RosemaryLong.com

It’s no secret that strategizing, designing, implementing an online presence for one’s self is about a gazillion times more difficult than for clients, even for those who strategize, design, and dream-implement in their sleep. A few weeks ago, Comrade’s site went live, and taking a proper modern web approach, it is constantly growing and evolving.

While it’s always advantageous to understand more about a client and spend some time with them to get a proper feel for their industry, doing a project for one’s own brand involves taking a step back. We live and breathe what we do everyday, how do we abstract ourselves so that others can understand us. I admit that these are the same challenges that I felt over the years as rosemarylong.com (nee rosemarysanchez.com) constantly felt like an unfinished project.

Luckily, having driven team members with strong vision and a diverse array of talents helped devise our company’s online expression, constructively asking the question “why are we doing it this way?”.

And yes, spending time on *that* site made me feel a bit guilty enough to post new content on *this* site. Plus I can point out that my name is in the news section for the Big Rock snow that I did, whee!

A friend was asking for some help doing this, so I decided to dedicate a blog post to it instead. (Screenshots make everyone happy.)

I personally keep all of my project files in a “Projects” folder right under my home directory. Subsequently, each project (and subversion checkout) get their own folders. I also have Flash output being symbolically linked to the HTML site, but that could be another article.

Download, install, and pay for MAMP Pro. It’s great. It will do a bunch of setup stuff that I can’t remember since it’s been months since doing it, but it’s a relatively straightforward process.

If it didn’t do so automatically, start up your MAMP server. Switch to the Hosts view and then on the + sign at the bottom left to start a new project.

I always choose a Server Name to be something short and without spaces. When I run my localhost I will run it as mynewproject:8888 so I try to keep it short and self-explanatory.

Now under Disk Location, click on “Choose” and select the directory containing your project files. Click on “Apply” and you will be asked to restart the server.

Once everything is done restarting, you can either go to mynewproject:8888 (port 8888 is the MAMP default — I haven’t had a need to change this) or go to the Hosts view in MAMP again and click on the house icon next to your project’s name.

You’re done! If you need to create a local database, click on the WebStart button in the top right and you’ll see a link to your locally running phpMyAdmin. There’s a lot of help available online, and at least one friend here willing to lend a hand if needed.

If you want to want to see your site in a simulated Windows environment, you may want to read on how to configure your VMWare Fusion to view your MAMP server.

Big Rock Untapped allows artists to contribute music for release as a compilation album, promoting independent artists and local bands. I was tasked to find a way to download the music files (hundreds of them) and scoffed at the idea of manually downloading each of them. I considered using PHP to grab the files, but then remembered about wget which my old colleague used to pull the Weather Network current temperature for Fairmont Hot Springs Resort. After a bit of searching, I found Quentin Stafford-Fraser’s wget for Mac OS X which was a very helpful pre-compiled for OSX version of the binary and off I went. With the wget manual at my disposal, I was able to download the scores of files all in one go, definitely making my life easier (and preventing future cringing the next time I have to do this pull).

This reinforces the feeling I had in first year Computer Science: the joy of making computers do my bidding. Mwahaha!

It happens to everyone in this industry. “We need this done RFN!” is the message you get so when things don’t work the first time, the next instinct is to revert back to old ways.

For me, this was the case when I wanted to test sites I was developing in MAMP in Windows browsers. I tried the whole dyndns thing that the user manual outlines, but it didn’t work as I have a shared external IP. I reverted back to my old ways and set up websites on a subdomain of this one for testing. It was a huge pain when changes had to be done and tested quickly since I was constantly FTPing files and importing and exporting databases.

Today I listened to my inner diva (she often complains about doing tedious work) and figured it out, after over three months of doing it the hard way.

1. Check your System Preferences > Sharing settings and ensure that Web Sharing is off. You might also want to check your Firewall settings and allow connections for MAMP.
2. In VMWare Fusion, set your Network settings to Bridged. This will make it as if your VM and your Mac are peers but won’t restrict your access to external sites on your VM.
3. Check your MAMP ports. I went with the MAMP ports 8888 and 8889. You will need this for when you access your site from your VM.
4. Edit your hosts file on your Windows VM. Your hosts file is typically here: C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc and contains mappings. I entered my IP followed by the local name of my website, i.e. if I access my site through http://intactgrowth:8888 on my Mac, “intactgrowth” follows my IP in the hosts file.

That should be it. Much simpler and better than my other idea, which was to download Wamp on my VMs and share my code between two computers (this would’ve meant lots of DB work as well).

I was reading a very-relevant-to-right-now article on pmstories.com and came across this quiz to find out what kind of programmer I am. This is also one of those too long to tweet things, so I upgraded to a blog post about it. Yey.

Your programmer personality type is:

PHTC

You’re a Planner.
You may be slow, but you’ll usually find the best solution. If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.

You like coding at a High level.
The world is made up of objects and components, you should create your programs in the same way.

You work best in a Team.
A good group is better than the sum of it’s parts. The only thing better than a genius programmer is a cohesive group of genius programmers.

You are a Conservative programmer.
The less code you write, the less chance there is of it containing a bug. You write short and to the point code that gets the job done efficiently.