We teach you to read and write so that you can understand the world around you and have a chance to create your own values and views. So that you can form, affect and change yours and others opinions. So that you can engage in causes that you value. So that you maybe one day can change the world.

Our understanding of why we shall teach you this is based on the way information have been distributed the last 100 years; from a variety of sources with exclusive access to information; sources that decided to filter and shape the information the way they saw it and then distributed it to the rest of the world in the form of tv, newspapers, radio and printed matter.

Unfortunately the media landscape have changed dramatically; when newspapers, radio and tv were born they were independent, they tried to stay neutral and represent the truth. Today only a handful of outlets owns the news, the tv, the radio and the music. Truth and neutrality is no longer guaranteed.

Today you kids have to rely on the internet to stay independent. But with one big differance; there is no one collecting and gathering the truth for you. You have to do that yourself. The good thing is that it’s out there free for any of you to access. It’s in the Twitter streams, the Facebook statuses, the blogs and the open source tools, the api:s, the openGov projects, the UN databases, schools, librarys and a lot more.

But if you don’t know how to access, compile, compare and work with all this raw data you will be as easy mislead as we have been.

So, kids, I’m not saving up huge amounts for you to spend on housing, education and leisure in the future. I’m working my ass off to learn programming; PHP, Javascript, jQuery, C++, XML, JSON and more so that I firstly can make a living and help Malin support you and our family. Secondly so that I can give you the tools and knowledge to access the worlds sources of information and independently investigate and evaluate the world that is ahead of you. So that you can be free to find out things for yourself. Cos without the basic knowledge of computer programming you will not be able to draw your own conclutions. You can not form, affect and change yours or others opinions. You can not engage in causes that you value. You cannot change the world.

/Dad.

My back-up has three main components;1. Instant/realtime backup of workfolders and DBs. 2. Daily backups of my complete workstation/laptop. 3. Passive backups on my archives that is activated automatically when I archive stuff

My back-up has three main components;1. Instant/realtime backup of workfolders and DBs. 2. Daily backups of my complete workstation/laptop. 3. Passive backups on my archives that is activated automatically when I archive stuff

The setup has three basic components;

1. Instant/realtime backup for the stuff I work right now + databases.
2. Daily backups of my complete workstation/laptop.
3. Passive backups of my archives that is activated automatically when I archive stuff.

For the instant backups I use Dropbox Pro with the Symlinks-script installed (more about that at the end of the post). Via the symlink- script Dropbox monitors my workfolders/files and backs them up the very second anything changes. Dropbox offers 50Gb storage for $9.99 a month or 100Gb for $19.99 a month. I signed up for the 50Gb account and it has worked fine for me so far.

For the daily/nightly backups of my laptop I chosed iDrive.com. They offer 150Gb for $4.95 a month and has an extremely good interface when you want to create your backup sets. The size restriction on the account hasn’t been a problem to me, and I guess they will offer unlimited storage in a near future.

For the “passive” archive backups I have choosen to go with Mozy.com. I really wanted to use Backblaze.com since I felt that is was more flexible, faster and has a better user experience in general but I have files that is up to 20 years old that has to be backed up from old cd-roms (remember those days :-) and somehow OSX Leopard won’t read those discs. So I had to go with OSX Tiger on the archive server … and Backblaze isn’t available for Tiger. Anyway, Mozy offers unlimited storage at $4.95 a month so thats perfect for the archives.

Here is how you set up the Symlinks script on a Mac.

The Symlinks script allows me to sync/backup folders outside the default Dropbox folder. That way I can keep my filestructure and the workflow I have had pre-Dropbox.Basically it let’s me right-click any folder or document and create an alias (symlink) to my Dropbox-folder. Via that symlink Dropbox can then monitor my workfolders/files and sync/back up any file the second it changes.

First download the Symlinks files.

1. Place the “Create Symbolic Link.workflow” file in Home Folder/Library/Workflows/Applications/Finder/

2.Place the “Create Symbolic Link.action” file in
Home Folder/Library/Automator

If any of the folders do not exist … create them.

How to create Symlinks using Automator:

1. Right Click file or folder you wish to monitor.
2. Choose More
3. Choose Automator
4. Select Create Symbolic Link

5. Once you select Create Symbolic Link the script will prompt you and ask for the location of the alias/symlink. Choose your Dropbox folder and click continue.
6. The symlink will be created in the Dropbox folder and look like a traditional Mac-alias within the Dropbox folder.

Step-by-step tutorial based on “Dropbox Tutorial – OS X Symlinks.pdf” by Stephen Russet.

For more detailed information please visit the Dropbox wiki

I'm really happy with the environment I have. It's based on the MAMP php/Apache/mySql server.

The environment I have had for a while now is basically:

• Local server – MAMP (MySQL, Apache and PHP5). Since I’m a designer by heart I wanted a really simple interface to start with and Mamp gave me that.
• Mac and Windows environment. Through Parallels Desktop I can run Windows XP which is really valuable when testing sites, scripts and such.
• A bunch of browsers for both Mac and Win; Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome, Firefox and Opera.

That base will get you a long way, but it might be a good idea to check your stuff with Browsershots.org that will batch render your site in a vast amount of browsers and platforms. Or check out Litmus new Alkaline app. The downside with those services is that you get a astatic render of the site you are testing so interaction, javascipt and such cannot be tested, thats why I bought Parallells to run XP on.

Googles Chrome browser is picking up speed but it’s still not available for Mac, so if you to check your site in Chorme you can install CrossOver Chromium. It’s a ported version of Chorme developed on the Wine open source project. Be aware that CrossOver Chromium is still a test so don’t rely too hevily on it yet.

For hosting I’m using Bluehost (US) and Binero (Swe).

When developing sites iPhoney is a good Mac iPhone simulator running webkit.

When developing sites it might also be good to check them in a mobile interface. If you don’t want to flip your iPhone out every minute you can install the iPhoney desktop application. It simulates browsing in the iPhone and is built on Safari/Webkit. iPhoney is only available for the Mac.

Coding software.
Which web development software you use is a matter of taste as long as you don’t use crap like Frontpage or any other app that generates code for you via a wysiwyg interface. Your site is doomed to be filled with tons of crapcode and you’ll learn nothing.

Personally I have switched from Dreamweaver to Coda about a year ago, and I must say that I really love Coda. As soon as you get that basic knowledge in HTML, XHTML, CSS you should get an app that lets you handcode your own sites. In that way you learn more and get much better control of what you are doing … or at least what you are trying to do :-)

Browser plugins and other tools.
There are tons of addons and plugins for you to use. Some of the ones I use for development and debugging is:

Firebug - one of the most popular addons for Firefox. It gives you full overview of your site/components. Has really good debugging features like DOM-, CSS-, Html-, script-inspectors among others.

YSlow – analyses what, when and how fast every component of your site loads. So if you have a slow site, install YSlow and find out whats causing the lag.

CSS Edit – Initially I used CSS edit, but after a while I switched to Firebug and Codas built in DOM-inspector. CSS Edit gives you a custom browser in which you can examine your DOM elements and classes. One of the best things with CSS Edit is that you can create local CSS overrides for existing websites.

When developing column based designs Gridfox lets you set up your custom guides.

Gridfox – If you have built your own CSS framework or are using an existion one Gridfox lets you create guiding columns to aid your development. You can specify number of columns, widths, padding and more.

Today Typography.js only contains a script that picks up elements of the “typo”-class and runs through them finding words containing only uppercase letters. The words are then transformed into lowercase letters and a small caps class is applied to the individual word.

The script is “intelligent” in the way that it accepts diacritics such as : ; , . ” / ? ! as parts of the uppercase word but it leaves the diacritic itself untouched. Right now it does not recognise a combination like “the CSS-tables”, that’s on the to-do list :-)

Simplifyed, the script identifyes UC-words by counting, from first letter to the last, the number of letters within the Unicode range 65 to 90 (uppercase). If the uppercase count is equal to the length of the word it means that the word is all uppercase and shall therefore be scripted.

I’ll get back to the actual code in later posts.

Preview:
Typography.js – example with existing copy
Typography.js – type your own (my debugger/test version so there are flaws)

Future goals:
The overall goal is to work with true glypths, in other words OpenType fonts and unicode. Since Opera, Firefox will support and Safari and IE supports the @font-face feature and OpenType it is realistic to aim for true glyphts and not just scaling as the small-caps class does. True glypths gives such a higer quality to the details also since the contrast and blackness of the glypths is taken into consideration when designing small caps in an OpenType font.

Other goals is:
- enable customization and language support so that a web site owner can change typographic defaults due to the language typography.js is applied on.
- largely extend the typographic details the framework covers.
- and more that comes up as I go.

Background:
About 12 years ago I made an AppleScript suite of typographic tools for QuarkXPress, the suite automatized most of the typographic work that was needed for book and magazine publishing. After a year or two the suite was shelved but I could not get it out of my head. So now that I want to get deeper into development it feels like the perfect case; bring the suite back to life but in a web context.

“Web typography”, in my view, suffers from a serious shortage of “typography”. The term could be substituted with “Let me pick the fonts I want for my site” and most efforts is made trying to find techniques that allow the designer/web site owner to use custom fonts on their sites.

Custom fonts is good, but to me it is not what typography is about. Compare the typographic-features of print/desktop appications like QuarkXPress and InDesign to the non-existing features in browsers and webservers. You’ll see that there is years of work left before the web can be on the same typographic level as print. The basic conditions for webbased typography is really good; the typical web-project is following standards on how to handle content, design but also the avrage screen resolution is getting beyond the 1024×768 which ensures a lot of building blocks/pixels when rendering text on a screen.

Thats about it for now.

Keep in mind that I am a designer/art director since more then 10 years and the “Codecamp” project is my personal way of learning programing.

[Update]: I’ve renamed the Codeplay project to Codecamp since there is a company in the UK named Codeplay. My mistake, didn’t mean to cause any copyright infringements.

When I decided it was time to get into development I was crushed by the weight of choosing language/framework to start with. I mean, raising kids or fixing the credit crunch seems like nothing compared to getting into this three-lettered djungle that is in front of me.

Based on my past experiences and my current tech crush it was easy to figure out what and where i needed to dig in to get the most out of Codecamp:

The fundamentals of a web project

The behavior layer (5) Is executed on the client and defines how different elements behave when the user interacts with them (JavaScript or ActionScript for Flash sites).
The presentation layer (4) Is displayed on the client and is the look of the web page (CSS, imagery).
The structure layer (3) Is converted or displayed by the user agent. This is the markup defining what a certain text or media is (XHTML).
The content layer (2) Is stored on the server and consists of all the text, images, and multimedia content that are used on the site (XML, database, media assets).
The business logic layer/back end (1) Runs on the server and determines what is done with incoming data and what gets returned to the user.

In the past I have mostly worked with 2, 3 and 4. But 5 and 1 is my Achilles’ heal. So that is what I’m going to focus Codeplay around.

But still the question is, what language do I choose?

I had two “musts”, it had to be easy to learn so that I could get some fast results and it had to have a “future”. As an experienced developer you will say “what do you mean by future? … and who are you to decide what stuff has a future?”.

Well, I can in no way decide which language is best and what has the most potential future. I could easily go for PHP, .Net or something similar, but after asking a bunch of my experienced friends those languages have come to a “stale” meaning that they isn’t breaking new ground as fast as other newer languages.

So after some consideration I did go with JavaScript and Ruby on Rails/Merb. Why?

Ruby on Rails, as I have understood through research and a little testing is clean, simple, has a really low learning threshold. For me as a designer I really value quick results. Also the community surrounding RoR is providing the future with its fast development like Merb.

Javascript is maybe a strange choice but in my opinion it is one of the cornerstones when creating user experiences in a web project. Javascript also gives you a nice way into Flash/ActionScript, Air, AJAX, jQwery and such. But the main reason for choosing JS is that it can be used to script applications such as the Adobe CS. By choosing JS I will get a great language that is really good in web development but it will also let me create scripts and plugins for the desktop apps I’m using on a daily basis in my client projects. Once I got the JS going it’s no biggie digging deeper into JS “parent” language C and C++ … and that gives you a way into Xcode and native Mac application development … well maybe I’m getting a little bit ahead of things here but what the heck …

So from now on Codecamp will focus firstly on JS and secondly on RoR.

I’ve already spent about 30 hours with JS for the first Codecamp project. But I’ll get to that in a later post.

Take care!

[Update]: I’ve renamed the Codeplay project to Codecamp since there is a company in the UK named Codeplay. My mistake, didn’t mean to cause any copyright infringements.