Posts in "Web Development"

I've been setting up a new dedicated server at Go Daddy running Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron).  I was following The Perfect Server guide at HowToForge, and it was very helpful, especially in the area of setting up email using Postfix, which is new to me. I did run into an unexpected problem with outgoing email - it wasn't going out, or anywhere for that matter!  Taking a look in /var/log/mail.log showed an error saying "No route to host".  Trying to telnet to any other domain would give me the same error.  A little Googling dug up the fact that Godaddy blocks outgoing traffic on port 25, which is used for SMTP.  However they do provide a relay server that you can use for your outgoing mail. The relay server is k2smtpout.secureserver.net.  To use it, edit /etc/postfix/main.cf and set the relayhost line to look like this:

relayhost = [k2smtpout.secureserver.net]

Then restart Postfix with the command:

sudo /etc/init.d/postfix restart

And that should do it!  I had a lot of trouble diagnosing the problem and then finding the solution, so I thought I would post it here to help anyone else experiencing this problem.

For one long year, my fiancée and I lived in different states (before we were engaged and parents and stuff). I don't recommend the long-distance relationship to anybody who likes the person they are with, but sometimes it's unavoidable. We found that it took a LOT of telephone time, and we also explored some creative solutions to spend time together as well. One of our favorites was the long-distance movie date - while talking on the phone we would rent the same movie and watch it together while we talked on the phone. The trick to it was starting the movie at the exact same time, so we could share the laughs and surprises without annoying each other. You can picture how this went:



"One... two... three... press play!"

"Did you start it?"

"Yeah. How close did we get?"

"Umm... OK the credits are starting..."



And so on. If we had done it correctly, we could comfortably watch the movie together while talking on the phone. If we had done it incorrectly, we started over. It was kind of fun, if you looked past the hassle of trying to sync the movie.



Enter nxtgen.tv: Shared Video on Demand. This...

I have been building my first site using the Python-based development framework Django and it is really fantastic! I am picking up some of it very fast (the concept of templates and template tags, for example) because of my experience with the PHP-based CMS ExpressionEngine, and some of it is totally foreign to me... but as I muddle through it, I can tell that I've begun to learn some very powerful tools, especially once I got Django working with the jQuery javascript library.



When working with images such as profile avatars, you need to have the Python Imaging Library installed, which also means installing the libjpeg library to compile PIL. I found a couple articles here and here but it seemed that only part of each worked for me. Last night I installed everything again on my PowerBook running Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.4, so I recorded the combination that worked for me:



1. If you haven't already, you must install the Apple Development Tools (XCode).

2. Download and install the Unix software installer Fink. The binary installers for the Mac worked great, both on my Intel and PowerPC machines.

3. Open a Terminal window and...

The Surfin' Safari blog announced SquirrelFish today, a new javascript interpreter for WebKit that is 1.6 times faster than the current interpreter. This is incredible, as Safari is already a super-fast browser, but as John Gruber points out in Daring Fireball, it may mean improved JavaScript support for the iPhone. If you've read much of this blog, you already know my opinion about the whole "JavaScript on the iPhone really sucks" thing. I was recently reminded of this when translating some jQuery/JSONscripting from the Web to the iPhone. What ran as a fairly simple and speedy app on the Web became unusable on the iPhone, and I had to strip out tons of code to get even basic functions up to speed. Keep your fingers crossed that SquirrelFish makes it to the iPhone, and soon! I'm not sure if its release so close to the WWDC conference means it won't be making it to the upgraded "iPhone 2" that everyone is expecting to be announced, or if an iPhone software update will be released after the new iPhones hit the market. The sooner the better! The creators of SquirrelFish say this is just the beginning...

I recently had a client ask me to adjust her site to be iPhone-compatible.  The navigation of this site uses Flash to apply a cosmetic animation on the text, so her site wasn't navigable via iPhone or any other non-Flash equipped device. At first I thought I would advise her to forget about the slight effect that the Flash provided and change to a non-animated, but fully accessible navigation system.  But I knew she really liked this small detail of the site, so I thought I would try another way. ...are you using swfObject to embed your Flash content, anyway? Because you probably should be.  swfObject is an  XHTML-valid javascript  method of displaying Flash content without using unwieldy tags.  The script will fill any old