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Hey. If you're listening, go over to http://vazav.com and read there, instead. This blog is DEAD. At least for now.

Rails Magic with Named Routes

Something I just... never noticed before, I guess: Rails' named routes.

map.board '', :controller => 'gripes', :action => 'index'
map.category 'gripes/:category', :controller => 'gripes', :action => 'by_category'
map.detail 'gripes/:category/:slug', :controller => 'gripes', :action => 'by_slug'

This allows you to do the following:

board_url
category_url :category => 'Wowee'
detail_url :category => 'Wowee', :slug => 'Nifty'

I thought it was pretty cool.

Pownce

Alright. It's pretty cool. I signed up for a Pro account, but errors in the system have prevented me from actually getting my account. Add me up on Pownce! My username is "sintaks".

Tuplix Launched! (oooOOOooo... screencasts...)

After much waiting, Tuplix is finally launched. Break out the champagne! (We did.)

But... what is it?

Two years ago, I didn't know either. It was supposed to be this be-all/end-all solution for managing your site's content, so far as I knew. After working with XAVIOUR, TechMeridian's custom-application-development-environment-slash-CMS, for a year, I thought maybe it was supposed to be a replacement... a sort of... XAVIOUR v3. I then left TechMeridian after about a month of confusion and frustration, right when Tuplix development was revving up. I sold my soul, got a job at RightNow Technologies, and spent the next six months there, sulking. I then spent three months freelancing, playing World of Warcraft, and learning Japanese. Good fun.

I was then contacted by TechMeridian, after months of silence, and asked if I was available to help with some client work while Tuplix development continued. A few weeks later, and here we are. Tuplix is a working product, made for real clients (and already being purchased by Big Companies). I'm proud of TechMeridian for the work they've done. Hopefully this will open the door to the Grail of Web Development: being able to drop client work to make your own fun stuff.

So here I am, in the office, blogging when I should maybe be working. I have a screencast compressing, and am almost done with my list, so I don't feel so terrible. Plus I'll be here for like 10 hours today, sans overtime... Oh well. No complaining. That's what myGripe is for!

So what is Tuplix?
Tuplix is content-editing for the masses. When I worked for Zee Creative, we were constantly making these sites with five or six pages, and had to tie them to a DB just so the client could edit those... five or six pages. While it's not the "wrong" use for PHP/MySQL, it's a bit overkill, and led to quick, one-off sites with hard-coded IDs and wasted time.

Tuplix is perfect for these types of sites. One merely creates the site files, then places a specific CSS class in the containers she wants editable. Add them to Tuplix, tell Tuplix which CSS class you used, and like magic, you can make changes to your content. All your files stay on your server (though they make a round-trip to Tuplix servers for Processing, Editing, and Publishing). There are no special codes you have to stick in your site files, no stupid arrangement for separating content out. You could, in fact, design a site not knowing what Tuplix was, and then adapt it to work inside Tuplix in mere minutes.

And that's what TechMeridian is counting on. They're hoping that users with static sites will see Tuplix and ask their designer to make it work. They're hoping that designers will start accepting clients with Tuplix in mind. But then... they're not hoping very hard.

Like I said, TechMeridian is talking with Big Companies about Tuplix, and Big Companies are talking back. Whether this means some kind of liberal licensing agreement or outright purchase is yet unknown. Until there is some solidarity, we're keeping it low-key, relying on word-of-mouth and our own connections to spur users into trying it.

(Pause for an hour while I finish a screencast, take two phone calls, and hunt down some cookies...)

Anyhow... I've lost mental context now. I encourage everyone to try out Tuplix. First off, it's free. Well, there's a free account, anyhow... and it says active as long as you log in every 30 days. If you like it, upgrade. It's month-to-month, with no contracts and no setup fees. If you're a web-shop, and you're looking to save some programming time, contact us about possible co-branding opportunities. Who knows? It could happen.

Paximus Maximus,
Mase

Remembering Why I Love CodeIgniter

For giggles, I recorded a screencast of a project I recently did at work for a non-profit. The process reminded me why I like CodeIgniter over other PHP frameworks.

This was a very short project. All-told, it took about 6-8 hours to complete. The app itself is a simple Event Calendar application. There are only about five screens (view, add, edit, change password, log in) plus the front end. A gentle sprinkling of Ajax was employed, and I think made the app more usable.

The reasons I prefer CI over others are few:

1. Installation is simple.
2. The framework is light.
3. There is a lot of "helper" code available to you right away.
4. Everything just works.

What I loved most about these four things is that it enabled a fifth: speedy development. The framework is familiar to me, and easy for others to learn. Because of this, I can crank out lines of code almost non-stop. I rarely have to refer to the documentation (though when I do, the docs are plentiful and neatly organized), and everything works exactly as expected.

There are only a few things I wouldn't mind seeing in the framework, or adding myself:

1. Automatic layout/partial (a la Rails).
2. A real ORM.
3. Different application layout (in the filesystem)

Items 1 and 2 are fairly self-explanatory. Item three may not be. You see, CodeIgniter places your application folder inside of the framework system folder. This means that for every application you want to have, you have to have an instance of the framework for that application. In my mind, I'd rather have the framework library sitting in one place for every application, and have the app-specific code in its folder. This is the way Django, Rails, XAVIOUR, Tuplix, and so many other frameworks do it. It just makes more sense.

If you haven't tried CI, check it out. I think you'll find it to be a breath of fresh air.

Java, the Beast

That's right. Zoom in on this puppy, and you'll see that the Amazing Java is using 113% of my CPU. See? Giving something your one-hundred-and-ten percent is possible!

Facebook Platform Development Setup

I've been playing around with the newly released developer features from Facebook. Since it's quite difficult debugging FBML from a remote server, I've come up with the following setup.

I'm using Ruby on Rails to develop a simple Poll application. Since I don't want to have to upload my work every time I'm going to test it, I've decided that during development, I'll run the server locally.

Your Facebook application needs to request information from your server. Since my IP changes once in a while, I registered it with DynDNS, and gave it a hostname. I then set up port-forwarding on port 3000 of my router to head to port 3000 of my laptop.

Now, when Facebook makes a request to http://myurl.homeunix.net:3000/, it goes to my IP, which is served to my laptop. The joy of this is that you can see the debugging output from your server instance, which is very helpful, as Facebook does not really print out debugging information.

Peace out, homies.