Ryan Leland

Finally found a new host after keeping my eyes open for the last few months. GoDaddy served me well for the cheapness, and reliability, but things like the lack of control, and scalability, and not being able to use Zend Frameworks at all was really starting to get to me. I’ll be gradually moving my sites over to the new Media Temple server over the next week or so.

Also been catching up with season 4 of BSG, and it feels great. Oh, Baltar & 6, how I’ve missed you. So far I’m pretty happy, although all the new cylons is almost a bit too much to handle. You almost start to wonder who isn’t a cylon. Well, they do have a plan.

This is a kind of quick and dirty approach to making an ajax responder in Zend Frameworks. The more elegant solution would be to make a controller plugin to add support for auth, and acl, but so far it looks like this approach works just fine for simple things.

<?php
class AjaxController extends Zend_Controller_Action {
	private $ajax_output;

	function init() {
		if($this->_request->isXmlHttpRequest()) {
			//The request was made with JS XmlHttpRequest
			$this->_helper->viewRenderer->setNoRender();
			$this->_helper->viewRenderer->setNoController();
		} else $this->_redirect('index');
	}

	public function indexAction() {

		Zend_Loader::loadClass('Zend_Json');

		$myArray = array('someData',
             			'moreData' => array(
                             			'hello'
                           			)
           	);

		$this->ajax_output = Zend_Json::encode($myArray);
	}

	function postDispatch() {
		echo $this->ajax_output;
	}
}

Today is significant. I have committed to releasing a site I have been working on for 2 1/2 years on 08.08.08 (Aug, 8, 2008), and today is 4 months from that date. Despite having a crazy amount of work left, I just committed rev 58, and have nearly 4000 lines of code that I’ve written in the last 4 weeks.

So despite having worked on this site for 2+ years, this is the 3rd complete re-write, and it is epic. I am so excitd to finally have a product, and officially be able to call myself a web entrepreneur.

If I had had more time I would have made an official announcement with some details, but I think this will have to do given my limited time, and unlimited tiredness.

Or rather, my first day being self employed again. It turned out to be fairly interesting. A good mix of struggling with Zend Framework, which is awesome in every way despite some often confusing documentation. The classes themselves are documented as well as one could hope for, but there are times when peicing the library together to make an actual framework takes some trial and error.

I also had some issues with SVN not quite working properly. My hunch is that the service I use, and the combination of my wireless network dropping packets like crazy, causing commits to time out, and corrupting my working copy. This technically should not happen, but it did. I had to create a new project, and create the directories manually, and copy over each file, and commit. All 53 files.

I  did get a lot done, and I plan on announcing my project within a few days in a fairly big way (at least that is the hope).

I usually don’t like to think selfishly, and I’m not normally one to have materialistic desires. While I’ll admit I do love stylish clothes, and technology gadgets, and rarely pay full price for clothing, and the gadgets I do buy have to be justified fairly well before I lay down the plastic.

I had a dream that I bought a Ferrari last night though. It was pretty sweet. It was used in a race, and was a little quirky, but I really loved it. I think the cool thing about the dream was the feeling of going fast, more so than spending the money. I’m not much of a dream analyst, but I’m pretty sure euphoric feelings, and going fast, or flying are pretty good signs.

Have some pie. Now watch a video about Daniel Tammet.

According to this msnbc article, AOL will be buying Bebo for the price of $850 Million USD. Bebo, a social networking site that is best know in Britain and Europe, has a membership of 40 million users. This obviously works out to about $20 per user. My estimate is that each of those users would have to average 20,000 page views, or 2000 hours of site use before AOL would make that money back. Hard to say what kind of growth Bebo is experiencing, but this still seems as though it’s on the expensive side for a site that most North Americans haven’t heard of.

I’m about to do something I haven’t done in years. I’m planning on building something tonight, and I’ll be staying up all night, because that is when my focus and drive is at its best. I have a thermos of herbal tea, some snacks, good music, and my MacBook.

I maybe haven’t had this much excitement for building a site since, maybe HighDriving.com (I still can’t believe I let that domain slide). What I’m working on is pretty much just a proof of concept at this point, but if things go well tonight I’ll be posting some more info by the weekend. I’ve done most of the night all nighters before, but have never before planned to do it. If this is a success, I hope it will become part of a fairly common practice of planning through the week, and pulling an all-nighter on the weekend to get as much off a TODO list as possible.

Also, I’m starting a new job next week, and I haven’t really done as much skill sharpening as I had hoped to have done this week. This will maybe serve to make up for some lost time.