Polymath Workshop

I just spent about two hours trying to set up Ruby on Rails on my Mac with MAMP. Here’s a quick and dirty of how to do it for those of you who don’t feel like going crazy. Follow the installation steps for RoR here: http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/getting-started/installation/mac Edit your MAMP MySQL installation using the steps provided on this website: http://boonedocks.net/mike/archives/175-MAMP-and-the-Ruby-MySQL-Gem.html After you’ve created your first Rails project, locate it on your computer, then go to config/database.yml and enter the following:

development:
 adapter: mysql
 database: XXX_dev
 username: root
 password: root
 timeout: 5000
 socket: /Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock

# Warning: The database defined as "test" will be erased and
# re-generated from your development database when you run "rake".
# Do not set this db to the same as development or production.
test:
 adapter: mysql
 database: XXX_test
 username: root
 password: root
 timeout: 5000
 socket: /Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock

production:
 adapter: mysql
 database: XXX
 username: root
 password: root
 timeout: 5000
 socket: /Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock

Finally, follow the steps provided here to create your MySQL DB for the project. Good luck!

If you’ve got a site that could use a little organizing, or if you want to take a static site and turn it into an interactive blog, WordPress provides an excellent (not to mention free) means of doing so. Installation is fairly simple, though you may need to muddle through it the first time. The WordPress Codex actually contains detailed installation instructions for first-time users, so don’t panic. Just download the latest version of WordPress and follow the instructions at http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress#Detailed_Instructions.

Read more

If you’re just starting out in web development, there’s a good chance you don’t even know what tools are necessary to start making a website. Where does a newbie programmer go from square one? Right off, you’ll need to set up a private server. Anything you put into a new website, along with any changes you make later, can be tested offline through this server. You’ll also need a decent text editor, and by “decent” I mean “not Notepad”. These two all-important tools, the private server and the text editor, will be the subject of this, my inaugural post. Note that the post will assume that, like me, you are working on a Windows based machine.

Read more

I wrote a :CueCat decrypter for Workshop 88 based on the following scheme:

You should check it out here, where I’ve also included the process.php file for download. I’ll be working on additional features in the future, including product listing and price comparisons.