spread the word!

3 Comments

Some of you may already be using the PDF bookmark plugin I put together for Adobe Reader. It provides a quick and easy way to bookmark the page your on and return back to that spot later. It’s especially handy when reading large PDF books.

Thanks to the input of Michael Hartl, I updated the plugin to work properly with Adobe Reader 8. Adobe turned on some security settings by default in the new Adobe Reader which broke the previous version of the plugin.

See the full details and download the plugin.

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I’ve heard many horror stories of developers trying to install ImageMagick/RMagick to manipulate images. Fortunately, when I needed to install RMagick to use with the attachment_fu plugin, I ran across a fantastic script at OnRails.org by Solomon White (many thanks). It gave the steps to install RMagick from source without MacPorts or Fink.

I made the following minor changes to get it working for me and posted the script below.

• Changed ‘wget’ to ‘curl -O’
• Updated a couple of links that weren’t working for me
• Updated sourceforge links to the east coast
• Updated links to latest version of source code (as of today)

#!/bin/sh
curl -O http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/freetype/freetype-2.3.5.tar.gz
tar xzvf freetype-2.3.5.tar.gz
cd freetype-2.3.5
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
cd ..

curl -O http://superb-east.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/libpng/libpng-1.2.23.tar.bz2
tar jxvf libpng-1.2.23.tar.bz2
cd libpng-1.2.23
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
cd ..

curl -O http://www.ijg.org/files/jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz
tar xzvf jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz
cd jpeg-6b
ln -s `which glibtool` ./libtool
export MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.5
./configure --enable-shared --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
cd ..

curl -O ftp://ftp.remotesensing.org/libtiff/tiff-3.8.2.tar.gz
tar xzvf tiff-3.8.2.tar.gz
cd tiff-3.8.2
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
cd ..

curl -O http://superb-east.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/wvware/libwmf-0.2.8.4.tar.gz
tar xzvf libwmf-0.2.8.4.tar.gz
cd libwmf-0.2.8.4
make clean
./configure
make
sudo make install
cd ..

curl -O http://www.littlecms.com/lcms-1.17.tar.gz
tar xzvf lcms-1.17.tar.gz
cd lcms-1.17
make clean
./configure
make
sudo make install
cd ..

curl -O http://superb-east.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/ghostscript/ghostscript-8.61.tar.gz
tar zxvf ghostscript-8.61.tar.gz
cd ghostscript-8.61/
./configure  --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
cd ..

curl -O http://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/GPL/current/ghostscript-fonts-std-8.11.tar.gz
tar zxvf ghostscript-fonts-std-8.11.tar.gz
sudo mv fonts /usr/local/share/ghostscript

curl -O ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick/ImageMagick-6.3.7-1.tar.gz
tar xzvf ImageMagick-6.3.7-1.tar.gz
cd ImageMagick-6.3.7
export CPPFLAGS=-I/usr/local/include
export LDFLAGS=-L/usr/local/lib
./configure --prefix=/usr/local --disable-static --with-modules --without-perl --without-magick-plus-plus --with-quantum-depth=8 --with-gs-font-dir=/usr/local/share/ghostscript/fonts
make
sudo make install
cd ..

To test that ImageMagick was installed properly you can check the version number.

convert -version

[you should see something like this]
Version: ImageMagick 6.3.7 11/26/07 Q8 http://www.imagemagick.org
Copyright: Copyright (C) 1999-2007 ImageMagick Studio LLC

To test that ImageMagick is working properly you can run the following test. It will create a copy of the ImageMagick logo.

convert logo: logo.gif

13 Comments

For years my brother, Glenn, and I have talked about working together. I’m ecstatic to say that it finally happened! Glenn started his own business, Glenn Fu, and we’re teaming up on projects. He’s a strong developer and getting his feet wet in the small-business/freelance world. Right away, he picked up Ruby on Rails and is making sure our code is solid by keeping us on track with BDD and using RSpec. It’s extremely refreshing working with Glenn who makes me challenge my business process and development style. Every business could use that type of shot in the arm.

I’m so happy working with you Bro!

5 Comments

“Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we’re educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence.”

(via swissmiss)

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I ran into a snag today while trying to get the websites on my local machine running with Leopard. The first thing was that the config file in the new version of Apache is in a different location (/etc/apache2/httpd.conf instead of /etc/httpd/httpd.conf). Once I changed the settings I kept getting 403 Forbidden messages every time I loaded a page (the default in the new httpd.conf is ‘Deny from all’ for all directories). I finally figured things out and here’s what I did:

1. Open the httpd.conf file for editing (sudo vi /etc/apache2/httpd.conf).
2. Uncomment the line
   LoadModule php5_module     libexec/apache2/libphp5.so
   by removing the ‘#’ from the front of the line. This will enable PHP 5. The php5.conf file is loaded automatically from /private/etc/apache2/other/.
3. Create a file called _sites.conf in your Sites folder. I like to keep my site configuration in the Sites folder to make it more easily accessible as I’m doing development.
4. Add the following line to the very bottom of the httpd.conf file:
   Include /Users/yourusername/Sites/_sites.conf
   That will make Apache load all the configuration settings from your _sites.conf file.
5. Add the following information to your _sites.conf file.

# Enable named virtual hosts
NameVirtualHost *:80

# Override the default httpd.conf directives.  Make sure to
# use 'Allow from all' to prevent 403 Forbidden message.
<Directory />
	Options ExecCGI FollowSymLinks
	AllowOverride all
	Allow from all
</Directory>

# A basic virtual host config
<VirtualHost *:80>
	# Add yoursite to your /etc/hosts file so you can
	# type it directly in your browser
	ServerName yoursite

	DocumentRoot /Users/yourusername/Sites/yoursite
</VirtualHost>

Now you just need to start/restart Apache and the sites should load. PHP should be working and no more 403 Forbidden message.

27 Comments

CompUSA is running a $30 rebate special today and tomorrow on OS X 10.5 (Leopard). Now is a great time to pick up a copy if you’re planning on upgrading. As you can see, I’ll be installing mine after I finish this post (and backup my stuff).

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For those of you using the script.aculo.us Slider demos I’ve just added a new one. Sometimes you may have a slider and a text field to show the value. This example lets you change the value in the text box and the slider will update to match the value.

Example: Change Slider Value by Changing Text Input Field

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