The infrequently updated blog of Matt Kirman.
Founder, Technical Manager & Developer. Rubyist.
I spend a lot of time working on the command line. Day in; day out. Hours at a time. This is a brief rundown of the setup that I’ve been using for some time and am finally happy with.
With the increasing time that I’m spending in Tmux and Vim I’ve come to realise that the positioning of the control key is far from comfortable when working for a period of time.
As of today I’m open-sourcing my custom WordPress CloudApp powered shortlink generator Cirrus. Developed ~9 months ago I’ve been using it on and off on my own blog so that I have a unified shortlink presence.
I’ve been gradually moving back to Vim from and one aspect that has really swayed me is the recent addition of the relativenumber setting in Vim 7.
As a quick followup to my previous post detailing how to run WordPress behind a Nginx reverse proxy I thought I’d post an interesting graph retrieved from Google Webmaster Tools showing page load times of this site over the past few months: I switched to the Nginx/Apache configuration just before the start of June and, thankfully, it appears that the performance increase I noticed has also been observed by others.
Recently I’ve wondering whether it was worth trying to improve my WordPress-based blog performance. While it wasn’t particularly terrible, waiting over 2 seconds just to load a single page isn’t exactly stunning.
Spotio is an open-source, web-based, multi-user Spotify remote. It features support for viewing the currently playing track, skipping tracks and, most importantly, the ability to control playback.
It annoyed my slightly that simple things such as hitting escape to close the new tweet window were only available to people who’d purchased the MacHeist Nanobundle.
I’ve been an avid reader of Jason Calacanis‘ various newsletters for some time, not least for the sheer amount of work he puts into each and every one.
Well it looks like Facebook Places has just launched in the UK. Worryingly this was brought to my attention by my newsfeed showing that one of my distant friends (who shall remain nameless) has just checked-in to his house.
I’ve been a Git convert, and version control geek, for over a year now so I’ve sort of become the unofficial Git consultant at the office. If anythings breaks or something weird happens I’m usually the one called in to sort it out.
Even though the Google Closure Compiler is very useful for compressing JavaScript it has absolutely no support for CSS, something that the YUI Compressor excels at.
I’ve been trying out the brand new Google Closure Compiler instead of the YUI Compressor. I’m not going to go into any detail about the Closure Compiler as there’s plenty of information out there already, but I can say that it looks like another solid offering from Google.
A common problem when designing for the web is how to create equal height columns. The usual solution is to either resort to JavaScript or CSS absolute positioning, here I will show you how to create equal height columns with pure CSS using the margin, padding and float properties.
Whilst I was redesigning my blog (what do you think by the way) I decided that what I really needed to finish it off was an ajaxy live search. Now normally I would have looked for a jQuery version, but as I’ve been trying my hand at a bit of MooTools recently I decided to write my own plugin.
Recently I’ve been looking at a way to ease the path of deploying PHP applications to my servers. I eventually settled on the excellent Ruby tool Capistrano which is very popular with the Rails crowd.
[Update] I’ve recently changed my JavaScript framework to MooTools, hence the rf.Sparks demo isn’t working properly. The plugin itself hasn’t actually changed so should still work perfectly fine on your own site.
Facebook has featured in social media blogs recently for adding a Konami code Easter egg to their home page. In this blog post I show you how to add similar “functionality” to your site using Javascript.
There is a major problem with the approach of many internet based companies. Don’t get me wrong, I’m as much a fan of them as anybody, but if they want to survive they need to get smart.
[Update] I’ve recently changed my JavaScript framework to MooTools, hence the rf.Highlight demo isn’t working properly. The plugin itself hasn’t actually changed so should still work perfectly fine on your own site.