Nashville web developer, Ruby on Rails, Josh Crews : Blog

Baby Crews

03 November 2009

Personal project
Had a blast developing a website to guide our friends and family into donating towards our out-of-pocket midwife baby delivery expenses as a baby shower gift. Stephie did all the design! She did great--in fact anything that doesn't look great on the site is from me. I did all the code in Ruby on Rails.
How to get the most value out of your web developer

01 November 2009
Steps on saving time, money and developing a web project effectively working with a web developer In short: whittle down your features, develop a simple site, launch, add features based on live feedback
Steps
1. Clarify your idea to written features using sentences and stores (Example: "When you go to the home page, it should show you the 5 top coffee sellers")
2. Aggressively trim your list down to the 'minimal marketable website'--that is what is the simplest service worth using.
3. Have you developer build that 'minimal marketable website' for a fixed fee. Resist the temptation to add features, but rather keep a list of features to add later.
4. Launch that site! This site is not everything it could be; but it's enough to launch and tell people about because it works and it does something special
5. Note the live feedback from users. Email some early users for their feedback. Engage the real users personally to make them 'partners' in the future development of the site.
6. Go back to your web developer and start working a triage system of Most Crucial Additions.
7. Repeat as the site grows!
Summary
The major thrust of this article is this--discpline yourself from developing cool features too early because they delay launch date, increase costs, and increase complexity. Launch early, and launch cheaply. Then let real user feedback guide what you develop next.
Rails content slider, carousel, jQuery slideshow

29 October 2009
(slider, carousel, slideshow are all different names for those cool rotating images on websites) I did not write any of the libraries, I'm just showing you how to do use them.
Steps

On the view of the page where the slider will go

That partial
_slide_photo.html.erb *This format is from the Paperclip plugin, which I recommend for allowing admins to create their own slides. You'll want to make these images identical length and width If you want to skip the content management, you can just make a ul tag with a few li's holding images and move along.
In the controller
I'm using the field "on" to let an admin disable slides, and priority to set the order.
Download the easySlider 1.7 package
easySlider 1.7
Copy the javascript files in that download to your "public/javascripts" folder.

Include the javascript in your application.html.erb file head
*Potential pitfall--the easySlider demos use js/jsquery... and not javascripts/jquery... if you are copying directly from their docs
Add in the CSS
It's included in the easySlider download--you want the sections in the /* Easy slider */ parts The most important part is setting the height and width px's of the li section to the same as the images you are using.
Drop in the script that makes it go
I put mine at the bottom of the page that the slideshow appears on. This one is customized to turn off the left/right buttons, and go a little slower.
Apple bragging

26 October 2009

Today I brought in an iPhone 3g whose microphone wasn't working to the Nashville Apple Store. They checked it out, it was really broken, and they gave me a new one with no questions.

In May, I brought in a MacBook with the K,I,L,J keys not working. They checked it out, took it into the backroom, told us it could take 24 hours, called 30 minutes later that they had replaced my built-in keyboard and I was ready to go.

So awesome!
Nashville Rails meetup October 2009

23 October 2009
Question: Did I improve the Nashville Ruby on Rails meetup by going on vacation and letting someone else run a meeting? Possibly! And if so, that's awesome.
Good feedback on the twitter:
The #railsmeetup was really awesome tonight. @brian_dailey gave a great talk on command line ninjary. http://twitter.com/travisroberts/statuses/5084990622 killer command line tips from @brian_dailey at the rail meetup tonight - so many awesome tricks I never knew - http://bit.ly/eOzLp http://twitter.com/weaverryan/statuses/5084606567 great meeting at nash ruby on rails users group thanks to @brian_dailey. also met some other rubists -> @banjoey (ok, fixed typo... haha) http://twitter.com/andrewtn/statuses/5085708753 Thanks, @weaverryan @travisroberts @andrewtn! I am glad I was able to share some useful tips. I'll post the phpargs shell script tomorrow. http://twitter.com/brian_dailey/statuses/5086349152
Brian's blog has the writeup
Where can I hear the gospel preached in Nashville, TN?

22 October 2009

or Where is there a gospel-centered church in Nashville?

I have found one! It's called Immanuel Church. It's about 1 1/2 years old and is currently meeting in a old Church of Christ building in south Nashville. Come visit! The gospel is amazing--Christ has accomplished for me what is impossible: a wrong man (me) legally declared to be right. Such grace is changing me. I can feel it. I really don't have to worry about my reputation any more. My enemy in some situation can "win" over me. (More on what I mean by 'the gospel') If you do visit, come find me and Stephie. If you want, we'd love to go out to lunch with you. Also go talk to the pastor, he's very available. He's a man of grace, peace and wisdom. He knows two things: that's he's a great sinner AND that Christ is a great savior.

Want a sample?

(audio clips) Ray Ortlund - Immanuel Church - No More Slavery (full sermon) Ray Ortlund audio clip with some cool music (5 mins)

Another good church

I also have strong reasons to recommend this church: Reformed Baptist Church Nashville. I could give more recommendations than this, but I'm not prepared to make a list because I know I'll leave good churches off and that wouldn't be kind.
Nashville Ruby Group, Nashville Rails Group

22 October 2009
At the beginning of October, Will Bridges started the Nashville Ruby Group. I couldn't make it, but I'm glad it's being organized and hope it helps builds up the Ruby and open-source developer relationships AND market Ruby and open-source tools to the Nashville business world. That group recorded it's meeting and put it on Vimeo: Nashville Ruby Group Meeting #1. The Nashville Rails meetup group (different) meets this Thursday at Centresource. I won't be able to make it because I'm in Destin, but I know the group will do great without me. I'll be back for the November meeting.
BarCamp Nashville shout out

16 October 2009

I'd like to give a shout out to Josh Oakes who put a lot of work into a great looking http://www.barcampnashville.com website. Josh has a great mind for business, web strategy, design and user interface.

While I'm giving out Barcamp Nashville shouts, I'd like to promote Bryan Dailey doing a talk at BarCamp on Web security, Christopher Cotten doing a session on teaching kids to program, and Ryan Pryor on paid search. I really wish I could go.
Joomla site hacked through 'forgot password'

16 October 2009
I had a Joomla! site hacked through a security hole involving the retrieve password feature. Joomla 1.5.7 hacked Hacker: SilentAssualt (to people hacked by same group find this page)
What happened
I got an email that I had requested to reset my password (even though I hadn't requested it) Later that day I got a phone call from a client-- hacked! My password had been changed through a trick involving Forgot password, and now someone else was in control of my site. The index.php page had been replaced with The World is **ck**.
How to fix it
This article/video helped me fix it, even though I'm not sure the hacker used the same techniques because my Joomla! version is 1.5.7 which seems to have fixed the hole that broke his site.
Steps
- Go into your database through PHPmyadmin.
- Get to the users database table
- Browse the data in that table
- Find your Super Administrator User
- Edit those fields
- Create a new password, enter it into http://www.md5encrypter.com/, copy the encrypted password, and paste the encrypted password into the password field.
- That should let you login to yoursite.com/administator
- For future security: Go to Site -> Users -> Super Administrator and change the username of the Super Admin away from admin to something else to make it more difficult to hack your account by this scheme
- For another layer of security, you can delete or rename the compenents/com_user/views reset as a crude way to disable the ability to reset password feature.
Fix the page
- FTP into your account, and navigate to the themes folder. My hacker had replaced the index.php page (and possibly the params.ini file). Re-upload those files and overwrite the hacker files.
- I also had a new file in my images folder. I deleted everything updated in the past 24 hours.
Hope this can help someone.
Nashville Technology Council panel on .Net, PHP, Rails

06 October 2009
They began by discussing Rails and debunking a common myth surrounding the platform... http://www.technologycouncil.com/2009/10/02/council-newswire/

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