Posted on September 3rd, 2009 by Jeff
Another day, another updated web site. A client wanted to convert his existing website from drupal 6 to Wordpress 2.8. They wanted to make the switch because Drupal became too unwieldy to configure, manage and to extend. The integrated forums left much to be desired and the lack of a good antispam module meant that they were inundated with so much spam that their signals were lost in the noise.
Trusster reimagined in Wordpress
The transition was fairly painless. I installed Wordpress in a subdomain so I could run both sites side by side during the conversion. I was able to migrate the posts and users from the original site from a command shell.
Next, I recreated the custom blocks as text widgets; that gave me all the sidebar functionality necessary. Widget Logic allowed me to easily hide and show widgets based on the page being displayed. SABRE prevents bots from joining the site while Aksimet kills any spam that gets through. Drain Hole allows my client to control access to downloads. Dagon Design’s Import Users, Email Users, New User Email Setup, and bbPress integration plugins round out the user management side of the site. If you didn’t guess from the last plugin there, we used bbPress for the new forums.
Check it out, and let me know what you think.
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Filed under: News
Posted on August 25th, 2009 by Jeff
I’ve been busy over the past few months, working on various web sites and applications. Not only am I working on a redesign of Snowmoon Software, I’ve launched the following sites:
Nicky’s Fight - Meet Nicky, a wonderful young boy with Neuroblastoma. Please consider donating something to his cause.
Handmade Soap – Brenda L. makes a cold process soap that is made from Olive oil, Coconut oil, Palm oil, Castor oil and Wheat Germ oil, Cocoa Butter and Shea Butter. Then they are carefully scented with natural Essential oils. She adds no synthetic fragrances or additives.
FreezBeat – We’re very proud to announce the release of FreezBeat, a media playback utility for Windows. With support for iTunes, Windows Media Player, and WinAMP, FreezBeat adds a feature missing in these players…YOU! The concept is simple; why should your music keep playing when you’re not listening? FreezBeat bridges that gap. When you’re not at your computer, it pauses your music or podcast. When you come back, FreezBeat notices and resumes playback from where you left off. You’ll never miss a beat again.
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Filed under: News
Posted on November 5th, 2008 by Jeff
So Jason Seifer and Gregg Pollack have turned their podcasting talents towards making screencasts. They call them envycasts. I’m a regular listener of the podcast and enjoy their lighthearted style so when Gregg was looking for reviewers of their latested episode, I jumped at the chance.
I’m not going to cover all the Rails goodness present in the ‘cast; that’d take the joy out of the whole thing for you, now wouldn’t it?
Read more…
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Filed under: Rails, reviews
Posted on September 29th, 2008 by Jeff
Over at the Start Up Manager Brian wrote:
So how can such a noble endeavor go wrong? There are lots of reasons, but the most challenging to control is the effect that occurs when the QA department sits in the shadow of Development.
There is sometime a perception that the QA engineers are inferior technically to the developers. If this is the understanding in your organization, then QA will occupy a lesser position in the social structure. This mindset sets up an environment where development has a greater influence over the solitary QA engineer than is advisable.
There’s another variation on this trap that I’ve seen and that is when QA is over developmen — whether in actual reporting structure or pure political power within the organization. When this happens, QA is effectively driving the development process. Their schedule is imposed on the developers.
QA needs a build first thing Monday morning! Well, what if dev isn’t ready to give QA a build? Without equality between the departments or a capable arbiter, dev will be forced to overextend their resources (ie, work late hours or the weekends, resulting in lower morale and quality) or pass along an incomplete or buggy build to QA, thus wasting valuable time and possibly jeopardizing the schedule.
Another risk of having QA-over-Dev is that the development schedule may bloat to accommodate QA’s demands. When the schedule needs to be pulled in, management will be forced to cut features or testing time, neither of which results in a good, quality product.
The takeaway:
QA/QE and Development must be equals within the organization, preferably with a slight adversarial relationship.
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Filed under: Editorial
Posted on August 15th, 2008 by Jeff
There’s an emphasis in the Rails community on testing as you write your code. So much so that the built in code generators will generate unit tests right alongside your models. You can even generate integration tests too.
So here we are, merrily generating models, controllers and more. We’re writing code, writing tests and even running the tests to make sure they pass. All is good, right?
Wrong.
How many of you test your reverse migrations? Do they even work? I was bitten by this recently. The column names in a migration were spelled incorrectly so I thought, no problem, I’ll migrate down, fix the script and migrate up again.
Not so fast! The down migration was dropping columns that hadn’t been added yet — an error caused by modifying the migration before reversing it. Another error was caused by a misspelled table name, it wasn’t pluralized.
Since I’m working with mysql, ddl isn’t wrapped in a transaction. My development database is a snapshot of the customer’s data so dropping the whole database to recover from the failed migration isn’t an option either.
My advice: after creating a migration, migrate up, then immediately migrate back down. Make sure it works before moving on. The time you save might just be your own.
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Filed under: Rails
