A few musings on why agile principles are no longer optional when looking at modern responsive design principles, especially when working in an external team/agency.

A quick and easy solution for your .zshrc to get useful tab & window titles.

I initially launched this blog in May 2011, built on WordPress, with a fair amount of customization to a stock theme. At the time, I was looking for a simple, easy setup with a platform I was familiar with, and it more or less did the job. However, in the last few months, I’ve been wanting to make a change, even though I don’t have that many posts or that much traffic.

By default the Rails environment includes public/robots.txt that puts no restrictions on search engines accessing your site. This is generally OK for production, but definitely not desired for development & staging. By generating the file using Rails, you can easily have a different file for each environment without having to move files back and forth.

Rails by default has a number of helper methods that return simple HTML. One that’s extremely powerful is link_to which, generally speaking, generates links to other pages. On one particular project, I knew I would be writing a lot of links that referenced another site. While I certainly could’ve written raw HTML since they weren’t using named routes or any other Rails niftiness and were essentially static links with a few dynamic URL variables, one of the principles of Rails is Don’t Repeat Yourself, so I wrote a custom link_to helper for the occasion.

I’ve been using Drush for some time now for Drupal development. Especially for downloading, enabling, and updating modules, it is considerably quicker than doing things by hand. Another practice I’ve also taken to is putting all downloaded modules in a contrib/ folder instead of simply in sites/all/modules/. This makes my custom modules stand out much more than they would otherwise, which is a good thing for multi-developer sites or for just generally taking a look at what custom code a site is using.

This is the first time I’ve had a website since 2003. I’m starting it to not only establish something of a personal brand and a unified center to find me across all the various social networks, but also to allow me to write on subjects that aren’t relevant for my company‘s blog, like my interests in aviation and becoming a pilot, and my adventures with my home studio. We’ll see how it goes.