SuperGeekery: A blog probably of interest only to nerds by John F Morton.

You like videos, right? Then you’re prob­a­bly famil­iar with Hand­Brake, the open source video con­ver­sion tool. Encod­ing a sin­gle file is pret­ty straight­for­ward, but the pro­gram has the abil­i­ty to set up a cue and go through a bunch of shows while you are away from your com­put­er. Here’s a quick video walk­through on how to use this fea­ture I put togeth­er for a friend.

I’ve been teach­ing myself Gulp recent­ly. I found the basics easy to pick up. Although I didn’t con­sid­er myself a Grunt expert, I’d taught myself Grunt pre­vi­ous­ly and that helped with me with Gulp. Before we go fur­ther, check out the GitHub repos­i­to­ry that con­tains the fin­ished exam­ple project we’ll go over here: https://​github​.com/​j​o​h​n​f​m​o​r​t​o​n​/​u​s​i​n​g​-​g​u​l​p​-​h​t​m​l​p​r​o​c​e​s​s​-​e​x​ample One thing I have seen in both Grunt and Gulp work­flows I’ve used from their repos­i­to­ries was a script… + read on

I recent­ly worked on a site which saved data in it’s local data­base which need­ed to be col­lect­ed and sent each day to a remote serv­er via SFTP for analy­sis. Need­less to say, I didn’t want to man­u­al­ly do this process every day, but I had nev­er ful­ly explored cron jobs, so I had to teach myself about cron jobs while I fig­ured out the prob­lem at hand. Here’s how I end­ed up automat­ing… + read on

At the time I write this post, Google Ana­lyt­ics has a new ver­sion in beta called ​“Uni­ver­sal Ana­lyt­ics”. It’s basi­cal­ly Google Ana­lyt­ics ver­sion 3. This means that code you may have relied on dur­ing the ver­sion 2 of Google ana­lyt­ics may no longer work. Google sug­gests that all new projects moved to ver­sion 3 now. It does offer ​“real time” ana­lyt­ics, so you can see who is on your site at that very moment… + read on

Here’s a small code snip­pet that I use to incre­ment a val­ue between vis­its using a PHP cook­ie. I use it, for exam­ple, when I have 3 dif­fer­ent images that could go on a page, and I want to serve up the next one in the sequence on sub­se­quent vis­its to the page. I just use the “$num” where appro­pri­ate. You can edit the ​‘2’ in line 14 to change the wrap around val­ue… + read on

I’ve used Nav­i­cat for years. I’ve used MAMP Pro for years. Both tools are must-haves as far as I’m con­cerned, but I had been hav­ing prob­lems with spe­cial char­ac­ters being cor­rupt­ed for near­ly 6 months. Every curly quote, m‑dash or umlaut was tor­tur­ous. Briefly, the prob­lem was that those spe­cial char­ac­ters (like curly quotes) would be changed to ques­tion marks in my data­base after I had migrat­ed it to or from my local devel­op­ment… + read on

I recent­ly worked on a project for a client who want­ed to allow a user to view and print a num­ber of recipes direct­ly from a Flash ban­ner. There were all the oth­er ways of inter­act­ing with the recipes as well, like email­ing, shar­ing on Face­book, and shar­ing on Twit­ter. (I don’t go into those oth­er thing in this post, but you can find me talk­ing about how to do things like that else­where… + read on

I recent­ly had to set up an MX record for a client and although I’ve set them up before, it sud­den­ly made sense to me in a way that it hadn’t before. Per­haps my sto­ry will help some­one else have a sim­i­lar epiphany. Basic name serv­er set up. My client had their site and their mail all han­dled by the same serv­ing com­pa­ny. This meant their name serv­er records were basic. There were … + read on

There are a vari­ety of ways to pass­word pro­tect pages online. Per­haps the eas­i­est is to use an .htac­cess file. The rea­son this is the eas­i­est way is because it’s built into the con­trol pan­el at many host­ing com­pa­nies. I use Dreamhost and it’s con­trol pan­el makes it auto­mat­ic. Sweet. If you don’t have that as part of your host­ing pack­age, check out this arti­cle at htm­l­lite for a walk through on do it… + read on

Yes­ter­day was Michael Jackson’s Memo­r­i­al ser­vice. The world mourned. Yes, the world mourned. As I watched TV with much of the world, I won­dered what we were mourn­ing. I didn’t ask that as a way of dis­parag­ing Michael’s tal­ents. I’ve been a fan of his music like you prob­a­bly have too. But the fact that I can even say that you were prob­a­bly a fan of his music is what I think we’re mourn­ing… + read on