Tim Dupree

I have been wanting, for some time now, to create a website that will teach visitors how to create a web application completely from start to finish. From no server and no domain name, to a complete site running on a vps/cloud based hosting provider complete with CDN, DNS management, S3 file hosting, etc. In addition to the administrative tasks of getting a site up and running (domains, server, cdn, dns, etc.), I would like the teach visitors how to create a database driven site complete from server-side to client-side (including front-end high performance best practices and SEO). I plan…

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I applied for the pilot program to test out the new Google Chrome OS and got my prototype laptop this morning, less than 48 hours later! It came in an awesome box with a guinea pig about to get on an exercise wheel connected to a jet engine :) The instructions card that came with it had some fun copy too, even the FCC Notice. Check it out!

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Today Amazon rolled out support for custom origins with their CloudFront CDN. Before this, you could only serve content through CloudFront that was stored on S3. Now, you can specify a custom origin server (the source that CloudFront initially goes to for a requested asset) to serve out files through CloudFront. This is awesome news because it means that you can provide dynamic resources that have a long cache time and do not change often. Additionally, it looks like this may open up some new ways to more intelligently serve gzipped files to users (currently a pain to do with…

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Using the handy MooTools JavaScript framework (and its terrific Fx classes) I made the simple expanding menu you see to the left of this post. It worked great until I tested it in IE and found that the JS engine is so slow that it was doing some wacky things in the animation. I wanted to keep the markup as clean as I could but I ended up fixing the IE problem by wrapping the menu text in <span> tags and then doing a little extra styling of those spans with css. The menu works in IE7&8, as well as…

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I recently needed to create some HTML emails.  I knew that email clients were pretty restrictive when it comes to the html and css they allow, but I was a bit surprised at how bad the landscape really is. Pretty much throw out any best practice for coding html and pretend you are back in the 90′s.  Here are some general tips and tricks I learned this week about HTML emails. Inline your CSS. Forget about embedding your css styles at the top (or as separate resources).  Most email clients strip out the HTML and BODY tags so you have to embed…

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I ordered the Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH wireless router on Newegg last weekend.  It has some really nice specs and my old router was getting a bit wonky.  The new Buffalo router is replacing a Lynksys WRT54G2 v1 which seemed to have some incompatibility with the Intel wireless cards in 3 out of the 4 laptops that are usually in my home. For the past couple years I have only bought routers whose firmware can be changed to run DD-WRT (a Linux based open source firmware for routers).  The Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH is a great router for DD-WRT, but there are/were some problems surrounding…

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The Google Chrome web browser is extremely fast and has pretty much become my primary browser. It has some developer tools baked into the browser similar to the Firebug addon for Firefox.  I still tend to gravitate to using Firebug for heavy duty stuff, but the tools in Chrome are good enough that I find myself breaking out Firefox less and less for Firebug. If you are feeling geeky, or want access to some of the newest developer tools for Chrome/Webkit, you can run with the Dev Channel build. It is the most cutting edge build of Chrome, so you always…

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Need to remove the GRUB boot loader from an external usb drive connected to a Windows machine? This is how I did it. I had a hard drive that was set up to dual boot Linux and Windows XP. The windows XP install had ceased working for some reason so I decided to wipe the drive and do a clean install.  Since this was an old laptop of mine that my father-in-law was using, I figured I would also wipe the linux partition, that I had played with long ago, and get rid of the dual boot option. I removed…

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