Category Archives: Design

Migration Tips to Media Temple (dv) 4.0 from (dv) 3.5

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I recently transitioned to Media Temple’s (dv) 4.0 from their (dv) 3.5, and though it was a pretty painless process, I’d like to share the following suggestions to ensure a smooth transition for anyone else considering upgrading:

  1. Following their guide was very helpful, Migration Manager makes the transition fairly straightforward:
    http://​wiki​.mediatemple​.net/​w​/​(​d​v​)​_​4​.​0​:​P​l​e​s​k​_​M​i​g​r​a​t​i​o​n​_​M​a​n​a​ger
  2. Item 12 on their guide didn’t make sense until I moved everything over. All your Domains are under Subscriptions and should be listed under your name, this is the menu you’ll use the most and it allows you to launch the Control Panel for all domains under the subscriber, which after migration will be you.
  3. The new Control Panel is where you’ll manage Users, Email Address, FTP, Stats, etc. You’ll have a Subscriptions drop down at the top which allows you to quickly switch between all domains under that subscriber. All previous email users have roles now and can now login to your server and manage their email accounts. The only caveat is that they can see all other domains on that particular Subscriber’s Control Panel. This isn’t a big deal for me, most of my customers don’t want to manage anything, but I’ll be creating different subscribers for each domain to prevent unauthorized access.
  4. I had one client that had another developer request access so I setup a limited account on Plesk 8.6, which showed up as a Domain Administrator. Since all my domains were on one Subscriber, this person had access to all my accounts, which wasn’t ideal, so I did the following.
    1. Go to the Customers Tab, create a new account with the customer contact information and give them a username and password (I used the FTP username and password to keep access the same as on the old server), but give a fake domain name, since it requires you to add domain name information when you create a customer.
    2. Go to the Subscriber panel, check the domain name in question and hit Change Subscriber at the top.
    3. This will take you to a page showing all your Customers, which for me is just myself and the other administrator. Change the subscriber, which allows the previously used FTP login to directly access the Control Panel for that domain, but not any of your other accounts.
  5. If you use Spam Assassin for email accounts, it seemed to be active for everyone by default. I use it myself and only had it active on a couple other email addresses. One of my clients complained she was missing email so I tried to raise the setting under Server Management > Settings > Spam Filter Settings in Plesk, but it didn’t seem to take. To fix this, I SSH’d into the server as root, Rebuilt Qmail/Mail server configuration and Restarted the Qmail/Mail server. After that, checking the mail log showed only the correct email addresses using Spam Assassin.

Additional Performance Tuning recommendations, as I noticed the base configuration was maxing out my allotted RAM and didn’t want to immediately upgrade the server to a higher plan:

  1. If you use Media Temple’s name servers for DNS (all my domains point to ns1​.mediatemple​.net and ns2​.mediatemple​.net), you can disable DNS on your server. I followed the article here, second item on the page: http://​wiki​.mediatemple​.net/​w​/​(​d​v​)​_​H​O​W​T​O​:​_​M​i​s​c​.​_​p​e​r​f​o​r​m​a​n​c​e​_​t​u​n​ing. After disabling DNS I saw RAM usage drop to about 70%, and no maxed-out resource errors.
  2. If you haven’t done this before I recommend raising Courier IMAP connections on the server. I enabled this on my old server since Apple Mail would frequently report it was timing out on the email account. After the quick change, no more problems:
    http://​wiki​.mediatemple​.net/​w​/​(​d​v​)​_​H​O​W​T​O​:​_​R​a​i​s​e​_​C​o​u​r​i​e​r​-​I​M​A​P​_​C​o​n​n​e​c​t​i​ons

Here’s a couple other links that might be useful during the transition:

Common SSH Commands, since I always forget these: http://​wiki​.mediatemple​.net/​w​/​C​o​m​m​o​n​_​S​S​H​_​C​o​m​m​a​nds

Wiki page for all things (dv) 4.0: http://​wiki​.mediatemple​.net/​w​/​C​a​t​e​g​o​r​y​:​(​d​v​)​_​4.0

I hope your transition goes smoothly, I’m extremely happy with the upgrade, Plesk 10 offers a lot more bells and whistles for my clients and hosting resellers. I’ve been a happy customer with Media Temple for years, I think their service and support are top-notch and this was a welcome upgrade.

2010 Year in Review

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I decided to write my own year in review post after being inspired by Seth Godin’s post, #YearInReview What did you ship in 2010? This was an exciting year, both in business and my personal life. Here’s a breakdown of what I shipped:

  • Rachel and I got engaged! We’re looking forward to a small ceremony with friends and family, then off to Italy for our ten-day honeymoon.
  • Worked with SALT. Optics to launch a new website for SALT. Optics and SEESALT. a blog of inspirational items.
  • Worked with Dewey Nicks to transition their site from one that was Flash-dependent to a mobile-friendly version utilizing HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery.
  • Launched Imperial — Barbershop Grade Products for Razorback’s Barber Shop in Long Beach, California.
  • Worked with CMg Design to launch an online version of the Parsons Sustainability Report
  • Worked with Maerita Cooper to launch her new website Manage My Life NYC.
  • Worked with Luxury Brand Group to update their Portfolio and Press sections.

2010 has been a great year, I’m looking forward to 2011 and the new experiences it brings!

Is this thing on?

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It’s only been two years since the last post so I figured that it was about time to update my website. I can’t complain, business has been steady, but it’s no excuse for neglecting to write or post new work. So what has happened over the last two years?

I’ve been working with SALT. Optics the past few years and we were able to finally launch their new website, offering an updated look and ease of use on any platform. We also worked with Pat Brumfield from Normalcy to launch their online store. Feedback has been great and I consider myself lucky to work with such a great group of people.

While partnering with CMg Design I was able to work on some great projects for Microdevices Laboratory at NASA JPL, Mercury Insurance and Parsons Corporation.

One of the most exciting non-work relate news items, is my girlfriend, Rachel, became my fianceé, we’re looking forward to the wedding next year. When you have time, take a look at all the new work while I continue working on the new site design.

Multi-Safari

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I previously wrote about Tredosoft’s Multiple IE, which is great for testing my web development in legacy versions of Internet Explorer. Today I came across Multi-Safari and just installed Safari 2.0.4, which is the latest non-beta version of Safari on most Mac’s running Tiger. I’ve been running the Safari 3 Beta for quite sometime and I don’t want to have to uninstall it everytime I need to check compatibility in Safari 2 for projects. This will save me a lot of time and allow me to continue running the Safari 3 Beta, check it out if you have a chance, Multi-Safari. (via cameronmoll​.com)

Pixelmator

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Pixelmator looks like a possible Photoshop competitor with a pretty slick UI and is based on Apple’s Core Image technology. It’s supposed to take advantage of GPU-powered image editing, so your video card can handles some of the processing and frees up your CPU for other tasks. It doesn’t look like it will be available until late July 2006, but with a $59 price tag, it could be hard to pass up. We’ll have to see how it compares to Photoshop CS3, though it looks they share many comparable features. (via Daring Fireball)

Microsoft Surface

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Microsoft Surface looks pretty amazing, not only the technoology, but their site as well has a great interactive feel. I’d be impressed seeing a multi-touch display like this in restaurants or other areas as demonstrated in the videos, but I doubt this would be inexpensive. I’d expect to see something like this in some high-end or expensive places.

This isn’t the first time I’m seen something like this, the demos from Jeff Han blew me away last year and earlier this year everyone saw the iPhone demos as well. I don’t think the question is which company will perfect this first, I think the question is how much will new technologies like this impact our lives? Twenty years from now we could all be taking this for granted.

4th Annual Magic of Memories Dinner

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Magic of Memories Logo

I attended the 4th Annual Magic of Memories Dinner on April 28th, 2007 with my good friend Angela Cronk. In November of last year, Angela asked if I’d be interested in helping design the logo, in-store posters and invitations for the Magic of Memories fundraising campaign. The campaign’s goal was to raise money with Paul Mitchell the School and benefits Leeza’s Place, The Andrew Gomez Dream Foundation, and Vidal Sassoon’s Hairdressers Unlocking Hope on behalf of Habitat for Humanity.

It was a honor to have been involved in this project, and to have been invited to the dinner as well. It took place at the Fairmont Hotel in Newport Beach, and was hosted by Leeza Gibbons and Winn Claybaugh. Representatives from each organization spoke about their involvement, what they benefit and followed with a video presentation for the audience as well.

Mike Helm, from The Andrew Gomez Dream Foundation spoke about Andrew Gomez, a student who tragically took his own life during personal hardships, the goal of their organization is to provide help to those in need, much like Andrew did during his own lifetime.

Leeza Gibbons and Dr. James Huysman spoke about The Leeza Gibbons Memory Foundation, which was started to benefit caregivers and families of individuals with declining mental health. Leeza Gibbons’ own mother suffered from Alzhiemers disease before she passed away and now she is calling attention to millions of families, like her’s, that know the frustration and heartache of memory disorders. It was an honor, and humbling, to meet Ms. Gibbons and be personally thanked for my involvement in the project.

Vidal Sassoon spoke about Hairdressers Unlocking Hope, which is an organization that is working with Habitat for Humanity to benefit victims of Hurricane Katrina by rebuilding New Orleans. He painted the picture of his own upbringing and life story of being an orphan and homeless in London during World War II and now is working to prevent others from suffering from homelessness as he once did. Mr. Sassoon gave a very passionaite and moving speech.

I was a great experince to have worked with these organizations and have attended the dinner, I applaud them for what they’re doing to give back to the community and those in need. I recently updated my portfolio with examples of the work that I contributed to this project, which can be viewed here.

CSSEdit 2.5 and Coda

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MacRabbit just updated CSSEdit to version 2.5, which brings some new features such as tabbed windows and the X-ray inspector for all of your CSS needs. I’ve been using this quite a lot since the 2.0 release, the new features have been very helpful with development; I can’t recommend this program enough.

Panic just released Coda, which is an integrated web development solution, part Transmit, part SubEthaEdit and Terminal, with CSS support all rolled into a single interface. Personally I started on Dreamweaver, but dumped that for a combination of Textmate, CSSEdit and Transmit for all of my development needs. I think Coda can give Dreamweaver a run for it’s money, Coda is a much more affordable solution for a freelance developer.

The Textmate-CSSEdit-Transmit combo work quite well for me, but Panic’s new program looks very interesting, I may have to download a copy and see how it works. (via MacRabbit Blog | stevenf)