Michael Bianco

MacRuby Deployment + Load Order

After reading the official MacRuby docs on deployment, I read over this guide. Although the deployment build seemed to be working fine on my local machine when I dropped it on my laptop with a standard Lion install it crashed, claiming that there was an defined constant – but that constant was a class. How could it be undefined if it ran fine locally? Looking into it a bit more the class that was undefined was being used as a superclass for another ruby class. Taking a look at rb_main.rb revealed that there is no specific load order. Since the load order was undefined, the class requiring the other ruby class as a superclass was being loaded before the superclass was loaded…

Lion, SMTP Postfix Relay, and Dreamhost

When developing web-apps locally it is useful to have a fully functional smtp server to test automated emails associated with your application. Many times the network you are developing on will not allow you to simply start up postfix and and run your own local smtp server. However, this doesn’t imply that you can’t use postfix – modifying postfix to relay all outgoing mail to an external / offsite smtp server that you have control of will enable you to develop & test the parts of your application that require a local outgoing smtp server without an issue. Many times port 25 (the default smtp port) will be blocked somewhere along the line in your network connection…

Custom Premailer Modifications

I’ve had to do quite a bit of email newsletter design recently and I’ve become very familiar with premailer, an awesome open source email preprocessing library that makes developing emails a little more sane. My workflow is a bit different than what premailer expects out of the box, and there are a couple of improvements that I wanted to add to the project…

Lion Frustration Fixes

Installed Lion today, some great improvements, some not so great (iCal… really?), and some frusterating changes than can be fixed. Scrolling seemed delayed and generally choppy on my magic mouse. The scrolling preferences are completed removed from the mouse system preferences. Instead they are hidden in the “Mouse Options” button in the “Mouse” tab of the Universal Access system preference. In the mouse tab you can also remove the scrolling delay. Safari’s cmd+option+l to open the download window was removed! Luckily you can add it back using a script by Daniel Jalkut bundled in a service bound to to the cmd+option+l keyboard shortcut. The new window zoom animation is really annoying…

Dynamic AJAX Content, Internet Explorer, MooTools, and Form Elements

Another day, another Internet Explorer bug. I was using MooTool’s Request.HTML to load some AJAX content to display within an inline popup and IE kept throwing the classic “Object doesn’t support this property or method” error. The error was occurring inside document.id (i.e. the dollar function) which made the issue even stranger. Looking at the dollar function’s source code, it seems as though methods are copied from Element.prototype to the element being retrieved. The AJAX content I was loading contained a form which had a form element with ID “position”. When the Request.HTML receives html content it retrieves a list of all elements contained with the AJAX response using getElements(“*”)…

Using VMWare + Windows to Test Web Sites on Windows

Step 1: Retrieve Emulator’s Gateway IP Address Grab the inet number resulting from `ifconfig vmnet1`. Step 2: Add Test Site’s Local Hostname to Window’s Host File For each site I develop I setup a new Apache virtual host (some info on apache virtual hosts here). For instance, the local domain / hostname for a website could be mabblog.localhost. When developing locally there are some hardlinks to the local development hostname, for this reason the it isn’t enough to use the inet vmnet1 address retrieved above when debugging in VMWare / Parallels; the local hostname must be added to the Windows host file…

Part 2: Thoughts on Buzzmarketing

Empowered Interactivity A while ago I read an article on the lessons to learn from the DropBox marketing model. After reading the chapter on empowered interactivity I immediately recalled that article and how incentivizing referals increased signups by something like 60%. People generally want to share what is useful to them, and they really want to share something if it can benefit them in someway…

Thoughts on Buzzmarketing

I’m currently reading Buzzmarketing by Mark Hughes, a book about word-of-mouth advertising. I’m only about a 1/4 way through the book but as I’m reading through the book I keep comparing the ideas that he is presenting to experiences in my own life in order to understand the practical application of his ideas. I’m not a marketer by trade, this book is the first step in my goal to achieve a better understanding of marketing methods (especially marketing via social networking channels). The two key concepts I’ve pulled from the first section of the book are: 1) the human desire of having something worthy of the interest of others 2) the effectiveness of creating a ‘pre-packaged conversation’ that people want to share with others…

Economic Analysis & The App Store

I read two articles – the app bubble and bad news about iphone economics – which surprised me a bit. Their analysis, which doesn’t account for gain in human capital and the value of lock-in (or alternatively the cost of switching), seems to posit that the App Store is bad for everyone. I could be completely misevaluating the arguments presented, but I believe that if you dig into the arguments presented significant benefits are not being accounted for. Apple is Paid to Advertise Apps aren’t very profitable for Apple either…

HTML For Email Newsletters & Image Links

Recently I’ve made some minor adjustments on newsletter bound HTML documents. One particular document was made in the iContact WYSIWYG editor and as you can expect the HTML markup was horrendous. Even worse than the markup was the various ways the email displayed in different email viewing environments. Hotmail, Outlook, and Gmail all displayed this same email differently. The main issue I was experiencing was a mysterious 3px bottom ‘padding’ given to all img elements wrapped in an anchor tag and lined up horizontally using tds (apparently tables are still the norm for email marketing). No actual CSS padding or margin was being applied to the img or any of its container elements…

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