Welcome to The Very Daily Weblog of Joshua Blankenship

Let’s start this off right: I am a hack. An amateur. A hobby web developer who occasionally gets talked into building websites for other people. That being said, I spend an inordinate amount of time designing and developing sites of my own and a few client projects, and if I’m going to spend time doing something, I will try my best to work smarter, not harder.

Being dependent on an internet connection to do development work forces me to work when said connection is available, not when I want to work. During a stint of traveling a few months back, I started researching local development options and the process has been so beneficial to my workflow. Here’s how I do development without an internet connection:

1. I use TextMate ($55) for code editing. Use whatever you’re comfortable with here, but I’ve grown to love TextMate for its flexibility, user interface and integration with my ftp client of choice, Transmit ($30).

2. MAMP (free) is an app that installs Apache, PHP and MySQL as a local server environment on your computer. I point MAMP to a document root at /Users/~/sites and keep my files for each project in separate folders there. A browser sees whatever is in that document root as http://localhost:8888/ by default. MAMP also allows of full installs of Wordpress and ExpressionEngine without the need for setting up hosted databases, so I have the freedom to develop fully-functional, content-heavy sites locally.

3. Fluid (free) creates site-specific browsers for any URL. Each Fluid app is treated like a unique application. I create a Fluid app for each project with the URL structure of http://localhost:8888/projectname/ (which is pointing to /Users/~/sites/projectname in the Finder.) I like being able to focus on one project at a time and keep it quarantined off from the rest of my recreational web browsing.

4. But what about everyone’s favorite browser Internet Explorer? Using a combo of Darwine and ie4osx (both free), I can run IE6 and IE7 as X11 apps on my Mac. I have Parallels ($80), too, but I typically don’t need to boot a full Windows install just to see what IE is doing with a website. ie4osx is awesome in its simplicity.

It’s a work in progress, and I’m certainly still learning, but separating my development from the internet-connected browser has set me free to make websites whenever I want to. Web dev is now no different than sketching or playing in Photoshop or writing an article. And it’s possible thanks to mostly free technology.

1. How the cortisol that your adrenal glands make plays into stress and health
2. ExpressionEngine templates and member groups
3. Economics
4. Using multiple CSS classes to achieve complex grid-based designs
5. Designing an office environment for maximum communication/flow/inspiration

The good: after a solid 9-day push of all-nighters, we rolled out the initial version www.NewSpring.cc a few minutes ago. I don’t know what day it is, but i’m fairly certain i’m hungry and my lower back is killing me.

The bad(?): There are a metric ton of Internet Explorer woes to tackle, as well as a big list of design tweaks and type changes mainly pertaining to giving the blog(s) some much needed loving care. There’s more content to add. There’s a Resources section to finish. There’s a slick new video player to rollout (more on that later). There are 3+ years of audio and video to port over to the new site/servers. Lots of IM pats on the back to Mr. Noah Stokes, who handled all the development heavy lifting. There are bloggers to train on a new content management system and strategy meetings to be had about what features should be added where. There are hallway conversations and emails to field. There’s second-guessing to be done and typos to be fixed…

All that to say, there’s always something. Perfection in design is illusory, especially in regards to the web. You strive for it, and walk in the tension between it and productivity, but at some point, you just have to launch the thing and then hit the ground running in the fallout, dodging shrapnel and enjoying the weather.

This is a foundation. An experiment. A process. A series of little victories yet to be had. I’m excited.

P.S. if anyone ever suggests launching a full corporate rebranding and a new website on the same weekend on a roughly 6 month timeline, punch them in the nose and call them silly names, because they are idiots. I’d hit myself in the face for suggesting it to myself (and others!), but I’m too tired to fight.

Dotcomrades at The Barbarian Group have released a fullscreen, borderless browser for client presentations called Plainview.

Straight from the Barbarian’s mouth: “We Barbarians give a lot of presentations. A lot of speeches. A lot of Dog and Pony shows. People want to see our work. And the work we do is on the Internet. And, until now, we really had two options for showing our Internet work: we could capture it all to Quicktime, and throw it into Powerpoint or Keynote, so we could present in a nice full-screen mode that looked professional, or we could try to show it in the browser, and have all that ugly chrome distracting people from our beautiful sites.”

Plainview has a few options (hotkeys, bookmarks, presentation mode for collecting sites into groups, multiple windows, etc.) but mostly it just gets out of the way and shows off your work in a completely functional, distraction-free browser environment. Oh, and it’s completely free.

Love those Barbarians.

Quote, “Google App Engine enables you to build web applications on the same scalable systems that power Google applications.”

Once you get an invite, they give you 500MB of storage and 10GB of bandwidth a day. And since it’s Google, it’s free. In other words, “Good morning, Amazon… Google is now potentially competing with your web services package.” Too bad Google’s programming language of choice for App Engine is Python, instead of something I want to actually use/learn.

More: one of the software engineer’s gives a nice video rundown on developing/deploying a Google Web App.

I haven’t had a device that records video in almost a year, but I still keep up with Vimeo because 1. it’s the best solution for hosting/displaying/finding user-created video online, 2. I’ll procure a video camera eventually, and 3. they’re in a seemingly constant state of experimenting and tweaking (as all good websites should be.)

I logged in for the first time in awhile and was greeted with the following message:

Welcome home, Joshua Blankenship. You still have 500MB free for uploading this week. Your contacts uploaded 13 minutes and 34 seconds of video this week. Joshua Brewer added you as a contact. The staff posted Finally, A Reason To Use Facebook to the blog.

That’s a succinct, clear, and dead-simple overview. I wish other website dashboards were that simple. Then I might not ignore them.

I just launched a minisite for NewSpring Church’s Unleash Conference featuring the video content of the two main sessions from this year (and last year), some photography (from myself and anyone tagging their conference photos with unleash08), and a few other goodies.

In leu of a typical blog, I thought we’d try using Twitter as a way to relay information for Unleash 09 and updates. We’ll see how that works out. Obviously, everyone doesn’t have a Twitter account, but I’d wager enough do (or will) to make it a viable experiment.

I’m constantly running into roadblocks, both small and large, while we’re hosted/CMSed by our current provider. Their templates are fairly worthless, so I’m just building pages from scratch, but their core technologies are all Microsoft-based (no PHP, no .htaccess, no anything fun) and they have control of our DNS right now, which makes it absurdly difficult to get anything done quickly or easily. They will go away soon. I will rejoice. All that to say, sorry about the lack of clean URLs; I know nothing about ASP other than I don’t want to use it.

For the typography lovers, I’m using Mike Cina’s quirky tall Jute for most of the display text. I’ve been wanting to use it on a project for (literally) years, but nothing really clicked until this site.