http://www.xobni.com/bryan <a href="http://aboutbryan.com">Bryan</a>'s thoughts on web design and development Tue, 17 Jun 2008 00:52:50 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en At Xobni, I've developed a simple testing and deployment platform that helps us ensure that new web code is good before it's pushed out the door. Part of this means maintaining two separate databases, one for development and one for live mode (Ruby on Rails developers will find this concept ... http://www.xobni.com/bryan/2008/06/16/copy-tables-from-one-mysql-database-to-another/ If you're on a windows machine and you use SVN, I'll bet you already know about TortoiseSVN. If not, it's seriously the most important application in my arsenal. It makes svn management a snap in windows, where before I had to adopt a whole clunky editor (Eclipse) to do the ... http://www.xobni.com/bryan/2008/04/03/windows-tools-tortoisesvn/ There are a lot of Windows unzip utilities out there, but 7-zip outshines the rest by far. The shell commands (right click a file to zip or extract), the multitude of supported formats, and the speed of extraction make it a star. And it definitely beats out XP's standard unzipper ... http://www.xobni.com/bryan/2008/03/20/windows-tools-7-zip/ Ruby on Rails brought with it a lot of good practices in regards to code structure and maintenance. At least for me, my experience with RoR two years ago was the first time I'd used subversion and deployed my code (via capistrano). Even though I use PHP on my day-to-day, ... http://www.xobni.com/bryan/2008/03/14/deploy-php-like-a-starfleet-commander/ As you know, gmail has an awesome spam filter. It's the reason I started using it for personal email in the first place. They also have a cool feature that is not at all well documented, which can help you find out where your spam is coming from. The premise is ... http://www.xobni.com/bryan/2007/11/30/monitoring-spam-with-gmail/ Even with today's modern version 2.3 era, Wordpress's WYSIWYG editor is still the evil, overbearing dictator it always was: "You couldn't possibly have wanted to put that tag there - I'll go ahead and remove it for you!" How helpfully MS-Word-smart-paste-paper-clip of you! Thankfully, it's easier to remove this most egregious ... http://www.xobni.com/bryan/2007/11/02/saving-your-wordpress-posts-from-tyranny/ For years I've used Courier New or whatever font my IDE chose for me. On a whim, I decided to search for a better programmer's font; one that's not only is easier on the eyes, but is more compact and efficient. I think I've found it: ProggyFonts The Proggy font collection ... http://www.xobni.com/bryan/2007/10/30/a-better-programmers-font/ In case you haven't heard, Gmail has finally released IMAP support for Gmail. This means that you can access Gmail from Outlook (or any email client for that matter). The clear implication here is that I can use Xobni on my gmail inbox, finally! Setting up Gmail on Outlook http://www.xobni.com/bryan/2007/10/26/imap-gmail-outlook-xobni-bliss/ The last few days I've been noticing my system lagging pretty badly at the end of the day. On a whim, I took a look at mem usage in the task manager, and noticed the largest memory hog was not firefox as is the custom, but google desktop... As I ... http://www.xobni.com/bryan/2007/10/24/memory-leak-in-google-desktop/ Graphing in PHP has always been an annoyance for me - while it would be cool feature to have, the need doesn't come up nearly enough to warrant paying the exorbitant fees associated with most commercial graphing libraries. Besides, commercial PHP libraries always bring out the miser in me - ... http://www.xobni.com/bryan/2007/10/22/simple-dynamic-graphs-with-phpmysql/