Homepage Albums
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I recently added an albums I've been enjoying this week section to my homepage. It's still a major work in progress. For some reason, tons of people have commented about it on Twitter asking how I made it, so I thought I'd write a quick post about the tech behind it.
The first thing your probably noticed is the sexy vinyl look. I got this from Komodo Media (all of their stuff is awesome, you should check it out). Some simple CSS plus their images and it looks dang sexy.
I'm using the Last.fm API to get my listening history. The call to get your top albums for the week doesn't return the album art for that album, so I have to get all of the albums and then get the art for each one. This whole process is pretty slow (source here) so I shove it in memcached on Heroku using the memcached gem so rendering is fast on my homepage.
Archiving NSManagedObject with NSCoding
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Several of the apps I have been working on lately have been using Core Data. Core Data is pretty sweet. So far, I really like it.
I needed to persist an array of NSManagedObjects to NSUserDefaults to persist the state of the application between launches. Obviously, I could have done this with another attribute on the Core Data entity, but this approach seemed a lot simpler. I was surprised that NSManagedObject didn't conform to NSCoding. I guess that makes sense because if you store any custom types in your entity, it wouldn't know how to archive them. In my case, (and I would assume most others) I didn't want to archive the entire object since it was already store in Core Data. I just needed to store the object ID.
This was actually really easy. See:
Hosting Frustrations
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Lately I've been struggling with good hosting. Here's three stories about some stuff I've tried. (Skip to the bottom of the post if you just want my conclusion and don't care about the stories.)
I love Heroku. I did a screencast on how awesome they are a few months ago. Since then, I've moved all of my personal apps and all of Tasteful Works's apps to Heroku. They've been really great until recently.
I have two big complains (and one small one) with Heroku.
Old People and the Other Side
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Watching different people use software is fascinating to me. My mind works a lot differently than Average-Joe's does when it comes to using software so seeing how people interact with software is really intriguing to me.
I was just at the post office and this old lady in front of me was trying to buy a shipping label for her package. This is a very easy thing to do. There are lots of instructions, big buttons, and even instructional videos to help you if you want.
After two tries she gave up and went to go stand in the super long line to get someone to help her. (Why are the lines always stupid long in post offices? It was 2:30 in the afternoon. Why is there a line?)
What I Do
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People as me a lot what I do. I generally say "I write software" and get a blank look. I think I'm going to start saying:
I type a lot and make stuff happen.
That sounds cool, right?