Spree Hosted Gateway is my second ‘big’ extension - one of the ones that isn’t just adding one or two bits of nice functionality, but actually and end-to-end solution to add something that I think would be useful to a broad range of Spree developers (My first was spree-import-products, see my post on it here). Spree (for those of you...
Recently I’ve had to deal with a strange problem with rake tasks being run using Cron, a UNIX tool for running commands on a scheduled basis. The problem was basically the server being slowly strangled of resources across a forty to fifty minute time period, as each time the rake task was run it would leave an entire bash process...
OK,_So_I_Was_Wrong So I was just flipping through my archives of blog posts, when I found this_one my first ever post to Tumblr, where I vowed to stop posting enormously long essays on silly ideas I have to change the world. Oops. Sorry everyone!
Following an insanely interesting presentation by Steve Souders at Webstock, I began thinking about ways to simplify (i.e. automate) certain processes to optimize performance of sites. Something that immediately jumped out at me from early on in Steve’s workshop (So early, I was able to start coding in the halfway break), was that inline images were an ideal candidate for...
While working at 3Months as a developer, I am also completing a Bachelor of Business Information Systems at Victoria University. One of the things that rolls around twice a year and always causes students headaches is the signups system - it’s one of the bragging points of the School of Information Management at Victoria, as it was build as a project...
Tonight I’ve been playing round with Radiant - it looks really impressive as a content-management system, and I’ve been thinking about ways I can change it round to support vendors - that is, one person or organization offering Radiant as a service to multiple clients - basically, it would be one big Radiant application (to simplify administration and server maintenance),...
So I decided this evening to devote a couple of hours to giving back to Spree, after using the framework for a couple of work projects, and appreciating it for it’s flexibility and extensibility. I’ve developed an extension for Spree called Import Products. The source is based on a few bits of code that I have used for 2 projects...
Every now and then, you run into one of THOSE problems - inexplicable, and something it seems no one else has solved before you. This afternoon, I hit one of these. Basically, I had just installed RVM, Ruby_1.8.7 and Rails_2.3.8 - everything was working great - I could run a server just fine, and use the running site. Eventually though,...
Finding appropriate domain names is a chore. There are so many rubbish parking sites out there that just … shouldn’t be. I dare sayjoshmcarthur.me could be considered one of them, since I could easily offload this onto Tumblr, but I enjoy having the unlimited capabilities a hosted site allows. I think that domains should be treated in a similar way...
Fixing time problems is probably one of the most satisfying things to fix programmatically for me. It is one of those things where you may spend ages stabbing in the dark with different time zones, formats, etc etc. - but there it really is satisfying when you do get it right and what you see in your code is what...