Introducing: Link Posts

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For those familiar with Daring Fireball, or Tumblr sites like MG Siegler’s parislemon, or Marco Arment’s website, link posts are probably pretty familiar. I’ve noticed this trend more and more. Maybe I was missing something before – they’ve been on Daring Fireball as long as I can tell. I’ve always shared links that I find interesting on Twitter, but 140 characters isn’t usually enough to add my thoughts and Twitter doesn’t feel permanent at all.

What are link posts?

A link post is literally just a link attatched to an article. The heading is usually linked to the link that’s attached to the post instead of a permalink. They let you comment on another article in longer form than you would normally want to write in a comment. And, if the author of the site you’re linking to has pingbacks turned on, they’ll be notified of your post in the comments. It’s a useful way to share interesting links with your readers and let them know your thoughts as well.

Since I’ve implemented this feature for the next gernation of this site, and I’m running the new site internally, I decided to add the feature to the current generation theme. I’ve already posted some links, so you can check it out. This implementation isn’t necessarily exactly how it will be when the new version launches, but at least nobody is left wondering about any of the articles here. Currently, link posts are linked directly to the source article in the headline of the homepage and on the single post page. Both pages also have an arrow (→) at the end of the title, indicating that the link is going to take you to an external page.

Photoshop CS6 Improvements

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Here are some of the improvements to Photoshop in the public beta release of Photoshop CS6. I’ve installed it and the new interface colors are gorgeous. There are four steps with the lightest being the same color as the interface of CS5. It defaults to the second darkest one. They note in the article that the darker interface will probably be popular among many photographers.

Layer styles on groups and group clipping masks are exciting as well. It mostly seems like they’re bringing functionality up to what users might expect – ⌘J, for example, duplicates anything now including groups.

You can get the public beta from the Adobe Labs site.

Virtualized Development, Part 2

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This is a follow up to my post, Set up VirtualBox for Web Development, where I describe how to configure a VirtualBox VM with two NICs so that you can develop on a local VM wherever you happen to be. I’m going to describe how to enhance that with a shared folder between your guest and host operating systems so that changes can be immediately reflected with a need to “upload” them to the virtual server.

One of the advantages to working with virtual machines for development is having a sandbox to throw stuff in. Not having to install PHP or MySQL on your local machine is nice, and if something goes wrong, just wipe it and start over (or boot from a snapshot). But wouldn’t it be nice if you could save your files and have the changes instantly reflected on the VM without going through an app like Transmit? I’ve been working with CodeKit recently, and one of the nice features is that it will refresh the browser for you automatically when you save your changes, but if you have to “upload” the files to a VM every time you save, this feature isn’t quite as useful. So, let’s fix that.

A couple of things came together in an interesting way leading up to this post. I’ve been working with CodeKit for a few weeks and it had started to become obvious that my workflow was a little flawed. Uploading to the VM after every save was getting old, even with Dropsend from TextMate. I knew about shared folders between VirtualBox host and guest, but gave up after briefly looking into it because I didn’t know how to install Guest Additions via the command line.

Then, someone showed me Vagrant. It’s an awesome app for automatically provisioning “lightweight, reproducible, and portable development environments.” I had a problem with it though; my MacBook is old and slow. Part of the automatic process is using Chef to essentially set up all the apps you need to run your environment – PHP, Apache, MySQL, etc. Everything went smoothly until Chef started doing its thing, then the CPU would jump to 100% and everything would lock up. I could limit this to 75% of the the host’s CPU if I wanted, but that wasn’t the real issue. I never really gave it a chance to finish, but it took long enough that it would be completely impractical for me to wait that long every time I needed to provision a VM for a new project. So, back to plain VirtualBox.

Let’s do this already!

As I mentioned, there is a way to set up a shared folder between the guest and host – Vagrant does this automatically for you, which is the main feature I was interested in anyway. Once you have the guest OS configured the way you want it, it’s only a few steps to create the shared folder:

First, install Guest Tools.

sudo apt-get install dkms
sudo apt-get install build-essential
sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r)
sudo reboot

After the machine reboots, go to the “Devices” menu and click “Install Guest Additions”. This will essentially add Guest Additions as a CD-Rom, just like if you were using a desktop OS, but you have to mount it manually. Then, run the Guest Additions setup.

cd /media
sudo mkdir cdrom
sudo mount /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom
cd /media/cdrom
sudo ./VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run

If you haven’t already, you’ll need to shut down the guest to add a shared folder in the VirtualBox settings. From VirtualBox, click on the VM you want to set up, go to “Settings”, “Shared Folders”, and add a new share. Then, mount it with the following, where “yourshare” is the name you gave the shared folder.

mkdir /path/to/mountdir
sudo mount -t vboxsf yourshare /path/to/mountdir

Now you can just save your files into that folder and they will be shared on the guest as well. Eventually, when I get a new machine, I’ll try Vagrant again. This works excellent for me right now though.

Resources

  1. The commands to install Guest Additions came straight from Michael Halls-Moore’s blog.

Update

Instead of mounting the shared folder directly to the path you need it at, you may want to use a symbolic link to take advantage of the auto-mount feature of VirtualBox. When auto-mount is turned on, the folder will be mount in /media as the name you set it up as in VirtualBox, but it will have a prefix of ‘sf_’ in front of it. To create the symbolic link, you would run the following command.

ln -s /media/sf_yourshare /path/to/mount

Network Favicons

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Network Favicons is a simple WordPress plugin that allows blog owners on a multisite network to upload a favicon to the root of their theme’s directory and have automatically be used as the site’s favicon. This requires a one-to-one relationship between blogs and themes, but that could be as simple as creating a child theme for the favicon if you’re already using the same theme on multiple blogs.

I made the theme for my new hosting network, network.joshbetz.com. This is where I’ll be hosting future client websites and I needed the ability to use custom favicons instead of just having my own favicon displayed on every blog.

Note: If no theme is available in a theme’s directory, the site still just use the default one provided at the domain’s root.

View in Plugin Directory Download on Github

Set up VirtualBox for Web Development

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I’ve used many different development styles through the years. For a while I was a big fan of using Coda to develop live on the server. Recently I’m using more of Textmate and Transmit1. And, while I still like the how fast I can move while writing changes straight to the server, I don’t necessarily want to be doing anything that could potentially break a client’s website — even for a short time. The solution to this is pretty simple; run a virtual machine that acts just like the remote server. You can make your changes and when you’re sure it’s right, you can make one push up to the live site. This probably seems pretty obvious, but I’m going to talk about how I have my VM configured so that it works even on a strange network.

Goal

We want a virtual machine that has a static address that will work even if we pick up and decide to work out of a coffee shop for a day or, say, a warehouse in Northern California. It needs to act just like a production server, which means it also needs to be connected to the web.

Solution

  1. In Preferences, set up a VirtualBox network. Since this particular network is going to be for servers, we won’t worry about turning on a DHCP server. Screenshot
  2. Create a new VM in VirtualBox. I like Ubuntu, but you can use any distro you want. Use whatever specs work for you. It would be a good idea to mirror the production machine you’ll be working with as closely as possible. Don’t worry about networking on the machine yet — that’s next.
  3. Make sure the VM is not running and open its settings. Go to the network tab and verify that adapter 1 is still set for NAT. This is how the VM will access the internet.
  4. Click over to adapter 2. Check the box to enable the adapter and set it to use the network that we set up in step 1.
  5. Start the VM and open the network configuration file. In the current version of Ubuntu this is at /etc/network/interfaces. Make sure you leave eth0 as a dynamic interface and set eth1 as a static interface for your VirtualBox network. Screenshot
  6. Restart the machine and verify that it can access the internet. Also verify that you can access the machine from your host OS on the IP address you gave it.

Something I like to do, just to make this a little easier to work with is to set that address to a local domain in my hosts file. Something like local.dev seems to be popular, but you can name it whatever you want. Obviously if you name it google.com you’ll need to start using Bing or something. 😉

I realize this was a pretty quick overview of the process, so if there’s anything that was unclear, let me know in the comments or shoot me an email.

  1. Textmate with the Transmit bundle really makes Dropsend amazing. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, look for the Transmit bundle for Textmate and check out the secrets of transmit blog post that Panic wrote a while back. ↩