I’ve got only one complaint: the filesystem icons are a giant step backwards.

They’d fit nicely into Windows 95, but Dropbox did a much better job. I poked around in the Google Drive.app package hoping for some replaceable resource, but found no way to change them. I’m sure that Google’s teams frequent my blog, so I’ll kindly ask that someone address this. Then, of course, get on to the LAN syncing and bandwidth tuning.

What do I do again?

I love solving problems, I’m fascinated with the web, technology, and putting things together that can make people’s lives better in some way. I’m used to wearing a lot of hats, and I like it that way, but I’m constantly forced to choose between focusing on one or two things to be really good at, or chasing a whole bunch of interests at the expense of never being The Expert at any of them.

A smart person I used to work for told me that the work I take will be the kind of work I keep getting. To my unamazement, this has proved true. I’ve learned that low-budget, ASAP projects where I’d occupy a narrow role are the worst to take on. They offer the most stress for the least pay and tend to be a drain on everyone involved. On the other hand, I work extremely well in situations where I’m the glue; there’s a big, undefined problem that needs to be identified, solved, and executed. It may involve translating between people with different interests and skill sets, or helping a small client solve big problems on a small budget. It may mean researching and building some weirdly-specific thing that nobody else could figure out how to do. I love this stuff, partly because I’m hardwired to take pleasure in organizing things, and partly because the conversations and relationships involved are engaging and interesting.

And Then There Were Answers

Through trial and error, I’ve finally started to figure out where my interests and abilities overlap. This makes it infinitely easier to know how to choose projects and who I’m looking for to collaborate with.

Things I know now…

I’m a good designer and a lousy artist.
You can argue that there’s overlap between the two, and I’ll agree to some extent. But I’m convinced that a designer is a person who solves problems, and an artist is a person who creates (or at least observes and interprets if you’re in the “nothing is new” camp).

Reliability is something I sell.
I want to be the person with the killer Dribbble feed, or the eagle-eyed pro that spots new trends before they’re big. But I’m neither. One of my most useful traits isn’t sexy or even all that interesting: I do what I say I will, when I’ve said I’ll do it. I try and communicate clearly, spell and punctuate like I give a damn, and actively take ownership of any mistakes while doing whatever I can to make them right. I’ve learned that, despite being hopelessly dull, this is a desirable trait.

Work does not happen in a vacuum.
I spend an awful lot of time at a desk by myself, and sometimes fall into the trap of believing that I work on my own. The reality, however, is that every project I work on is the result of a process, often with lots of focused communication. A huge part of what I do is to cultivate relationships that allow for efficient problem solving, be it with clients, collaborators, or both.

My spirit animal is a stodgy old man.
I can’t help it: I think that capitalization, punctuation, spelling, and grammar count for something. I don’t think Facebook, Twitter, or many newfangled ways to communicate make thoughtful communication obsolete. Intentionally crappy drawings don’t impress me, regardless of what the hipster holding the poster looks like. Maybe I’m drawn to things that seem inherently well-considered. Maybe I’m just a jerk.

The Inevitable Redesign

With these realizations, and even before articulating them, I decided it was time to redesign my tiny website. The old site, despite being tiny as well, was wasting time spreading a minimal amount of content over a few pages, and started using silly visual motifs that were more whim than anything else. So I did what felt right: focused, simplified, and made sure that design, responsiveness, and page load times would support the myriad of browsers and devices that could end up at my humble little domain. Caslon feels way more appropriate for me than Museo ever did. And as fun as it is to add excessive textures and faux embossing to type, it’s just not me. I’m also not bold enough to build a site without a stylesheet altogether. I only considered it in the moment while writing, but I suppose I’m not purist enough to take it that far.

End of Post

I’m not sure that this post will be meaningful for anyone but me, but it feels important to leave a note for my future self that says, “remember you’ve been learning things.” After all, no matter what I end up doing next, no matter how wonderfully or terribly it goes, I can take pride in having learned things and helped people solve problems.

The web host was HostGator (shared reseller account), and a chat technician confirmed my suspicion: they do not (yet) support IPv6 mapping that CloudFlare provides. So if you’ve enabled the IPv6 feature from CloudFlare’s settings and your site suddenly disappears, make sure your host supports the IPv6 protocol. Disabling the feature (it’s just a feature you can disable!!) restored the blog to its happy former state. That is all.

I host several projects on MediaTemple DV plans for the stability, flexibility, and top-notch support. (I’d rather not be troubleshooting server issues for clients at 3AM.) You can certainly use CloudFlare without MediaTemple hosting, they’ve just made it a one-step add-on service that you’d have to be a drooling idiot to mess up. I warily enabled the service for a static site, which involved signing up for a free account (email address, password) and enabling the service in MediaTemple’s control panel. A CNAME record was automatically created in the DNS settings, and that’s it.

I visited said site and it had an immediately-noticable zing. Excitedly, I added the service to workingconcept.com to see how CloudFlare would cripple the ExpressionEngine setup. I was sure it’d fail and I’d have to revert, but I tried it anyway. I was blown away – CloudFlare seemed to have absolutely no effect but to dramatically speed up page delivery. Below is my non-scientific evaluation…

just-ping.com results, before CloudFlare (MediaTemple DV4.0, Virginia datacenter)

just-ping.com results, with CloudFlare

As you can see, ping times were easily improved across the board. Remember that this is less than an hour after enabling the service.

Pingdom Full Page Test

I use Pingdom to monitor my own website and client web apps, and they’ve got all kinds of great tools. Here I used the Full Page Test to compare page load time. This test loads an entire page and basically gives you an overview of the process: how long it takes, what assets are loaded, the order in which things stack up.

The result: page load from 4.7 seconds to 1.8 seconds.

I did nothing but switch on the service. I’d say that’s a significant plus for a product that’s totally free.

Wordy Conclusion

Yesterday I could have cared less about CloudFlare, but today I suddenly can’t live without it. I’m thoroughly impressed and hope this post is helpful to somebody. I don’t work for CloudFlare or get any sort of incentive for writing this post, but I would certainly take incentives if they were offered. I’ve already been experimenting with Amazon S3 as a CDN, and Rackspace CloudFiles – both offered inexpensive performance gains with minimal setup, but CloudFiles is another thing entirely! The pro and enterprise upgrades offer increased protection and fine-tuning along with a variety of genuinely-enticing features. As of this moment I’m still using the free account, which is serving pages much faster and allegedly adding a layer of protection from various types of attacks. Once they fix that placeholder logo of theirs I’ll be proudly recommending it to everybody I can find!

input[type="email"] { 
	box-shadow: none;
}

I’ve also made a habit of having textareas size automatically when the page loads, in the even that there’s already text in the field to be edited:

$('textarea.autosize').autoResize().trigger('change');

After hours of searching for said app, I stumbled upon Mikeal Simburger’s KillWhite, a Photoshop plugin (and 64-bit PixelBender plugin!) that does the same thing. And what a relief. It works just as well as the mysterious app I first used, and even better is that Mikeal is working on a version that will key out a selected color.

Comparison:

I made sure that my connection info was correct, and unlike every other PHP app install, I continued to get the error.

Assuming I still managed to get something wrong, I was good sport and used a barebones PHP script to test the connection info. To my surprise, it worked. The problem had to be with WordPress.

After a few hours of experimenting, I found the problem. I had created a test working copy on my public development server; the WordPress install I was using locally at “wp.localmachine.com” moved to “wp.devmachine.com”, and I had simply copied over the same database. The WordPress database references the site URL in several places, and you need to update these URLs in MySQL for your alternate site to work. The easiest way to do this is to dump your database to a .sql file, then find and replace the original domain (“localmachine.com”) with the new one (“devmachine.com”). Then import the resulting .sql file on the new server.

If you’d rather update the new database by hand, I believe you’ll need to change domain references in wp_site, wp_options, and wp_blogs. But be careful, wp_posts and several other areas will have references to your old domain.

Careful with those quotas. And that’s the blog post you’ve been waiting ~3 months for.