About
John Ford presently works on Farmstand, an iPhone app connecting communities with locally-grown food. Passion for coding is what motivates John, but some people are beginning to question his attachment to his iPad. Mix equal parts beautiful code writer, lover of healthy living, world traveler, living room DJ, and community giver and you'll have the geek known as John Ford.
Category Archives: Tips
Programmatically Pull Attachments from WordPress Posts
One of my favorite tricks in using WordPress as a CMS is to have it handle photo resizing and insertion into pages automatically. For example, swissmiss and I just launched Convert (a NYC based Green Roof Service) today. Within the projects section they display photos of the green roofing projects they’ve done and let you download a project sheet PDF. … More
Stop Mailing Me Phone Books
With Google’s local search, and sites like YellowPages.com, I haven’t opened a phone book in years. The printed books are such a waste of resources and time. I also get the same book delivered to my home and work addresses. I contacted YellowPages.com via email and they were nice enough to give me a list of local providers who are … More
Phusion Passenger (mod_rails) Memory Management
I’ve been using Phusion Passenger (mod_rails) for about a month to run a production and staging machine with a Ruby on Rails app. So far things have been going really well. Installation was smooth and it’s been really peppy. However, the app just got hit by a lot of people at once and stopped responding. I didn’t realize the default … More
Installing ImageMagick/RMagick on Leopard
I’ve heard many horror stories of developers trying to install ImageMagick/RMagick to manipulate images. Fortunately, when I needed to install RMagick to use with the attachment_fu plugin, I ran across a fantastic script at OnRails.org by Solomon White (many thanks). It gave the steps to install RMagick from source without MacPorts or Fink. I made the following minor changes to … More
Getting Apache & PHP to work with Leopard (OS X 10.5)
I ran into a snag today while trying to get the websites on my local machine running with Leopard. The first thing was that the config file in the new version of Apache is in a different location (/etc/apache2/httpd.conf instead of /etc/httpd/httpd.conf). Once I changed the settings I kept getting 403 Forbidden messages every time I loaded a page (the … More
The Architect and Builder Dilemma
(Originally uploaded by sweetsexything) One of the problems I’ve seen over the years, in corporations where I’ve worked and as a business owner, is the misconception that a builder (a developer in this case) can quote a project without the blueprints. I often times receive a request for a quote (10 pages long) and it says something like this: We … More
Staying Healthy as Designers and Developers
I’m just getting back into the swing of things after returning from a 2.5 week business event overseas. These trips really take a toll on my body so I do my best to stay aware and focused on my health. As regular computer users we’re also abusing our bodies by sitting in front of a computer for hours at a … More
Don’t Submit Your Site to 300+ Search Engines
If you ever see a product or website that offers a service to submit your website to hundreds of search engines, here are some reasons not to do it. Link farms As search engines continue to become smarter they often times penalize for having your website listed on link farms or similar sites. It is possible that a submission tool … More