New Gold Leaf

We got a very close-to-brand-new pair of classic Technics 1200...

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 11:57:38 -0700

We got a very close-to-brand-new pair of classic Technics 1200 turntables for the New Gold Leaf office yesterday. We’re awaiting the arrival of Serato from the delivery guy so we can really get our mix on.

A hilarious video of Connor poppin some champagne and his hat at...

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 12:40:00 -0700

A hilarious video of Connor poppin some champagne and his hat at a World Cup Brunch. Joe shot this vertically with his iPhone 4…check out the Vimeo page to see how Vimeo renders the vertical HD video…pretty cool. Wonder what YouTube does with these? We’re thinking there is going to be a influx of vertical HD videos posted online now that people have the option to shoot video this way with the new iPhones.

The Web Reel Episode 6

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 12:13:12 -0700

The Web Reel Episode 6:

All about E3! our prediction on why the Xbox Kinect is super awesome and Sony Playstation Move kind of sucks.

Microsoft’s new console the Xbox Kinect, is the clear winner at E3 this year. Every retails seemed to focus on 3D and motion based gaming. This weeks cocktail is the “Dark and Stormy”, which is actually made out of smashed up village people! Awesome!

having fun this morning with iMovie on the iPhone 4 - very...

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 11:32:32 -0700

having fun this morning with iMovie on the iPhone 4 - very impressive app!

The Web Reel Episode 5

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 14:12:30 -0700

The Web Reel Episode 5

We coded ARG’s site and made a quick Gource video of us...

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 12:12:00 -0700

We coded ARG’s site and made a quick Gource video of us building it with some original background music as well.

In this episode Eric and Joe discuss what went down at TechCrunch Disrupt 2010, and hold a showdown...

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 16:09:07 -0700

In this episode Eric and Joe discuss what went down at TechCrunch Disrupt 2010, and hold a showdown of Apache verses NGNIX. As usual they spend time talking about their Apple products, this time Eric highlights how productive he is with his iPad as opposed to his laptop while traveling and Joe highlights the merits of jail-breaking his iPhone.

Joe also demos his new Macbook Pro with it’s solid state drive while they both drink white russians and mention expert sex changes?

The Web Reel Episode 4

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 14:29:00 -0700

The Web Reel Episode 4

An amazing video of Joe fun-boxing his new MacBook Pro with high...

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 09:00:00 -0700

An amazing video of Joe fun-boxing his new MacBook Pro with high rez screen at the New Gold Leaf office. Shot using a Flip Mino HD, which we love.

The Web Reel Episode 3

Fri, 28 May 2010 16:00:00 -0700

The Web Reel Episode 3

Remove MySQL in one line.

Fri, 28 May 2010 11:37:00 -0700

Well at least only one line of code for you!

bash < <( curl -L http://bit.ly/91Ugqt )

Remember this will totally nuke your MySQL installation, so be sure to have your databases backed up and safe.

This script only works on *nix systems in which you’ve installed MySQL the standard way.

I encourage you to check out the script that is being run when you execute that command, and please if you notice any improvements fork it!

http://gist.github.com/417529

Here is the 24 second version of The Web Reel’s theme song...

Fri, 28 May 2010 09:00:00 -0700

Here is the 24 second version of The Web Reel’s theme song recorded, sung and written by Elliott and Connor of Dem Suite.

the web reel

Thu, 27 May 2010 08:00:00 -0700

Our new weekly video podcast by Joe and Eric where they talk about web development, design and general internet tomfoolery.

http://thewebreel.com

A quick tour of our office on Potrero Avenue in San Francisco.

Wed, 26 May 2010 12:18:00 -0700

A quick tour of our office on Potrero Avenue in San Francisco.

Simple iPhone User Agent detection with Rails

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 10:30:27 -0700

There are a lot of methods for detecting user agents, but if you just want to use a different app layout in your rails app for iPhone users, here’s how we do it.

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base

  ...
  
  layout :application_layout

  # detect UA for iPhone users
  def application_layout
    @browser_name ||= begin
      ua = request.env['HTTP_USER_AGENT'].downcase
      if ua.index('iphone')
        'application.iphone'
      else
        'application'
      end
    end
  end
  
end

It’s important to note that we did have to define layout :application_layout Rails will choose this as a default, but since we have to override it’s default we’ll need to state it again here.

Now we just need those two files, application.iphone.html.erb and application.html.erb in views/layouts.

Using Git with Your Media Temple (gs) Server

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 20:10:00 -0700

It’s about time that web designers, not just developers, start using version control, and while staying as far as possible away from the SVN vs. Git battle that still rages on, I just use Git and pretend like SVN never existed.

We use media temple to host much of our clients work and stage up changes and updates to sites before we push them live to one of our application servers or perhaps its final destination is on the (gs) server itself.

Luckily if you are on a Media Temple (gs) you already have it installed. So besides the server you’ll need:

Mac OS X Leopard or Snow Leopard (or Linux)
Git 1.5.6 or higher
A sprinkle of Terminal and SSH knowledge

Firstly, I’ve created a domain git.mydomain.com, You can use any subdomain, but this seems to make the most sense.

# navigate to where you keep your projects
cd ~/Projects/
mkdir my-website
cd my-website
git init
touch .gitignore
git status
git add .
git commit -v -a -m "initial commit"

So we’ve created a local repository on our computer, which is already useful in terms of some basic version control! But there are a few more things we should do before we can make real use of our new repository.

With the empty .gitignore file (which is necessary because git needs at least one file in the repository, folders don’t count) we can tell git which files not to put in the repository, mine looks like:

.DS_Store
log/*.log
tmp/**/*

So this one is more setup for a rails app specifically the last two declarations, feel free to edit them and keep the files you want out of your repos. Remember some files especially logs can grow really large over time and they also don’t have a purpose in your repository

cd ~/Projects/
git clone --bare my-website my-website.git
touch my-website.git/git-daemon-export-ok

Uploading the repository to our server, scp is a great protocol for transferring files, but you can also use rsync or even [shudder] ftp.

scp -r my-website.git serveradmin%s#####.gridserver.com@s#####.gridserver.com:domains/git.mydomain.com/html/my-website.git

Now you can pull files from your repository, but first clone your repository and you’ll have a local copy of it.

git clone http://git.mydomain.com/my-website.git

After making some changes or adding files you can commit them them like you did earlier.

git commit -a -m "just added some features... blah blah"

lastly, you can push them to the repository using git push, telling git to send the master branch

git push ssh://serveradmin%s#####.gridserver.com@s#####.gridserver.com/home/#####/domains/git.mydomain.com/html/my-website.git master

Because it sucks to type that every time you want to push your changes Git allows you to have have multiple tracked repositories. Since we cloned our project from http://git.mydomain.com/my-website.git Git knows it can just push to there every time. Let’s add a remote repository and tell Git to push our changes there.

cd ~/Projects/my-website/
git remote add gridserver ssh://serveradmin%s#####.gridserver.com@s#####.gridserver.com/home/#####/domains/git.mydomain.com/html/my-website.git

Great! Now you can push changes to your Grid Server just by running git push gridserver master.

Snow Leopard's Safari renders ugly text?

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 22:05:00 -0700

If anyone has upgraded to Snow Leopard notices that text rendering is severely messed up. In fact Safari 3.0 was leaps better, not sure what the issue is.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jpsilvashy/3907386980/