Gazing, Coding, Rambling

http://zachholman.com/posts/how-github-works-asynchronous/

http://zachholman.com/posts/how-github-works-creativity/

http://zachholman.com/posts/how-github-works-hours/

https://github.com/features/projects/codereview

https://github.com/holman/feedback/

http://zachholman.com/posts/why-github-hacks-on-side-projects

http://scottchacon.com/2011/08/31/github-flow.html

http://speakerdeck.com/u/holman/p/how-github-uses-github-to-build-github

http://how-i-work.com/

Great post by Tim O'Reilly (of publishing fame) on the merits of business and profit using Steve jobs as a great inspiration. The standout quote is;

"profit in business is like gas in a car, you don't want to run out of gas neither do you want to think that your road trip is a tour of gas stations"

It seems to me that the more people you have as supposed 'experts' on a problem the less people use their own initiative. Yes, I'm generalising massively here but it's something I see all the time.

It often goes like this; "ah well that person knows about this, so I won't think about what I'm doing and just ask them instead". More often than not it seems that this is caused by a complete lack of understanding of the project or situation at hand.

Now don't get me wrong, I like being helpful and I'll always try to help someone out in anyway possible but it's definitely a case of asking the right questions and not just defaulting to asking someone because you can't be bothered to think for yourself.

I've had quite a lot of trouble with people upgrading wordpress, installing themes and plugins etc via FTP. After quite a bit of internet searching and trying quite a few fixes, the one I found that works was from this blog; http://forums.cpanel.net/f5/letting-wordpress-users-install-themes-plugins-without-ftp-credentials-199111.html

Basically the fix is to force WP into using a 'direct' file transfer mode (as FTP never works). The reason why you may have problems with this is because of permissions and execution rights on Apache. 

So here's the line you need to add to wp-config.php

define('FS_METHOD', 'direct');

Is it just me or does this make more and more sense now?

In my head every app should be JS framework based frontend calling some exposed services from a backend (JSON) that points to a NoSQL DB with a lovely layer of caching in between.

The frontend in the above system will be doing all the heavy work and just persisting to the DB. Decoupled and very scalable.

But I guess PHP and .net are going to be around for quite some time longer.

After a long, gruelling evening of finishing off a theme build in Magento it's become pretty clear to me that theming it sucks.

I think Magento is an incredibly powerful ecommerce platform, however I really hate the way themes work on it and everything they entail. I think in the Magento's guys heads everyone would be just changing some CSS and Images to make a different skin, but seriously how often does this happen?

My biggest problem with platforms such as Magento and Wordpress is that there's too much markup returned in the requests for objects. For example, getting categories by using list categories in WP - it returns in a nice ul, li list and I can change the tags. Great. But why? Surely every dev can write a for loop?

As a developer I believe the moment we stop learning is the moment we should stop tapping on the keyboard. Learning new technologies keeps you ahead, but it does more than that - it keeps your passion alive. 

So on this theme, here's a little list of everything that I want to do within the next 6 months.

Do something with a NoSQL database, whether that's Mongo or Couch DB

Dabble more in Node 

Use a JS framework like Backbone or Spine in a production site

Do some SVG loveliness with Raphael JS

Do some Canvas stuff - maybe

Learn more RoR - i've scratched the surface so far.

I just finished reading this rant; https://plus.google.com/112678702228711889851/posts/eVeouesvaVX by a senior Google Engineer on the failings of Google.

I think alot of people have taken this as being 'Google+ is a failure blah blah' - but there are important lessons to all developers in here. He talks about the golden rule of platforms as being 'Eating Your Own Dogfood' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food) - meaning use your product internally as much as possible.

Steve talks about how platforms need to be feature rich externally and internally, in order to cultivate your developer base and cites this as being one of the biggest successes of Facebook. Personally, I couldn't agree more - where the hell is Google+'s feature rich API? Ok, FB api isn't perfect but it's a hell of a lot better than nothing! - (I know G+ has a small API)

Google can get away with not fully fledged products like G+, because well, they're Google. But this doesn't work for everyone. Developers are important, accessibility to your data and your product is important. We live in an age in which API's are key, everyone wants to do things with your products data, so let them. 

I use Wordpress alot as a CMS. Not just for simple blog projects but also for more complex projects with custom fields and such, often to achieve this I use Magic Fields. 

I'm currently in the process of developing quite a complex single page site for my friend Magnus Deuling - he's a UX / Designer, so wants all the nice features he can cram in.

We're going to use WP to power the site, just because it's user friendly and he can easily add work to it (his work pieces are essentially title, content, loads of images and some tags) - however, I'm going to take a different approach to just skinning a WP theme as I would normally do and that's what I wanted to outline here. 

Spine JS

Launched yesterday as FOWA Spine JS looks like a brilliant MVC JS framework. I've used Backbone in the past, which I have really enjoyed but I like the appeal of Spine and especially the integration with Node and it's mobile features. (I wrote a piece of the Dare tech feed)

Wordpress JSON-API

On my usual stumbles around the internet I came across the WP JSON-API plugin from Dan Phiffer. It basically opens up WP to be used as a data layer (you can see where I'm going here yeah?) The plugin is available here; http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/json-api/ 

Combining the two

So, my idea is to create a front end built entirely on the Spine framework (it's a SPA app after all) and use Spine's routing etc to allow deep links. Then I want to hook the model up to the Wordpress backend, exposed via the JSON-API.

This may all seem a bit odd, after all it is quite a bit of effort however I believe it has the following rewards;

I get to build on Spine 

All the nice Spine features are exposed (routing, processing data in the Model, Mobile etc)

The application could be distributed, serving the backend from a different server etc. 

I don't have to spend hours getting custom AJAX functions in WP working

The CMS could be (in theory) swapped out with relative ease

One thing that the JSON-API is missing is a cache. Lots of the data that will be retrieved is pretty static, so I'm thinking of employing DB Cache Reloaded (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/db-cache-reloaded/) but time will tell how this goes. 

Earlier today I decided to make a little app that takes a random Guardian article, parse it and pick a random word from within it. The result? Guardian WOTD.

I used the Guardian random article generator to grab an article within the last 24 hours. Then after parsing it the word is tweeted.

Follow the twitter account at http://twitter.com/guardianwotd

After taking a look at the BBC News site today on Chrome (I recently switched from FF4 after it was absolutely shite) I saw some really nice crisp readable fonts. With a bit of investigation I was lead to an article about font smoothing in WebKit that gives this effect. 

Font rendering is an interesting subject. It seems that the inconsistencies between browsers are massive. And even across platforms. A few site's i've been building recently have used embedded fonts and I've wondered why it looks totally different on Mac and PC - it's often like the font is rendering as bold on Mac. Turns out this is all down to the font-smoothing and the way it's antialiased on Mac.  

So, I decided to do a few experiments with the font-smooth css property and the -webkit-font-smoothing property.