Mixing Legacy and Modern Web Development on OS X Mountain Lion
Over the past few years I have been developing modern web applications like Kifu on my laptop using Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, Octopress, and Node.js powered by Pow. But over the next few weeks I’ll be helping a friend upgrade a bunch of older legacy static (plain HTML), PHP and Wordpress sites.
I do want to keep using the same smooth workflow processes as I have now. But I do not want to clutter up my pristine OS X installation to do it. So this is how I have my modern web development environment set up, and how I have added almost seamless legacy development capability to it.
RSS Address Change
Update: This post has been updated with a new feed URL that will become the standard in future releases of Octopress. If you re-subscribed, I’d ask if you could please do it one more time. Thanks.
It looks like Google is about to kill off Feedburner, so its best if we get started on the transition. Going forward, I’ll be using Octopress’ built-in RSS feed. Please re-subscribe to The Hiltmon RSS Feed at:
Someone Else Did It Better
Over the past year I have been working on a stealth iPad app to scratch an itch of mine. Today, following a tweeted link, I found the product I was working on, just done better by someone else.
The Product
As a developer, I have a bunch of old iPhones and iPads. As a writer, I have a blog. The idea was simple: create a dashboard app to run on the old iPad 1 as a second screen to display my site’s Google Analytics using tiles so I could rearrange the view.
Long on Apple
Chris Umiastowski in Apple investors: How to stay sane by staying long via iMore:
- Realize that you will never have an information advantage over the pros. Most information is geared to short term results anyway. Just don’t pay attention to short term news and rumours when it comes to investing. It won’t help you.
- Buy a stock for your own reasons and sell when those reasons are no longer true. This will stop you from making emotional decisions and trading on rumours.
- Start to notice the wording that journalists use when they talk about information sources. If the source is vaguely referenced, there is a much higher chance of the information being complete crap. Refer back to rule number 1 and 2.
Point 3 nails it!
I'm doing it wrong: Dropbox buys Mailbox
On my tweet stream today:
@jnack Makes me wonder why I’ve been wasting years developing a sustainable product through many mature versions.
— Marco Arment (@marcoarment) March 18, 2013
Anyone got ideas for a revenue-free product I can make and sell for 100mm?
Follow the author as @hiltmon on Twitter. Mute
Windows Phone 8 support will expire before your phone contract does
In a seriously bone-headed move, Microsoft has quietly announced that their mobile Operating Systems will only be supported and updated for 18 months:
Microsoft will make updates available for the Operating System on your phone, including security updates, for a period of 18 months after the lifecycle start date. Distribution of the updates may be controlled by the mobile operator or the phone manufacturer from which you purchased your phone. Update availability will also vary by country, region, and hardware capabilities. Microsoft Support
Cutting down on Web Tracking
You may not know it, but lots of web sites use a variety of tricks to track you across the Internet, not just on the site you are currently browsing. These all depend on your browser talking to the tracker’s server without your knowledge or consent. These trackers use huge numbers of servers with different names and IP addresses to make it more difficult to stop them.
If you use a single browser all the time, plugins like Ghostery work very well. But if you, like me, use lots of browsers and scripts, something else is needed.
Premature BlackBerry Sales Analysis by Forbes
I’m writing this for a friend who tweeted this article to me. Feel free to listen in. Mate, this in an intervention, don’t believe what you read in Forbes. Please.
Lets take yesterday’s post Nearly Half Of BlackBerry Z10 Buyers Switching From iPhone And Android by Agustino Fontevecchia.
BlackBerry’s new smartphone is stealing iPhone and Android users, according to a recent note by RBC Capital markets, which shows 45% of those buying Z10s converted from the two leading operating systems.
Also Destroyed the Ecosystem
Aldo Cortesi in Google, destroyer of ecosystems writes:
The truth is this: Google destroyed the RSS feed reader ecosystem with a subsidized product, stifling its competitors and killing innovation.
Erhem, see also:
- Amazon → book stores
- Amazon → music stores
- Amazon → video stores
- Starbucks → coffee shops
- Best Buy → Appliance stores
- Home Depot → Hardware stores
- Luxottica → Eyewear
- LVMH → Luxury goods
Follow the author as @hiltmon on Twitter. Mute
Backup Your Online Life
The big tech news today is that Google is shutting down its Reader RSS Sync service, and my Twitter and App.Net feeds are full of people upset about it.
I’m not because I planned for it. Free web service shutdowns have happened before and free web service shutdowns will happen again (with apologies to Pythia). So I regularly backup my online life. (Links to do so are below.)
By now, we’ve all been on the Internet long enough to know that everything changes, frequently. We all moved from: