Tom’s Graphic Design Journal

Lots! Aside from my full-time job, I just wanted to plug a shameless link. Cloud-9ine uses my media blog for a face so I can keep notes about my discoveries with Amazon's web services EC2 and S3. Course it's my blog so whatevs At any rate...and more importantly, I wanted to let anyone looking at my blog (and anyone interested) know that I'm working on making my media blog / cms infinitely scalable.

It has some refinements that need to be made. Some bits that could work a little faster and basically more dynamic...for example, adding one or adding ten images at once...Things like that. This is pushing the development really into the next phase of beta which is just polishing things off. I already have working demos, but I want to polish what I have before adding more features. I also want to of course figure out how it'll all work in terms of being deployed.

So how will that deployment work? Well, I still want to offer some sort of version to the world because I've been a leech long enough and I want to give back to the community. We all really need better blogging software anyway. WordPress (used right here folks) and Blogger, etc. are great...but...It's 2008. We have all this new wonderful technology that simply didn't exist when all these blogs and CMS' were built. No fault of anyone...and certainly WordPress is quite good. I won't go into my theories, there's enough of that here and where I think the future is going to take us with web development.

Back to the point. One of the things I envision happening in the whole web industry is a very acute change in how our web sites are hosted. Of course Amazon EC2. That's not the only provider either, there's others like Joyent and many "regular" web hosts that have been offering VPS solutions for a long while. That unique thing about EC2 (and Joyent to some extent, but that's Solaris and I believe more geared for Ruby - bleh) is that you can set the instances up in such a way that you can simply turn on and off more as you need. This is way cool and here's why:

Minervablog will be more of what they are coining the phrase "appliance." Where you will simply be able to turn on as many instances as you need to cover the traffic...But probably automatic. Meaning you will run one instance and as the traffic increases more will automatically turn on. As the traffic spike subsides, the instances will turn off. There will be backups, etc. Also, some nice little features.

Nice features? If instances automatically turning on isn't enough...another feature slated is the ability to "phone in" more support. Meaning, Minervablog will e-mail out to your phone an SMS (e-mail to sms via phone carrier) and alert you to errors. It will also give you the ability to e-mail back (if you can from your phone, cool, else, where ever) to make certain changes. Changes like starting up or turning off an instance, and more...Oh yes, there's more. This is just a taste.

I've been working with sites, and quite specifically, some fairly unstable sites. It's extremely handy to have e-mail alerts. However when you get one, you really can't do anything about it if you're out on the road or somewhere away from a computer. Well you still can't fix major issues, but with some of the features I have figured out, you'll at least be able to "reset", or add/remove power to, your site.

Note: I do quite a bit of research and let me tell you what I'm working on (whether you see it or not) is very big and doesn't exist elsewhere. I know it doesn't because the technology is all too new. Similar solutions (that are probably just as good and some better) do exist, but the cost and availability is the catch. Thanks to new technology, that's changing. Make no mistake...If it's a site that needs a CMS/blog and has a ton of traffic - this IS the solution it needs. Didn't I say it was 2008?

Of course it may be 2009 by the time this all comes together...But I hope not! I hope someone out there is interested, I just may work faster and stay up later each night.

So first off I finally found, cleaned up, and posted the source code to the little demo/tutorial on CakePHP and AMFPHP I posted a while ago here. I didn't write the most comprehensive tutorial, I highlighted on some key points. However, getting CakePHP to work with Flex is quite easy.

Also note that since this tutorial which used CakePHP 1.1 and AMF0 (I believe you can still switch that out for AMF3) there has been some new things going on. First off, there's AMFEXT which is much much faster than AMFPHP because it's a server extension. It also makes things easier for you as far as programming is concerned. There's a CakeAMF project that implements AMFEXT in CakePHP. I have yet to try this, but am very eager. The only downside I should note is that you have to install the server extension, so that pretty much cuts most shared hosting sites out.

Then there's SWX, which is a native data format for Flash. So that of course has been implemented in CakePHP as CakeSWXPHP which can be read about on the CakePHP Bakery. I personally didn't have much success with that at a first quick try, but it's also apparently very easy to use and setup. It also appears to be less code work involved than AMFPHP. I am unsure about the speed though. Here's a little tutorial about using flash remoting with SWX and CakePHP to make a Flash blog written by wouter.

So there's a few options for flash remoting and CakePHP. Now, I'm going to say the same thing I always tell people. Be CAREFUL how, when, and where you use Flash. You probably should not make a blog done completely in Flash if you write a lot and want it to be picked up by search engines. First off, it takes longer to load...but that aside, you're really missing out on what blogs are so great for - getting traffic. Search engines love text and hence crawl and list blogs a lot. So if they can't see the text in your Flash blog...you're in trouble.

I'm of course working on a media blog that will utilize both HTML/CSS and Flash to get the job done. Making it not only load more efficient, but also reach that maybe 10% market that doesn't have Flash and also be better optimized for search engines. More on that later, or go back and read some of my blog posts. I'm kinda at a point where I need to clean up some things to move forward with it - but the major functionality is done with that. You can also see Minerva blog in action...and kinda unrelated to this post - it doesn't use flash remoting, it uses RSS feeds...because I felt they were more universal and can be used for not just the galleries but also syndication. Aside from, perhaps, the most important reason: there's no writing back to the database using Flash with my blog. See how planning goes a long way?

So oddly RSS in CakePHP 1.2 came up a lot one night recently in the Cake IRC channel. There's a really good article on the Bakery about it, but that's for CakePHP 1.1. In 1.2 it's MUCH easier to do, there's less code. So here's a short how-to, though I'm sure it's published elsewhere, the more places one can find from Google the better.

First in your /app/config/routes.php file you need to setup the routing to handle the rss extension. So just add this line:

Router::parseExtensions('rss');

Then you'll need to make some changes and add a method in your controller.

// make sure you have text and time helper, the rest are whatever else you need
var $helpers = array('Html', 'Form', 'Javascript', 'Text', 'Time');
// example method i have here, but your find methods and model will be different of course
function latest() {
       // shows latest posts
       // So the first thing here checks to see if a .rss has been requested...
       // if so get what we need for the feed
      $isFeed = ife($this->RequestHandler->prefers('rss') == 'rss', true, false);
      if ($isFeed) {
            $this->pageTitle = 'Latest Posts Feed';
            $this->set('channel', array('description' => 'Latest posts'));
        }
       $limit = 10;
       $this->set('posts', $this->Post->findAll(null, null, 'date desc', $limit, null, -1));
    }

Then we'll go over to our view template.

// this file is located under /views/posts/rss/latest.ctp
items($posts, 'transformRSS');

function transformRSS($data) {
        return array(
                'title' => $data['Post']['title'],
                'link'  => 'view/'.$data['Post']['lid'],
                'guid' => 'view/'.$data['Post']['lid'],
                'description'  => $data['Post']['body'],
                'author' => $data['Post']['author'],
                'pubDate' => $data['Post']['date']
        );
}
?>

Just take note that your model and fields will differ from what I've output in the feed. "lid" is something I created for the link id...which is part of a friendly url system I have setup for example. Everything should explain itself here, but the most important note is the location of the template file. It should not only be the name of the method (like usual) but should be located under the /rss/ directory under the model's view directory where the other templates are.

That's pretty much all there is to it. RSS is quite simple to setup compared to what you neede to do with CakePHP 1.1. The main difference is a lot of the setup and creation of the xml document is built into 1.2 for you.

You can see this specific example in action on my media blog latest post feed.

I'm just a few short tasks away from completing the alpha version of Minerva, my media blog. Finally. I'm missing my goal by a day or two, but I've also added in some features planned for beta into this alpha version that I'm using to show off my idea. It's just a very rough application at this point, there's no form validation, there's some code that needs to be shortened, etc. but it's working. Not only is it working for posting text, leaving comments (with captcha), and uploading files...But it also will encode videos to flv on the server!

This of course requires the popular ffmpeg which I had to go seek out a shared web host who had that. Many more web hosts are having this support these days. I went with Apthost and they seem to pretty sharp and very fast with support. Probably the best customer support I've seen in a while, though their service is spotty. My site will go down at times or will be slow. I'm not happy about that at all. Aside from that, no coplaints. There is another web host with ffmpeg, Cirtex, that I'm going to try though in the future probably. I know it won't be as fair since their datacenters are on the east coast so it'll probably always be fast for me, when in reality it could be slow for the rest of the world. Well, that's what you get for $60 a year.

Anyway, you can check out a preview of Minerva blog here. I didn't expect to have something to show the public so soon. Enjoy.

So I'm working on a media blog as some people know. I'm anxious as hell about it because it's really going to be good. The end result should (hopefully) be very clean and easy to use, yet very extendable and scalable.

Hopefully it'll fix many of the short comings of most other blog web apps out there on the usability side as well as the code side. It's being developed with CakePHP, of course, my framework of choice and if all goes according to plan, a stable version will be out 8 months from now (or less hopefully). I get very little time to work on it. Though a beta should be available in 3 months! Which will be open to the public.

I will also be posting an alpha somewhere at sometime (soon) of the blog, but am not quite sure whether or not I'll publicize the link (or even protect it).

What's the point? Why not WordPress? Why not Blogger? Hell, why not the highly anticipated Propod? Well for one, I want to make web sites more quickly because as I said above, I don't have much time these days. So this is a super flexible base that can be extended. Two, it's going to (hopefully) be better than all the blogs I just mentioned, that includes FI's Propod. I've reviewed it and while I'll be the first to admit I have more market research to do (and Propod does look very very nice), it didn't impress me too much and from the outside (for those who don't know, there's a world of web technology that hasn't hit the mainstream yet - mainly only keen developers know this) and there are some issues that many people (not just myself) have identified with Propod. That's not to say they won't fix them or that they are severe ones of course. For me, the biggest disappointment is that it's not open source. Minerva Blog will be open source of some sort. I still need to iron out the exact licensing. That is going to be the Achilles tendon on Propod and believe me, Minerva will offer everything Propod does. I of course prefer not to have the blog done completely in Flash/Flex, but one would have the option of having a Flash/Flex template for Minerva with great ease (the exact AMF, SWX, XML, whatever communication method still debated upon).

I guess the best way I can summarize Minerva or explain the -why- is... Minerva Blog is being created because there is a lack of blogging systems today that can easily handle the demand of growing multi-media usage on the internet. Likewise, many blog systems are limited and not scalable. Minerva aims to be super efficient, scalable, easy to use, and sufficient for delivering a variety of media.

Check back for more soon.