The Coffeeshopped Blog

Update: HourPatch is now available to the public. Try it out at www.hourpatch.com

For the past few months, I've been working quietly on a web application that I've named HourPatch.

I'd like to share how I go about hosting development versions of websites on my Apple laptop (it's a 12" Powerbook G4). These instructions should work for anyone running OS X 10.3 and up (probably even earlier versions, as well). I'm talking about the regular OS X, not OS X Server.

The goal for these instructions is to be able to run a local version of a website, under a domain name of your choosing. Incredibly useful for development.

A couple of friends have asked me recently what I recommend/prefer to use for a content management system (CMS) when building a website.

For most small business, non-profit, or personal websites, I think Drupal is the best choice that I've come across.

Collective Playlist is an ongoing web-based art project that I got involved with a couple of months ago. From the website:

What is the Collective Playlist?

TOPICAL PLAYLISTS
A series of playlists organized by artists, curators and other cultural producers.

PUBLIC STREAM
A collection of user-contributed Mp3s linked from across the internet and made available as one streaming m3u file.

Last Friday marked the launch of a website redesign for Workpod 9, an architecture and design firm based in Austin, Texas. I worked on the project as web developer, as well as design helper to Ryan Coover, principal of Workpod 9, who designed most of the site.

As of February 1st, I am a full-time contractor, meaning I am no longer the Web Developer at California College of the Arts. Now is an exciting and scary time. It was my choice to leave and start fresh on my own (Exciting), but I chose to leave a comfortable, secure position in order to pursue an unknown, financially-risky path that doesn't come with health insurance (Scary).

Here's a bit of Javascript you can use on your website's 404 page so that when you look at your stats in Google Analytics, all the missing pages that your visitors tried to visit are grouped into one place. This technique can be useful as it gives you a single place to look in your stats for any bad URLs that people visit often, perhaps as the result of a mistyped link, or a deleted page.

Tonight marks the launch of my latest project, a website redesign for the National Lawyers Guild San Francisco Bay Area Chapter (NLGSF). Please give it a look.

NLGSF is a chapter of the larger National Lawyers Guild, an organization whose aims are:

If you use Google Analytics to track traffic on your websites, then you've probably run across the annoyance of seeing mysterious hits to pages that don't exist on your website. Common examples I've seen are like:

Earlier today I downloaded a bookmarklet from Sumaato Labs that allows you to easily geotag your photos on Flickr using Google Maps. I tried it on a few of my photos, and was really impressed with how easy it made the geotagging process.