compactcode

Where are the commercial Sass snippets?

2011-05-25T00:00:00Z

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t have any real talent for producing beautiful, eye catching web sites. That means I need to rely on sites like themeforrest and codecanyon to provide me with the necessary creative inspiration.

Lately I have been moving away from working with basic css, preferring more powerful tools like Sass and Compass for authoring my stylesheets.

:::css
.date .year {
  @include rounded-corners;
  @include drop-shadow; 
}

These tools make it easier than ever to package css code into small reusable modules, the kind that could easily be sold on an online market place. Unfortunately I haven’t seen anyone doing this and believe me I’ve looked.

I think there could be a great opportunity for someone to develop and sell Sass snippets on a site like codecanyon. I figure there must be plenty of other developers like me out there willing to buy.

VirtualBox and the 2011 MacBook Pro

2011-04-29T00:00:00Z

I really like VirtualBox, unfortunately it doesn’t like my new MacBook Pro.

When I create a Ubuntu VM with VirtualBox 4.0.4 the install process runs at a snails pace. My 2009 MacBook has no such issues, whats going on?

I did a bit of searching and found an open ticket on the VirtualBox bug tracker. Apple updated OS X installs on new machines to use the 64-bit kernel by default. Unfortunately 64-bit support for OS X isn’t quite there in VirtualBox.

So what can you do if you find yourself in this situation? Well, you can either wait:

Today we released VirtualBox 4.0.6 but unfortunately it does NOT contain a fix for this problem yet. I want to apologize for that. There are some technical problems which have to be resolved. The next maintenance release should fix this annoying bug and we hope that this will NOT take another 8 weeks. Thanks for your understanding!

Or you can switch OS X back to the 32-bit kernel

sudo systemsetup -setkernelbootarchitecture i386

Goodbye Wordpress

2010-10-13T00:00:00Z

When I started this blog just over a year ago I made the decision to host it using my own Wordpress instance.

It was a choice that involved a lot of complexity yet failed to deliver the levels of customization I was really looking for.

I wanted something personal

At the time I decided to start the blog I knew there were several options available that would have been easier to set up. blogger was an option, as was wordpress.com. Both offered a limited number of unimpressive, dirt common themes built for the riff raff. I decided that these options were too impersonal, too lacking in creativity. I wanted something I could customize, so I went with a custom wordpress install.

It was harder than I thought

I installed Wordpress on a brand new ubuntu vps server. This of course meant that I was responsible for installing a database, a mail server, a web server and Wordpress. It’s not that these tasks are especially difficult, but if they aren’t something you do a lot you end up wasting a lot of time figuring out less obvious details. For example, your ip address is likely to be automatically added to a spam blacklist.

I found something easier

One day I discovered a very interesting post about a super simple, super fast blogging tool called toto. The entire project is only a few hundred lines of code which means that even my poor pea brain can actually understand it. If I can completely understand my blogging tool, I can completely customize it.

The other advantage of toto is that it is written using Ruby, which means that hosting is a piece of cake. I can just create a free account on Heroku and publish articles without needing to worry about servers or maintenance.

I decided to use it

I took the plunge and decided to switch over to toto once I had something worthwhile to post. Since that was unlikely to happen anytime soon so went ahead and did it anyway. I didn’t see much value in migrating the old posts so I just moved them and set up some permanent redirect rules.

Blogging is good again. I have a simple tool that lets me focus on my content, lets me customize it and gets out of my way. My only remaining dillema is whether I should have used tumblr instead. Ahhh well, perhaps that will make for a good post next year.