digital:pardoe

Scheduling & Photos

Things appear to be moving along more quickly than expected this week, I posted my main application iSyncIt and the My Book Icons on a few forums and the Apple software website and suddenly the visits to my website have rocketed from 200 a day up to 700 hits or more a day. Not as massive as some websites but it’s certainly an incentive for me to do some more work.

After many requests I have started to implement a more suitable scheduling system in iSyncIt, I added the original system for people that change their calendar and contacts very often but it seems people want more flexibility so I am currently coding something more suitable and user programmable.

Also, partially as an experiment and partially due to me wanting to unify my websites into a single website I have today programmed and uploaded a photography section to the website. This portion of the website showcases some of the better photographs that I take, for other people to see. It has been created using the ‘rflickr’ gem and my Flickr Photostream. I had several problems creating the section due to the lack of documentation for the ‘rflickr’ gem, so I will be writing a tutorial in the coming days to help other people who want to create something similar.

Well, thats all for now, check back soon.

Quick Update

There has been a quick redesign of the caching system behind the website, this means that the cache has had to be cleared. Pages may be a little slow to load for the first time as the website cache is slowly regenerated, the search spiders help with most of the regeneration. Now the problem has been fixed you may also see slightly longer loading times on the AJAX page elements such as the archive, login and live search on the right hand side of the website.

Thanks for your patience, check back soon.

It's Almost Complete

Today I’ve added what I believe are the final touches to the website back end. The main change is that I have finally been able to enable caching fully so the website will run much, much faster and reduce the load on my hosts server.

I thought in this post I had also better explain the architecture of the website and its caching a little bit for other people that would like to write a Ruby on Rails system for themselves. The website structure is based primarily on the 4 sections you can see in the navigation bar at the top of the page plus separate administration and account sections.

Only the 4 sections in the navigation bar have any sort of caching applied to them, all areas of these sections use page caching rather than other forms of caching, as it is generally faster. However in setting up caching I came across the problem of aspects of pages that require regular, specific modification such as the login information on the right hand side of the website or comments in blog pages, remained unchanged due to the cache. I could have sorted this by continually cleaning the caches or using fragment caching, but I wanted the website to be as fast as possible. I got around this problem through the use of AJAX.

All dynamic items on all pages of the website are called using AJAX (with the help of the Prototype framework). When you load the website you may see loading symbols in the “Account” box to the right or where the comments section is at the bottom of blog pages. The information that is called by the AJAX is not cached and is generated dynamically for every user, because the AJAX calls are JavaScript in each page only the JavaScript is cached rather than the visible product of the JavaScript.

With all modern browsers supporting the JavaScript required to implement AJAX calls, I believe this to be a valid way of using Rails page caching to my advantage.

I will write something more in depth soon, for now try http://www.railsenvy.com/2007/2/28/rails-caching-tutorial for all your caching needs.

Back soon.

The Dark Side

Today I have done the unexpected and moved to the dark side, well, for a few minutes anyway while I release version 0.4 of My Book Icons, the main change for this set of icons is the inclusion of Windows versions of all the icons, including resources for Vista. My main reason for doing this is to give people some consistency between their OS X and Boot Camp / virtualization installations of Windows. But I don’t object to pure Windows users using the icons either, so, anyone that wants them, feel free to download them here.

Now you have recovered from the shock of reading the above I can tell you about a couple of other changes, to the website mainly. In order to try any fund the website and my software / graphics development I have introduced Google Ads to the website, I’m not particularly fond of Google Adverts so I’ve tried to make them as minimal and tasteful as possible, you will only see adverts in the header above and at the bottom of blog and software pages in the form of text ads.

If you like the work I produce I would also like you to consider making a donation using the button to the right (on the website if you are viewing this through RSS), any amount you choose to donate would be helpful to me.

Any money raised through adverts / donations will go towards funding the website and my development of software / graphics. In terms of development the money will be used for my Intel Mac fund so I can develop Universal applications that I can test properly as at the moment all my development is completed on a 12" PowerBook.

Thanks for you time, check back soon.

So Many Changes

Well, it looks like I lied, the iSyncIt release took longer than expected, due in part to my own laziness when it comes to programming but I put the effort in and iSyncIt 1.0 has finally been released. You can download it here.

The main changes to iSyncIt are the removal of the function to remove files installed by versions less than 0.4, the introduction of a preference to change the menu bar icon to one with a little more colour – this is at the request of several people that have emailed me. The final and largest change is the introduction of scheduling for your syncs, this means that you can now tell your computer to sync with your devices every 15, 30, 60 or 120 minutes, it even takes into account your bluetooth control preference. Along with the release of iSyncIt I have also re-vamped some of my smaller applications.

Kill Dashboard, Web Server Management and Kill Front Row have all gone to version 0.2, the main changes to these applications are improved workflow and brand new icons so you can actually keep them in the dock. I’ve also had a little fun with the icons for Kill Dashboard & Kill Front Row.

To continue the theme of making new icons I have released the My Books icons I created for my own external drive to the internet. After very high demand for the icons and a large number of requests I have added the larger My Book drives, vertical versions of the icons and Leopard 512×512 resources to the icon package. You can download them here.

I don’t think I have any other news at the moment, I’m sure i’ll think of something though whilst trying to come up with my next project and more features for iSyncIt. Check back soon.