Grab that screen
Need to grab a full length screenshot of your site? Look no further, just install Screengrab! , a Firefox plugin.
Psst!… look what’s coming
A little teaser of the new BetterClassroom.com website and logo. Can you dig it?
Lots-a-pasta
Hungry for good old traditional spaghetti and meatballs? You might want to try out Verdile’s Restaurant located at 572 2nd Ave in Troy, New York.
I couldn’t resist taking a picture of this perfect meal. I will surely head on over there when visiting New York.
It’s a Boy!
A big congratulations goes out to Paul and his wife Amanda for bringing in a new member to the BetterClassroom family.
Jack Griffin Lawler
Sept. 19th
7 pounds, 20 inches
A CSS Tip
A couple of my colleages just started the jump into CSS. They had a difficult time determining the postion of the elements in their layouts.
Here’s a little trick I shared with them. To get a better visual representation, I like to set the border attribute border: 1px solid red; of each major element during development. This will visually demarcate the sections and assist debugging.
body {
margin: 10px;
font-family: Georgia;
font-size: 80%;
text-align:center;
}
#container {
text-align:center;
border: 2px solid black;
}
#header {
margin:10px auto;
width: 600px;
text-align:left;
border: 2px solid red;
}
#content{
margin:0 auto;
width: 600px;
text-align:left;
clear: both;
border: 2px solid green;
}
#main {
position: relative;
float:left;
text-align:left;
margin:10px 10px;
width: 55%;
border: 2px solid blue;
}
#sidebar {
position: relative;
margin:10px 8px;
float:right;
text-align:left;
width: 35%;
border: 2px solid yellow;
}
#footer {
margin:10px auto;
width: 600px;
text-align:left;
border: 2px solid pink;
}
.clear { clear:both;}
Output:
Where have you been?
Well, to answer that. I’ve been very busy.
Trip to New York:
Paul and I had the opportunity to meet with the beta testing group in upstate New York. Before heading up there, Paul and I did our homework. We sniffed around the database to see what feature was and was not being used and how each user was using our software. The results were interesting. To give an example, we noticed that the state standards feature was not being used as much as we had hoped. Our question to them was, why? Come to find out, the users were having a difficult time navigating through the state standards. A usability issue, to say the least. Paul then came up with a brilliant idea, presented it to the users and asked for their feedback. Needless to say, they loved it and agreed that it would make the state standards easier to use. Now the difficult part, Paul assigned me to implementing this concept. I told him to give me two weeks to deliver. To my surprise, I cranked this feature out in a weekend and got a little taste Ruby on Rails AJAX support. Rails - Rocks!
Company website:
We finally took down our “Coming soon” splash page and released our new BetterClassroom website.
Software demo:
I created a quick tour of our software using CamStudio. It was pretty easy to use but it would be nice to be able to edit it before exporting it to Streaming Flash videos (SWFs). Be warned that IE seems to have a memory leak when playing the CamStudio exported SWF files. I was able to have our resident Flash guru, Rick (aka Flash Gordon), convert the AVI to SWF using the proper Macromedia tools. This has solved the IE issues. Thanks, Rick!
Application face lift:
I’m currently working on giving our software a shiny new look. We are going through each area looking at how we can improve its usability. Our goal is to make the software easy to use.
Setting up a Rails environment
A few weeks ago I challenged myself by setting up a full Rails/Lighttpd/FastCGI stack.
This will be my test bed for setting it up on a production server. The difficult part was wrapping my head around whole installation in an environment that I am new to. I’m briefly going to describe the steps that I have taken and in a later post I’ll be giving more details and “gotchas” that I’ve encountered.
First things first… install the operating system
Linux Red Hat 9
Install Ruby
wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/ruby-1.8.3.tar.gz
tar xvzf ruby-1.8.3.tar.gz
cd ruby-1.8.3
./configure
make test
make
sudo make install
Install RubyGems
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/5207/rubygems-0.8.11.tgz
tar xvzf rubygems-0.8.11.tgz
cd rubygems-0.8.11
ruby setup.rb
Install Rails
gem update
gem install rails --include-dependencies
Install FastCGI
* Download fastcgi developers kit *
wget http://fastcgi.com/dist/fcgi.tar.gz
tar xvzf fcgi-2.4.0.tar.gz
cd fcgi*
./configure
make
sudo make install
Install Ruby-FCGI Bindings (new non memory leaking bindings )
gem install fcgi
*Note: I did it this way. If this doesnt work try this method below.
wget http://sugi.nemui.org/pub/ruby/fcgi/ruby-fcgi-0.8.6.tar.gz
tar xzvf ruby-fcgi*
ruby install.rb config --without-ext
ruby install.rb setup
sudo ruby install.rb install
We need the correct pcre .soCT for lighttpd to work correctly
wget ftp://ftp.csx.cam.ac.uk/pub/software/programming/pcre/pcre-6.4.tar.gz
tar xzvf pcre-6.4.tar.gz
cd pcre-*
./configure
make
sudo make install
Install Lighttpd
wget http://www.lighttpd.net/download/lighttpd-1.4.8.tar.gz
tar xzvf lighttpd-1.4.8.tar.gz
cd lighttpd-*
./configure
make
sudo make install
Rails 1.0 is out
Looking forward to this release. Looks like 37Signals revamped the RoR site…. good job guys.
John here!
My name is John Rochford and I am one of the founders of Betterclassroom.com. We develop software for educators, specifically, lesson planning software. Most of the writings in this blog will be geared towards education, technology and my experiences in this startup company.
We have established ourselves in the great city of Atlanta, Georgia.