Scott Boms

Our December 2008 Back Catalogue

Booked

One of the things I hoped would dominate a significant portion of my free time outside of the office in 2008 was reading. I’ve always had a real love of books, despite what anyone says about the decline of reading. Considering the sheer number of books purchased over the course of the year, I did ok, but not great. The pile of books never seemed to shrink — in fact, quite the opposite was true, though not for a lack of trying.

My 2009 reading list
A few of the titles on my 2009 reading list

In order to get off on the right foot in ‘09 though, I’m going to attempt to be a bit more methodical about my reading habits. This means blocking off a specific portion of every day to get through an already growing list of books. 30 minutes to an hour a day is all I really need to make a serious dent. The books shown above, while entirely design or business focused are just a sample of those on “the list”. I’ve got a few trashy novels and the like to break things up such as The Road and the last book by High Fidelity author, Nick Hornby.

What’s on your reading list? Are there any good (design or business) books I should pick up? I’d love to hear your recommendations — just drop a note in the comments. Oh, and happy new year!

An Unforgettable Year

2008 has been a fantastic year for Wishingline.

Scott took the leap from freelance designer to small business owner, a decision that I’m sure has had it’s nerve-wracking moments along the way. I was thrilled for the chance to join him in March leaving my cushy, but increasingly uninspiring marketing job for the opportunity to learn about a side of the design industry I barely understood (…and learn I have). In the summer, developer extraordinaire Ned Schwartz joined us, bringing his wealth of knowledge in Javascript, AJAX and a ton more acronyms into the fold.

We’ve also been lucky to have had opportunities throughout the year to work with our good friends Brian Warren, Luke Dorny, Neil Lee, James McNally, John Martz and Theresa Neil.

The Wishingline crew -- Anna, Shawn, Scott and Ned
The Wishingline crew — Anna, Shawn, Scott (me), and Ned

The year brought new friends, awesome clients (both long-standing and new), and while we’re not able to talk about most of the projects currently in development (pesky NDAs), we’d like to express our sincere gratitude to everyone who’s helped make this year so special. We’ll tell you about the ones we can shortly.

We’ve got big plans for 2009 which we can’t wait to share including a new wishingline.com (finally!). So until then, on behalf of Scott, Ned, Shawn and myself — we hope you have a Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, Kickass Kwanzaa, Splendid Solstice and very happy New Year.

Fixing (Customizing) Virtual Movable Type

For the past few weeks we’ve been working on designing and building out a site for a client and since selecting Movable Type 4 as the CMS, we thought it would be worth giving the relatively new Virtual MT a try as part of our development process. Although our overall experience using VMT so far has been great, we ran into one small nit: the default site isn’t served from the root URL of the server and instead uses a subdirectory path. This (probably) should be a user-defined option, but isn’t currently, so we set out to resolve this for ourselves.

Let’s be honest — Movable Type has always been a bit of a pain to run on Mac OS X unless you happen to be or know someone well-versed in the black art of the command line and Perl. A black art if you’re a designer at least. This is exactly why VMT is great, particularly if you’re already used to running Windows in Parallels or VMWare for browser testing and debugging.

Virtual MT comes pre-packaged as part of a lightweight Ubuntu Linux OS. Downloading and running an instance (or multiple instances) of VMT is simple and we’ll cover the process using Parallels 4 before walking through the configuration change to allow the default site to be served from the root path of the included Apache web server.

Downloading and Running VMT

Get started by downloading a copy of Virtual MT which comes in both Open Source and Commercial (Pro) flavours. Unzip the downloaded archive and read the included Read Me file. No really, read it.

Parallels Virtual Machines
Parallels Virtual Machine list

Next, locate the VM Image file for Parallels (or your preferred Virtual Machine software) in the unarchived folder in your Downloads directory. In the case of Parallels, this file should end with a .pvs extension. Double-click the file to add it to the Parallels Virtual Machine library. Parallels 4 will request the VM image be converted to the newer bundle format.

Virtual Machine Boot Screen
The Virtual Machine book screen in Parallels

Click on the Virtual Machine and start it. In a web browser, go to the Configuration Page URL displayed in the running Virtual Machine window.

Virtual Machine Window
The running Virtual Machine window in Parallels

Complete the base configuration to enable access to the VM and Movable Type itself.

Virtual Machine Configuration
The configuration screen for the Movable Type JumpBox

Once the base configuration is complete, go back to the main Configuration Page and click on the SSH/SFTP icon. Check the checkbox to enable SSH/SFTP access and then save the change.

Virtual Machine Configuration Home Screen
The Movable Type configuration home screen

At this point you should have a fully functional, ready to customize virtualized install of Movable Type. No mucking about in the command line or Perl module installation required. Next — improving the configuration.

VMT Configuration Changes

In order to “correct” the configuration of VMT, provide access to the VMT install at the root of the included Apache web server and make accessing the MT insall and any published templates easy, you may want to install either MacFuse or ExpanDrive which let you access the virtual OS filesystem just like any other shared disk. Alternatively, Transmit or any other software that supports SFTP connections will also work, though direct access in the Finder is considerably more user-friendly.

And now the nerdy part. To make the necessary Virtual Machine configuration changes, run the following two commands in a new Terminal window. Replace VIRTUAL_IMAGE_IP_ADDRESS with the one provided in the VM window on your computer.


ssh admin@VIRTUAL_IMAGE_IP_ADDRESS
sudo pico /etc/jumpbox/apache2/jumpbox-app

After entering your admin password when prompted, in the pico text editor, change the contents of the jumpbox-app file to match the following:


# Alias /movabletype/blogs /var/data/mt-blogs
Alias /movabletype /var/data/movabletype

<Directory /var/data/movabletype>
  AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
  Options +ExecCGI
  # Uncomment the following lines to enable FastCGI
  # <FilesMatch "^mt(?:-(?:comments|search|tb))?\.cgi$">
  #   SetHandler fastcgi-script
  # </FilesMatch>
</Directory>

<Directory /var/data/mt-blogs/*>
  AllowOverride All
</Directory>

# Uncomment the following lines to enable FastCGI
# FastCgiServer /var/data/movabletype/mt.cgi
# FastCgiServer /var/data/movabletype/mt-search.cgi
# FastCgiServer /var/data/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi
# FastCgiServer /var/data/movabletype/mt-comments.cgi

RewriteEngine on
# RewriteCond /jumpbox/var/widget-on !-f
# RewriteRule ^(/?|/index.(html|php|htm))$ /movabletype/blogs/my_blog [R]
# RewriteCond /jumpbox/var/widget-on !-f
# RewriteRule ^/jblogin.(html|php)$ /movabletype/mt.cgi [R]

# DocumentRoot /var/www
DocumentRoot /var/data/mt-blogs

Save your changes by typing Control-O and then Control-X. To then restart Apache so it will reload the newly updated configuration, type the following in the Terminal.


sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Updating Movable Type’s Publishing Paths

The last thing that needs to be done is to update the Publishing Path values for each blog instance in Movable Type so content will be published to /var/data/mt-blogs instead of the default location. This is done from the Preferences > Publishing screen in the Movable Type admin interface.

Set the value of Site URL to the IP address of the VM and set the Site Root to /var/data/mt-blogs. If running more than one blog instance, change these values apporpriately. Save the changes and re-publish. And that, as they say, is that. Enjoy!

Note: The current (as of this writing) release of Virtual MT is slightly out of date with the recent 4.23 release of Movable Type though it’s simple enough to update your own base install in VMT.

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