Skin of Stars

Hello all, it’s been a while. The Skinofstars site has been languishing in disuse for some time now. Like I’m sure many others, I’ve found the transition to micoblogging is all too easy. Sometimes though, one wants to write something a little longer and long gaps are not helpful when you finally think of something. So I guess I’m just posting to get rid of some writers block really.

For the six months since my last post (my, that is a long time!) I’ve been working at Studio Lift in Reading. There are five of us; two designers, two coders and a multi-talented boss. We fill our days making like this and like this (bad linking! using Movable Type. This is the same blogging platform that is used by the BBC, The Guardian, ReadWriteWeb and various others. It comes in both Commercial and Open Source offerings and is perhaps one of the most venerable of blogging systems.

Does that mean I’m going to talk tech now?… sure (jump?). Movable Type (mt) has just released its 5th version. This places more emphasis on managing multiple blogs within a site structure. Very useful if you’ve ever tried to manage multiple blog instances (how many blogs do you think The Guardian has?). There is also a new emphasis on social communication (see Motion).

The system is written in Perl but because the publishing is static files you can drop pretty much any scripting language in without any problems. My current language of choice for server-side is PHP. You hook your language in with mt using their own markup derived syntax, and to be honest for a simple blog you never have to touch another language. Let’s look at an example which will iterate over a collection of the last five entries:

<mt:Entries lastn=”5″>
<h2><mt:EntryTitle /></h2>
<p><mt:EntryBody /></p>
</mt:Entries>

There is documentation, with my favourite page being the tag reference, but otherwise there certainly isn’t the same breadth of documentation as you would find with something like WordPress. Perhaps the strong ties with the commercial side of the software, it was increasingly license prudish at the Open Source blogging party, has been a hindrance to a warm and fuzzy community embrace. Still, some big media hitters use it so they’ve certainly got something right.

Well, as I said, I work in Reading and my crappy car’s wiper motor has broken so I’ve got to get up early and catch a bus. It’s been nice to talk to you again. Thanks for putting up with my tech chatter, I expect that you’ll get variation soon enough as we head towards the General Election

Night Night.

Hey all, just a quick one today. I just had a job interview and I was asked the question “which design websites do I frequent”? I ummed and erred a little before mentioning Digg and Slashdot. Not very design focused I know (except maybe Digg’s design section). I also said that I trawl the blogs for Ideas, which is true. I neglected to mention one of my favourite sites though, one which each and every one of you should have in your Feed Reader: A List Apart. I love that site and I felt a little ashamed for forgetting it, so as penance I am reminding you all to check it out.

Hey All,

Just thought I would tell you all about a new site that I’ve created for homework. It’s for an Oxford based band called Branch Immersion, a three piece acoustic outfit, some friends of mine. The site is hosted on the uni servers at the moment but I expect we’ll host it here at SkinOfStars towers soon enough once they’ve bought their domain name and I’ve ported the static pages to WordPress.

This is an original design and I must be honest, one I am very proud of. Please check it out at the temporary address (I’ll update with the final address later):

http://wwwusers.brookes.ac.uk/06021836/u75131

http://skinofstars.com/branch_immersion

Sorry for being a little late with the post. I’ll be quick as I’m still working on my aforementioned project.

I thought I’d talk a moment on favicons considering the talk on Google’s recent change.

First thing you need is a favicon.ico file. There are all sorts of programs that, some free some not, that can do this job for you. Instead I’d recommend using a web service, favicon.cc.

Once you’ve saved your favicon and uploaded it to some webspace (however you prefer) then you need to link that icon to your code. This is pretty simple, just include the following code in the <head> section of your HTML:

<link rel="icon" href="http://example.com/favicon.ico" />

Job done.

Very interesting and well made video about (cue buzzword) web 2.0

These machines aren’t all fun fun fun, sometimes you have to use them for some more serious work. In this post I’m going to tell you how to make your own php/mysql web development environment on your own Ubuntu desktop. Once you’ve done this you won’t need to keep uploading files to your server just to check if something works.

Firstly I’d like to point to the post that originally helped me do this at webmasterview.com.

Now, time to open up our trusty terminal. It is possible to do this through synaptics, but its quicker to do it like this:

First thing is to install mysql for databases on our machine. Copy this bit of code into your terminal:

sudo apt-get install mysql-server

Next we need apache2 as our webserver. Here is the code:

sudo apt-get install apache2

Then we need to get php:

sudo apt-get install php5

There are our three basic components. Now we need to hook them together:

sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5

and

sudo apt-get install php5-mysql

Now that’s just grand. We’ve now got all the elements that we need to serve files to the net. The thing is, we’re only doing this so we can work on stuff at home, in which case what we’re really looking for is an easier way to do so. What we need to do is have a public_html folder in our user directory. Perhaps now would be a good time to do that. The next step is making that work on the webserver we’ve just installed. Run this snip of code:

sudo a2enmod userdir

Then restart apache:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload

You should now be able to reach your home folder via http://localhost/~yourusername/

Finally we want to be able to administer our mysql databases. Though there are many good tools for doing this I still go back to the web based phpMyAdmin. Apart from the fact that it’s highly automated (which suits me just fine) it’s also a very common program to find on your paid hosting, so would also be very familiar when you go live. For the quick and dirty way of getting it up and running, download phpMyAdmin and extract to your public_html folder. Personally I rename it to something a little easier. Then rename the file within from config.example.inc.php to config.inc.php and within that file put something in the blowfish_secret field. Then all you have to do is navigate your browser to something like http://localhost/~yourusername/phpMyAdmin

addendum

If your server is going to be visible from the big bad world and this is your everyday machine then you need to turn off that user public_html stuff (it’s insecure for general use!). To do that just enter this instruction

sudo a2dismod userdir

then reload apache as before