Deploying your projects via git (or any kind of version control, for that matter) is a no-brainer. It's been discussed many times (this is probably my favourite) and as we all know, it takes all the manual labour, time and human error out of the process.

You don't often find deployment scripts though. Perhaps it's just me failing at Google, I don't know; but perhaps people just don't tend to write them generic enough. Or perhaps they are too simple to be bothered sharing them. In any case, I didn't like the idea of writing single-use shell scripts and so I whipped up something that does the job rather well, and in a generic and reusable way. (more)

Recently I've been doing a lot of responsive sites for clients. They're fun and often challenging things to work with; opinions and solutions from various developers and designers scattered liberally throughout the internet. So I suppose it's about my turn to chime in on it all. (more)

Recently it's been a task of mine to setup a new SQL database cluster. My favourite database engine of late has been Percona's XtraDB, and so naturally I was quick to choose Percona Cluster as a solution.

This installation was a Cluster 5.5.28 install performed on a RackSpace public cloud server using a clean Ubuntu 12.10 image- your mileage with other platforms, OSes and Percona Server versions may vary. (more)

Recently I had to go about setting up my own configurations for Webalizer. Grouping user-agents into meaningful sections seemed a worthwhile cause, so I ran through the mobile user-agent string list and setup matches for mobile devices on top of some of the more straightforward ones for desktop. The result is a pretty clean config that handles (in my experience) about 90% of my incoming traffic. I've also tried to provide a little bit of forward-planning for version numbers on some of the browsers which now update their major version almost daily (curse you, chrome), but you should plan to keep that aspect up to date yourself. (more)

Ok. I just found this, and my head has exploded at how much easier it's going to make my life.

You're awesome, Kenny!!

Whilst they offer some great free services (edit: Google Apps is now only offered on paid subscriptions, even under the previous 5 user cap. But if you got in beforehand, you do get to keep it for free...), Google's products with their user-friendly interfaces can occaisonally be confusing for those of us who know what we're doing - a whole new set of terminology to learn just to be able to do what you had previously learned in the 'normal' / 'homebrew' / whatever way.

This is a quick cheatsheet on how to achieve some of the fundamental and more advanced mail behaviours and operations that you'd expect from any mailserver via your Google Apps admin console. (more)

JSON schema is the modern equivalent to XSchema/DDML or the good old ancient DTDs. It provides a lightweight, self-describing and abstract protocol for describing and validating data formats and models. There are validator implementations in many languages, but the most obvious use is in pre-send validation for frontend JavaScript applications. A good validator and some simple wrappers or data binding (like say, this...) and you can code up a complex and powerful new application in days.

Its simple JSON structure and savviness of the community has thus far kept any kind of introductory documentation from cropping up, instead one must simply read through the spec and digest it for themselves. Since this is a time-consuming process, I did up a quick cheatsheet of the properties involved in schema declarations so that once one understands the basic principle you don't have to go back and check for what the name of something was repeatedly. (more)

Generally, I take it upon myself to push git onto other developers wherever I go. It is a wonderous, joyful world where your work is never impeded by a network connection and everything is far more powerful and flexible. Often you hear "why would I ever want to move away from Subversion?", which is a bit like saying "why would I ever want to stop riding a horse to work", but that's a topic for another post. This page is a first-stop manual for those new to working in teams or working with git, and lays out some good practises you'll probably want to follow early on until you become a more advanced user. (more)

Sometime recently I wanted to make some sweet-ass parallax stuff. Fun times would be had, but what a lot of effort it was going to be.

There were several great solutions out there, and I eventually decided upon jparallax as being the most complete. However, that still didn't allow me the flexibility I wanted - I needed to be able to do more than just move elements, I wanted to stretch parts of my parallax to achieve faux-sideon perspective. And then I started thinking about other things you could do, and decided the best way to approach such an engine would be to allow modification to any css property and decide what effects were workable later.

The other thing I generally have a problem with in JavaScript animation in general is 'the stutter'. You don't get it constantly, and on modern browsers / faster machines not at all, but for those of us on laptops and phones the stutter in our animation ruins the fuildity of the experience we're trying to create. CSS transitions are there and are supported by all the major browsers now (except, of course, IE (edit: IE10 does support them now)) so there's no reason not to be using them. Transitions run on the GPU in most cases, freeing up CPU resources being used to control the animation in JavaScript for other purposes and smoothing out animation by using framesyncing and other techniques only available on hardware.

Provided keyframe positions were known ahead of time or it didn't matter if there was a slight lag to the animation (indeed in many cases this can be appealing), there didn't seem to be any reason one couldn't leverage CSS transitions and the GPU to add fluidity to JavaScript animations updated at a low sampling rate. So that's exactly what I did with JCAnim and the parallax effect I implemented with it. (more)

It's no understatement to say that this website has fallen largely into disuse over the years. I aim to fix this; and to start it's high time we got our server infrastructure sorted out.

We're now serving all our content from a Rackspace virtual host, which means we have complete control over what it can and can't do. We no longer need to make halfassed compromises with server constraints and serve annoyingly awkward websites with no reliable database backend. Hooray! (more)