Henry's blog

Being a non-dual-booting Mac user, I hit a snare when working on a website the other week. I knew that it worked fine in both Safari and Firefox, but it was untested in Internet Explorer. For as much as people tend to rag on Internet Explorer, it still dominates the browser market share, and because of this, ensuring a site works in Internet Explorer is critical. Even on this blog — one I would think to be pretty technologically savvy — 62% of my visitors use Internet Explorer.

Now, back to my original dilemma: I had a website untested in Internet Explorer, and had no way of getting Internet Explorer on my computer. After some Googling, I came upon Netrenderer. It allows you to paste a URL you’d like tested, and unlike other services, instantly outputs a screenshot of your site as it would appear in IE 6 or 7, based on your preference. Though it does cut off at the fold, or the bottom of the browser window, this has proven to be an invaluable tool for me in ensuring compatibility in IE for sites I design.

Though I’m not a fan of the popular buzzword web framework, Ruby On Rails, I noticed something the other day: there seems to be a correlation between design beauty and use of Rails. Every app or site I’ve stumbled upon that uses the framework has a great, often minimal design that is quite pleasing to the eye. Perhaps it’s the fact that the people who design these sites have similar tastes in methodologies when it comes to programming languages: sweet, clean, and simple.

Those are just my two cents, but still don’t believe me? Check out some of these sites based on Rails:

• Mir.aculo.us
• Beast Forums
• Mephisto
• Shopify
• SimpleLog
• Fluxiom

Then again, it could just be the influence of “Web 2.0″ design concepts that make all these sites look great, but largely similar in terms of design elements (yes, Web 2.0 gets quotes from me). Stupid Web 2.0.

After putting it off for a while, I finally got Ruby on Rails running on OS X 10.4 (Tiger) the other night so that I could take a look at it. Crazily enough, I actually had an install from last May that I must have given up on. Luckily, all I had to do was update it with new Gems and everything was in working order… except for MySQL. Wow was that a headache.

In the end, after getting some very kind help from Jake, I found out that in my /usr/local directory were a number of failed MySQL installs that were preventing it from running. I simply cleared out every install, re-downloaded the latest MySQL binary and within minutes finally had my basic program from a tutorial, interestingly enough by Apple, up and running!

I played around and tinkered for a little while after this, and maybe it’s just my lack of understanding of the Model-View-Controller architecture, but it’s just not something I could see myself learning. In fact, as much as I get bashed for it, hell, I love coding basic webapps in Perl. When it comes to simply querying and inserting into a database, it gets the job done!

About 15 minutes ago I attempted to upgrade this blog, which runs on WordPress, to the newest version released today, version 2.1. I had read that the database schema was changed in this release, and that it may render some plugins incompatible. Unfortunately, what I failed to realize was that my stats plugin, FireStats, was incompatible, and when I upgraded, my installation was not only fairly odd-looking in terms of the admin UI, but my main blog didn’t even function. In the end, I had to revert back to version 2.0.7, which thankfully wasn’t all too difficult.

The moral of this story? If you intend to upgrade to WordPress 2.1, I strongly suggest that you first ensure any plugins you use are on the official compatibility list, which can be found here on the WordPress wiki.

So far on this blog I don’t think I’ve talked about web development, which is a biggy as far my comp-uuu-tarrr machine related interests go. Now, what I’m about to say everyone will likely scoff at, but I’m a big fan of Perl for making web apps. Now, I’ve never created a web app that’s gotten wildly popular and had to scale, nor have I created one where I’m not the only user, and nothing too complex, so I can’t talk defend Perl in that sense. However, as far as actually accomplishing a task, Perl just seems really logical to me, and what it lacks in free online tutorials (versus PHP with tons) it makes up for in its flexibility for doing things in multiple ways, as its slogan, “There’s more than one way to do it.” suggests.

But enough of this, now on to what I actually intend to start making: ladies and gentleman say hello to scrump.tio.us Hmm, I’m trying to think where I got my inspiration from, though note: I haven’t registered the domain. As you may of guessed, basically it’ll be a cheap, less good, in fact, extremely bad version of Del.icio.us. This means it’ll basically let a user save a link, preferably tag it, and optionally give it a brief description. Then other users can see the stream of links you save, and you can see others’. In addition to this, I may employ a rating feature. So, why create it, you say? Well, to tell you the truth, it’s really more for me than it is for you, in terms of learning different programming techniques, things of that nature. However, if there’s any interest I may indeed let others use it. In the meantime though, use Del.icio.us (and even if I complete it, still, and only use Del.icio.us, I command you!), heh. I might post updates about the project and maybe screenshots if I ever do develop it, so stay tuned.