Blogfolio
Apr 04 ’06
Filed in lighttpd, ruby on rails
I've run Apache on my Mac for as long as I've had OSX, using either the built-in version or the ServerLogistics package, which they don't make anymore. It always worked great, and when I started learning PHP, it was easy to install and make work. Getting SSL to work was a little bit more of a challenge, but once I found the right instructions it was a breeze.
But now I need to serve Rails as well. Getting Apache to do RoR with fcgi can be a hassle, and it's apparently slow as well, so I decided to switch to lighttpd, or lighty as it's called.
For development purposes, using the standard script/server is a no-brainer; however I want a "production" environment as well. One that can serve Rails, and legacy PHP, and do SSL for authentication, while talking to MySQL. I discovered that lighty can do all of these things, but how? Read the rest …
Mar 23 ’06
Filed in browsers, css
Many of the leading luminaries of modern standards-based web design have been very excited about the upcoming release of IE7; the promise of not having to support yet another crappy browser has been very tempting.
Let's recap what's happened, though. Read the rest …
Mar 20 ’06
Filed in lighttpd, ruby on rails
Since I've been playing around with RoR I've found the
script/server
trick for development to be fantastically useful. It's quick to use, the server itself is fast, and it's everything I could want. That is, until it's time to go in to production mode. I've been running Apache, using OSX's built-in build, but I'm considering switching my whole setup over to lighty because of the funkiness of Apache and Ruby's fcgi. So I tried it. Building lighty was really easy. Getting lighty to then serve my static pages was also very easy. Then I tried getting it to serve my ruby apps, and that's where the problems hit. Read the rest …
Mar 15 ’06
Filed in ruby on rails
I've been trying to learn Ruby on Rails. So far I've found it to be a very elegant solution to the problem of writing web apps. Until now I've used Tango or PHP, but I hope that I never have to use them again.
I recently had a rather interesting problem, however. My first teaching project was a little app to generate a bookmarks page, and it allows me to categorize bookmarks. Relatively straightforward, right? Well, I got the code to handle logging in, the categories, subcategories and bookmarks done just fine with no hitches, but then I wanted to test out caching.Read the rest …
Feb 13 ’06
Filed in ephemeral, plants
Finally, I've found a great page with photos of non-flowering plants: Dr. Dennis Walker of Humboldt State University has an online gallery of plant images that focusses mostly on non-flowering plants. It has excellent coverage of ferns and conifers, but very little in the flowering plants. The most interesting part is that many of the photos of weird species such as Welwitschia have full plant photos in the native habitats. If you want to see what weird plants can look like, check the Gnetopsida gallery. Via Scott's botanical links.
Read the rest …
Jan 25 ’06
Filed in food
Over on Chef Vault, bookchiq is speaking lovingly about her recent acquisition of vanilla beans. I'm almost out of my stash of this, but if you've got a lot of vanilla beans you can easily make a large amount of very delicious vanilla extract. All it takes is some patience. I practically grew up on this stuff, and I can't recommend it enough.
Ingredients
New bottle of Jim Beam bourbon
3-6 vanilla beans
Read the rest …
Jan 23 ’06
Filed in food, web design
A good friend of ours just came up from L.A. to visit over the weekend, and as a special treat I thought I would make a tasty breakfast Sunday morning. I gave our guest some choices, and she settled on pancakes. My current favorite is a recipe for some very, very thick and solid yeast-risen sourdough pancakes. I've been growing the starter for a little over a month, and I have to say that it's very good and getting better. If you make pancakes regularly, you have to make the sourdough starter once, and then just refresh when you make 'em. The recipe these came from is called "Ventry Sourdough Pancakes," from Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid's Home Baking, which is a pretty good book about baking traditions from around the world. In any case, the pancakes from this recipe come out easily a half inch thick, and absorb maple syrup like nobody's business. The sourdough isn't overpowering, and provides a subtle alternative to buttermilk; the yeastiness of them is fantastic. Read the rest …
Jan 16 ’06
Filed in site administrativa, web design
Hello world wide web. I hope that this post marks the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship between me and you. For my part, I'm a web designer-in-training. Or if you prefer, a grad student who decided to leave the botanical sciences for the wilds of the interweb. You might wonder why I would make such a transition. Well, there are several reasons.
Read the rest …
About the author
Brent Miller is the owner and principal web designer of Foliosus Web Design LLC in Portland, Oregon. He enjoys food, plants, and the color green. If you are interested in hiring him for web work, please contact him.
Categories
Plant of the day
Rhizophora mangle (Rhizophoraceae); Tapche or red mangrove
Fresh photos
