The Litmus Test
I've just subscribed to a Litmus account and I'm blown away by how useful it is. I run a test and it loads my web page in 23 different browser/operating system combinations and gives me a screenshot of what the page looks like. The site is really well put together with just the right sprinkling of Ajax to make it smooth and easy.
The only downside is the length of time it takes to tweak, deploy and retest. It's quick (a couple of minutes), but nothing beats the tweak-save-reload cycle with a local browser.
posted on November 30 2008
My Art Channel
I'm working on a long term contract for MyArtChannel in Victoria, British Columbia. We're leaving our Scottish home of 12 years and moving the family out to the beautiful Vancouver Island. MyArtChannel have some exciting plans and it will be great to be part of them. I'll still be doing freelance work as well.
posted on November 12 2008
Exceptional
I'm trying out the Exceptional plugin and web service for monitoring Rails apps and I'm interested in the benefits of just getting emailed every time there is an exception. What I like so far:
- Really easy to setup.
- Detects 404 errors as well as real exceptions but doesn't mix the two up.
- Very quick response from feedback which shows they care.
posted on September 10 2008
github Adventures
I've switched one of my projects from Subversion to Git (using github) and so far I love the way it works. I like the fact that my local repository isn't just a working copy, it's a fully functioning repository - I can look at the history, make commits whilst offline, etc. I often end up doing a couple of hours coding offline and it's great to be able to commit those changes as I do them rather than waiting until I'm next online and committing them all at once with a general, vague commit message.
It's early days and I'm still feeling my way. Some resources that helped me:
- Guides: Deploying with Capistrano
- Pragmatic Version Control Using Git ($22 downloadable PDF)
posted on August 03 2008
Back in Vancouver, Victoria later
I've returned to Vancouver for a couple of weeks - preparing for our move out here later this year. This time, I'm going to head over to Victoria on Vancouver Island to see what it's like. I'm going to drop by the company behind My Art Channel and see what they do. The rest of the time, I'm working out of the wonderful Workspace offices in Gastown, Vancouver.
posted on July 30 2008
Novera Energy
Novera Energy is one of the leading quoted, independent renewable energy companies in the UK. They generate renewable power at 57 sites across the UK, with a total capacity of 118 MW. Logical Cobwebs are providing an online, secure web application to consolidate engineering data from sites spread through the UK. This will give them a new way of looking at that data as well as making it easier for the engineers.
posted on July 18 2008
Logical Cobwebs in Canada
We opened our new business in Canada on May 6, 2008, based at the Workspace offices in Gastown, Vancouver BC (400 - 21 Water Street).
posted on May 15 2008
Passenger and Mongrel
I've been running my Ruby on Rails apps using Apache and a load balancer to proxy to Mongrel. It all works very well, but when I heard about Passenger (formerly mod_rails) I was very interested. I love it when things get simpler and having Apache run Rails directly seemed like a great idea. Passenger runs the Rails app with appropriate permissions in its own sandbox.
My next step is to setup SSL and see how well that works together. It always annoyed me having to setup Apache and Mongrel on my development machine in order to test SSL - I'm hoping this is going to get easier now.
posted on May 08 2008
Microformats
I saw Chris Messina's presentation on Microformats + DiSo at the Open Web Vancouver conference and then caught up with some of the background of Microformats at Gerald Bauer's presentation at the VanDev Meetup last Wednesday.
From their website:
Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviors and usage patterns (e.g. XHTML, blogging).
I like the pragmatic, "let's not make everyone start again" approach and I've sprinkled a few examples on this site (including this blog entry). It's pretty easy to implement and has got a lot of potential, so what have you got to lose? Read more at microformats.org.
posted on April 19 2008
WorkSpace
I dropped by WorkSpace yesterday to do some work. A really nice atmosphere and a good Internet connection. Views over the Burrard Inlet.
posted on April 18 2008
