Hello Cerebro
Introducing a tool to reduce cognitive load of when context switching between many side projects. For when minimalism isn't your style.
RyanParsleyDotCom
A software developer that is curious about quality.
Latest posts
Hello Faircamp
I want to share the story of wiring up a selfhosted music portfolio using Faircamp.
I Finally Got POSSE Automated
My journey from manual syndication to fully automated POSSE.
LSDJ Hardware Notes
I've been curious about LSDJ again and compiled notes about hardware considerations
How To Start Vim
People joke about how Vim is hard to quit, but I want to make it easier to start. Here is a collection of resources to help demystify Vim.
Arduinoboy Build Notes
I made a thing so I can control MIDI via a Game Boy, and so can you!
Refactoring my Astro Gallery Component
I refactored my Gallery Component to make better use of the Astro build process.
My POSSE on Broadband
Thoughts on how to own your data and play well with others
Zod makes TypeScript better
Explore how Zod can complement TypeScript to provide runtime validation and enhanced type safety in your web development projects.
Fancy types enable simple code
Thoughts on type safety and generic types in astro
What the heck is Stow!?
Stow probably solves a problem that you have.
Daily notes with zk
I explore the configuration of zk to approximate the daily note workflow I currently have set up with Obsidian.
The story of my whittlin' robot
In an effort to better understand how CNC Routers work, I decided to build one from scratch.
CloudCannon
CloudCannon offers a delightful patina to an otherwise unchanged Jekyll site.
Alexa Watson integration
Here are notes from building a proof of concept around integrating Watson Retrieve and Rank service into an Alexa skill.
CLI Driven Drupal
It's easy to get Drupal up and running by clicking around drupal.org, downloading and extracting packages, but that's not how I do it.
Styleguide Thoughts
A properly leveraged styleguide can be a great communication tool between designer and developers.
Jekyll Simply
Hopefully, this slimmed down example project will help you see the benefits of Jekyll without getting too overwhelmed with the embarassment of features that you likely don't need on day 1.
Don't call it a comeback
I got tired of upgrading drupal, so I migrated to jekyll.
AEA Debrief: The Developer's Ampersandwich
At An Event Apart in Atlanta, Jenn Lukas , presented a developer’s perspective on design for the web. Here’s a collection of take aways that resonated with me. Lukas makes a point that often gets overlooked. Good design is part of good craftsmanship. Good design isn’t necessarily all that tightly coupled with subjectivity, fashion, taste or any other magical factors that tend to be associated with…
AEA Debrief: Faster Design Decisions with Style Tiles
At An Event Apart in Atlanta, Samantha Warren made a case for why style tiles should be added to your back of tricks. Here’s a collection of take aways that resonated with me. A major point of Warren's talk is that style tiles are a communication tool. It's as simple as that, and as fundamentally crucial as that. We need to evaluate how we discuss web design and how we define success. Adopting…
AEA Debrief: Designing Using Data
At An Event Apart in Atlanta, Sarah Parmenter encouraged designers to use data to inform the decision making process. Here's a collection of take aways that resonated with me. Parmenter opened up by referencing a polarizing post recently made by Jeff Croft. In his post, Croft states that web designers need to diversify their offering. In fact, he concludes with: “Diversify or die” . It's a bold…
The best Android todo app - Simpletask
I've been using Todo.txt for a little while now. I love it for it's minimalism. Simpletask is a more polished approach to Todo.txt. It has some nice additions like grouping tasks by project and more configurable widget. Simpletask on Play Runners-up Todo.txt There is nothing wrong with this app, it just doesn't have some of the niceties of Simpletask. You should gladly give Gina the $2 for coming…
Simplicity?
When talking about the pursuit of simplicity, there tends to be at least one naysayer . "That's fine for you, but my problem is, at it's essence, complicated." The conversation then shifts to unearth how this person is failing to simplify his product. I think the "...but my problem..." part is a smell that the goal is a touch oversimplified . Shooting for simple is an admirable goal. It's not…
The best Android text editor - Draft
Contrary to popular belief, Android users like nice things too. There are a lot of text editors on Android and I spent a bit of time and money trying them all out so you don't have to. I believe Draft is the best. It has a beautiful interface with support for Markdown and DropBox. What more could you ask for? Draft on Play Runners-up Lightpaper Lightpaper is great for all the reasons listed above,…
Setting up Middleman and Anvil with RVM
I’m a big fan of designing with code, design in the browser or… whatever you want to call it. Middleman and Anvil work out as a nice pairing to create an efficient workflow. The rub is they don’t play well together without a touch of configuration up front. In the documentation middleman init my_new_project --rack The missing bits to make Anvil (pow) work rvm --create --ruby-version use 1.9.3 rvm…
Getting a Rails app set up for Heroku
I find myself daisy chaining a few blog posts together to get up and running with Rails. Here are the steps that I took most recently to deploy to Heroku. Initial setup Create your app. rails new [appName] -d postgresql git init git add . git commit -m "initial commit" Make help Pow and RVM play nice together. rvm env -- `rvm current` > .powenvmk Create your databases locally. psql CREATE DATABASE…
The story of my first Rails app
I’ve been using Ruby for a little while now. Mostly, making little tools to automate bits of my workflow. Each time client work came up, I’d “chicken out” and build it with Drupal. Here’s the story about how I accidentally made my first Rails app. The devils I knew Drupal may not be the most efficient way to solve some problems, but I’m rather familiar with it. Also, I’ve hosted many php sites…
Solving a problem with code
I was looking for a good excuse to learn CoffeeScript so I came up with a project that takes a note and returns the blues scale in that key. It’s not a completely contrived example, I currently work this out manually using the matrix that I posted on my music blog. I thought it would be interesting to list out the process by which I solve this moderately complex problem. Start with thinking Since…
More content, less system
Since I moved back to Ohio, I’ve been playing guitar more and even built a cigar box guitar with my dad. There is more of a community around cigar box guitars than I would have guessed, but not as many educational resources as I would like. Naturally, I made my own. I’ve been using middleman , a static site generator, for prototyping web sites and apps for a little while. I have not, however, used…
Illustrator for web layouts
Illustrator has some fantastic layout tools that are often overlooked by web designers. Here is a screencast overviewing some of the reasons Illustrator is in my workflow. I cover Split Into Grid, Text Wrap, Paragraph Styles, Transform, Graphic Styles and Appearance Panel.
Illustrating on the iPad
Up until recently, I've been reluctant to do much sketching digitally. This month, I found the perfect excuse to explore a purely digital process. I’m currently taking part in an event called 30 Characters in 30 Days . There’s not much more to the challenge than the title suggests. Participants are simply tasked with creating 30 unique characters in the month of November. I decided to make things…
Baseline grid in Illustrator
I recently wrote about an easy way to set up a grid in Illustrator. While that way is great for setting horizontal rhythm, I follow a different method for creating my baseline grid. This couldn't be simpler thanks to the Transform Effect. Select the Line Segment Tool (\) Click anywhere on the canvas Enter 1024 for length and make sure the angle is set to 0 Give the path a sensible color Use the…
Easy on the polyfills
It’s not that important to teach older versions of IE how to handle media queries. The point is to make layouts work on small screens. I don't know of any cell phones running IE6. As an alternative to using polyfills, I tend handle legacy IE with conditional comments. The only trade off for this is, IE < 9 users can’t change the layout by fiddling with the window size. I can live with…
Horizontal grids in Illustrator
Here are the steps I take to efficiently sketch out grids in Illustrator.
Mobile mockups in Illustrator
The Illustrator pixel is a majestic beast quite hard to pin down. The very nature of vectors makes the idea of a 300px by 300px document kind of silly. All you really know is it's a square. You can take the same document you create in Illustrator and export it as big or as little as you like and it will look perfect (Some exceptions apply. See offer details. Your experience in scaling vectors may…
10 Drupal modules you should be using
I make a lot of websites with Drupal. Since I do this a lot, I've been spending time working on a way to speed up and/or automate the process as much as possible. This distraction project had the fortunate byproduct of the following list. This is a list of modules that tend to make it into every Drupal project I build these days. These modules are mostly about extending Drupal as a CMS, so they'll…
What is the point of dp?
I've been reading up on Android interface design lately. One thing that has jumped out at me as counter intuitive is the concept of "density independent pixels" or dp. At first, I was very excited to see that Google was working to provide a way for designs to "just work" on all devices. Then, I read up on how it works. The math According to documentation you can convert px to dp with the following…
Vim tip: Fun with tags
HTML can feel unwieldy and inefficient to edit. There are lots of great tools and alternate syntaxes that make this easier... but who wants to set up a whole framework and all the dependancies that come with that just to be more efficient . With a basic Vim command and the surround plugin you can greatly increase your productivity traversing and manipulating tags. Say, for instance, you have: <ul>…
CSSOff recap
I recently competed in UnmatchedStyle’s CSSOff competition where frontend developers each took a crack at marking up the same Photoshop document. Submissions are to be judged based on a list of parameters including: semantics, resource optimization, legacy browser support and general code cleanliness. We were encouraged to use HTML5 and tasked to support browsers as old as IE6. Here are some…
Rule them all
Make your own graph paper with Illustrator.
Stealing the underpants
The hardest part of blogging is writing the posts
Susy at first blush
Susy looks to be a very nice tool for making cleanly marked-up grid-based sites. It's one of the many new compass plugins that are floating about these days. It doesn't claim to be an out of the box layout, and that's what makes it such a strong candidate for a real life solution. From the start, Susy is highly configurable. This means you're not stuck with a column count that is tightly coupled…
Initial response to Sass
I really want to like Sass, I have tried to pick it up a couple of times. Granted, each time I have played with it thus far, has been a fairly short interval. My most recent forray with it underscored why I think it hasn’t quite stuck with me yet. My markup/coding conventions seem to inherently solve most of the issues that Sass tackles. Things that seem redundant One of the benefits of Sass is,…
Let go and let cloud
I’m a renting kind of guy. I rent my apartment, I rent movies and I rent the comments on my podcast. I rent things that I don’t want to be burdoned with storing or maintaining. Sovereignty is old fashioned. There are many great services out there that solve all sorts of problems so you don’t have to. There’s freshbooks for invoicing, Basecamp for project management, Shopify for commerce, Twitter…
First look at WPF
I just finished the first day of a three day course I’m taking on WPF. I have looked at it briefly from time to time, but this is the first real attempt at picking up the skill. If you’re not familiar with WPF it is a relatively new way of writing user interfaces for .NET apps. I’m hoping that with a stronger understanding WPF, I’ll be better equipped to both design desktop apps. As far as I’m…
Out of my element
I recently resolved a server performance issue. Here’s a recap of what I went through in hopes you find it useful. I’m running Ubuntu on the smallest Rackspace Cloud Server available (too much foreshadow?). The server has 256MB of ram and it’s sole purpose is to run Drupal on Apache. I have set up a few servers in the past, but I do not claim to be an expert. This recent problem had me stumped for…
Who would have thought? It figures
While it’s not shocking that someone snatched up the talent of 280 North , who aquired them (more to the point why) brings a smile to my face that can only be conjured up by sweet… sweet irony. Motorola (the hardware company) has aquired a startup “dedicated to advancing the state of the art on the web.” 280 North is probably most notable for creating Cappuccino , “an open source framework that…
One size never fits all
While it is nice that new smartphones can render virtually any website reasonably well, we are remiss to not take context into account. Is “reasonably well” really your end goal? I have been dipping my toe into making this site more optimized for mobile consumption by serving up some size delineated styles. I wanted to share a couple of notes on my approach. Early on, I was seduced by…
My favorite 10 Android apps
You've got options, I've got opinions.