Please join me in welcoming the newest member to the team, Michael Tomko.

It's been in the works for a while now, and I am glad to say he has arrived as our new Production Director. Mike brings a heavy arsenal of experience to The Able Few. We are excited to welcome him into our quirky family. Mike brings an important skill set to the table in the form of Digital Strategy. His proven abilities in promotions both on and offline make him a perfect pairing for the services we offer our clients. 

Mike's day to day will be ensuring every client and project is met with quality. Mike will also play an intregral role at the front of each project defining and mapping the needs of our clients in an ever changing digital landscape and crafting the solutions for them. 

His abilities have been felt far and wide by agencies all across the region and we're proud that we can now count on him under our roof.

This marks the 4th new hire in the last 7 months for us. We are excited as ever and are anxious for the what the future holds here. 

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Schemata is a gem for corralling schema definitions across projects. As we work on new projects a lot of common field requirements come up ( addressess, contact forms, medical forms ) but its rare that the field names are ever implemented the same. Its a minor issue, but a major pet peeve of mine is when 'email_address' is defined as 'email' or 'phone_number' defined as 'phone' (Don't get me started on street_address_1 and all of its relatives ). 

So with schemata you define the fields once and then they are available to use in your migration files.  

gem 'schemata'

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29

# addressable.rb
module Schemata
  module Schema
      def addressable
        apply_schema :street_address_1, String
        apply_schema :street_address_2, String
        apply_schema :city, String
        apply_schema :state, String
        apply_schema :zip_code, String
        apply_schema :country, String
      end
    
    end
end

#provides your migration file with 
create_table :accounts do |t|
    t.addressable
end

# instead of The Old Way
create_table :accounts do |t|
    t.string "street_address_1"
    t.string "street_address_2"
    t.string "city"
    t.string "state"
    t.string "zip_code"
    t.string "country"
end

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

I came across the most amazing tool today: gource. It analyzes git logs and creates a time-lapse of commits -- which is pretty sexy once you throw in gravatars and directory names. Check out how we worked like busy little bees on a couple of our latest projects. 

missouriwine.org

tlg8gear.com

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Google launched the Chrome OS site and takes a stab at Apple. When prompted by the Bot for how to destroy the laptop, say "William Tell"

Isn't the object of that stunt to miss the head of the subject the apple is resting on?

Or is google trying to tell us all "don't get caught in our cross hairs".

See the full gallery on Posterous

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

I can't tell you how much we hate sorting through Ruby on Rails logs looking for logger messages. This results in cruft like:

logger.info("========")
logger.info( "What am I made of? #{@someobject}")
logger.info("========")

Yuck. You know you do it too. So here is our solution:

Create config/initializers/logger.rb and drop this beauty in there. It will create two extra methods on Logger. Logger.dbug and Logger.colorize which will output a nice colored background on your message when invoked.

I made a Ruby gist for you.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Seedbed is an easier way to manage development data and store that data in a repository friendly format. Seedbed automatically generates rake tasks for all available data in the db/seeds folder or you can just run rake db:seed to invoke all seeds specified by 'plant'

gem install seedbed

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9

#seed.rb
plant :admin_users

#block syntax
plant :about_us do |seed| 
  seed.path = "db/seeds/some_folder" 
end

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

We're in a nesting period for our new home at 2603 Cherokee -- check out the time lapse of our team building some super sexy black iron pipe desks. 

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

The Brand New SpaceSTL.com is live!

See the full gallery on Posterous

Check it out!

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

MMMMMMMMMMMMM... Fall!
Our favorite time of year!

See the full gallery on Posterous

Download em here. 

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

See the full gallery on Posterous

Digging in a little deeper, I found that the Pitzman company that produced the originals was purchased by Frontenac Engineering. I think I may reach out to them to see if they still have some the originals as there are parts of the map that could use some love. http://frontenacengineering.com/contact.html
I hope to have a full restoration of this done by the new year and large enough to print onto 36x24 poster.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

1

map.connect "faqs.html", :controller => "main", :action =>"faqs"

This would route a request for "domain.com/faqs.html" to the main controller with an action of faqs.

So this works fine and dandy for .html extensions. Now php!

1

map.connect "faqs.php", :controller => "main", :action =>"faqs"

Works locally! Hooray! We're done.
Wait. Passenger... uh... fail!
So digging around in Passenger there is a handler you can add to your vhost to make this work.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName domain.com
  DocumentRoot "/home/deploy/domain.com/current/public"
  RailsEnv production
  AddHandler passenger .php #added to support legacy routes
 
  <Directory "/home/deploy/domain.com/current/public">
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
  </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Simply add to your vhost definition, restart apache and you are done!

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

I saw a friend of mine retweet this:

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

You can literally just sit there and hit refresh and watch the page counter go up. Welcome to 1997.I'd like to see better inline stats, or maybe even analytics API integration for some data thats a bit more useful.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

See the full gallery on Posterous

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

I love UI. It's a great suite, but it's default themes, are well... fugly. So I made one stripped of all the web 2.0 uglyness.

jquery-ui-1.8.2.naked.css Download this file

Enjoi!

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

While setting up my new machine, I am reminded on how tuned my last one was. There is a SIMBL plugins for terminal that I can not live without and I thought I would share.

Megazoomer by Ian Henderson

Megazoomer adds a keyboard shortcut to make your window full screen. It's super handy for people like me who are easily distracted.

After it's installed, restart terminal and hit cmd+enter. Your terminal will blow up to fill your screen. Megazoomer works with most applications that use Cocoa like TextMate for instance and is really handy for total screen domination. 

Enjoi!

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Install Homebrew

ruby -e "$(curl -fsS http://gist.github.com/raw/436471/install_homebrew.rb)"

Install Xcode

http://developer.apple.com/technologies/xcode.html

Install GIT

brew install git

Install MySQL

brew install mysql

Initialize MySQL

Install Databases

mysql_install_db

Tell MySQL how to behave

Place this in /etc/my.cnf

[mysqld]
#Max packetlength to send/receive from to server.
max_allowed_packet=64M
#socket = /var/mysql/mysql.sock
character-set-server = utf8
default-character-set = utf8

#This option makes InnoDB to store each created table into its own .ibd file.
innodb_file_per_table

[mysql]
default-character-set = utf8

[client]
#socket = /var/mysql/mysql.sock
default-character-set=utf8

Setup the startup script

cp /usr/local/Cellar/mysql/5.1.47/com.mysql.mysqld.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents

launchctl load -w ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.mysql.mysqld.plist

Get rid of Apple Supplied Gems

sudo rm -Rf /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8

Or if you are paranoid… just move em out.

sudo rm -Rf /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8 ~/Desktop/OldGems/

Update Ruby Gems

sudo gem update --system && sudo gem clean

Install Rails

sudo gem install rails

Install MySQL Gem

sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64" gem install mysql --no-rdoc --no-ri -- --with-mysql-config=/usr/local/bin/mysql_config

Test it out

cd ~/Desktop
rails -d mysql testapp
cd testapp
rake db:create
script/generate scaffold car name:string
rake db:migrate
script/server

Then surf to: http://localhost:3000/cars

Voila!

Respect to: Justin Ball

Permalink | Leave a comment  »