Braxton in Austin » Braxton

How not to handle customer inquiries

Braxton — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 23:51:29 +0000

This is amazing. An employee from Ocean Marketing responds to an email from a concerned customer and then proceeds to berate him over and over. Needless to say, this is not how you earn long term success.

Converting a number to currency with Javascript

Braxton — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 14:47:57 +0000

I recently needed a way to convert a number to currency format using Javascript. I found the best solution in Alex G’s comment on Brad Harris’s post. But as usual, there were issues when cutting/pasting from the web so I just wanted to post here as a Gist so it might help someone else and also so that someone can improve it if they want.

Google Voice and Skype

Braxton — Thu, 06 May 2010 19:22:01 +0000

I recently got a SkypeIn number. I also have a Google Voice(GV) number. I thought this would be the perfect marriage. When I am working at my computer I can just have Skype up and running and any calls to my GV number would ring my Skype number. Then I could answer the call without ever taking my hands off the computer. And it was great when I had Skype running. But what I didn’t know was that when you don’t have Skype running, it’s voicemail kicks in. This meant that all my GV calls that I didn’t answer personally went to Skype voicemail and so GV’s voicemail never took effect. So I never knew I was getting the voicemails. I had this setup going for over a week and had no idea what was going on. Where were all my voicemails? I finally figured it out the next time I logged into Skype and saw my huge list of voicemails.

So I did a little Googling and found a few solutions. You can turn on call presentation in GV which is a nuisance when you are answering. You can also set Skype to forward the calls back to GV, however this costs extra.

I decided to disable the Skype number as one of my GV lines for now. But I have enabled call presentation to get used to it. After a few days I will reenable the Skype number and all should be good to go again. Oh, and I also enabled email notification for Skype voicemail so I am notified if someone does happen to end up at my Skype voicemail.

Rails respond_to issues when using IE

Braxton — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 03:28:17 +0000

I was experiencing a bug in IE7 where my Rails app would return js when I was asking for html and vice-versa. It worked fine in other browsers but just not IE. It seems a few other people were having this issue long ago but I could not find any recent info or a complete solution. I quickly figured out that the order of my format statements in my respond_to block affected the result that I got from my reqeust. So I could rearrange those and get the result I wanted. But the problem was that I needed both at different times in my app. That’s why you have them right? Anyway, after reading over a related post at info.michael-simons.eu I discovered that IE was sending the wrong accept-headers. So I checked out the Prototype API and learned that I could set my accept-header for my ajax requests. So I added accept:'text/javascript' to my ajax options and it worked. This was a real stickler for me so I wanted to document it here for others that were stuck on it.

Here is what my ajax request looked like:

new Ajax.Request(url, { method: 'get', accept:'text/javascript', parameters: params, onCreate: function() { $('listLoader').addClassName('on') $('mapLoader').addClassName('on') } });

Update: Looks like Paul Stadig might have a cleaner option. I haven’t tried it, but it looks like it might be the better way to go.

Moving to the cloud

Braxton — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 02:03:21 +0000

I am working on a rails-based project that we have decided to host in the cloud. We have decided to go with Amazon Web Services. We will be using EC2 and with an Elastic IP. We are looking into Cloudfront as well. So far I have created my account and launched my instance which was based on Webficients prebuilt Ubuntu image. It is geared towards rails apps with Passenger and MySQL already installed. It also has enterprise ruby which I will look into when I have more time. So after configuring my keys, I was able to ssh into the server and poke around. My next step is to get the command line tools installed and configured. Then I hope to my image customized and save it. Since server admin isn’t really my expertise, I am hoping this image will help me automate a lot of it. I can simply relaunch a new instance as needed with my preconfigured AMI and off I go. At least I hope it will be that easy, we shall see.

Just auto-upgraded WordPress to 2.8

Braxton — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 01:49:49 +0000

I just ran the auto-upgrade for this blog to bring it to 2.8. This is the first time I have ever used the built-in auto-upgrade. Most of my sites and clients’ sites are hosted on Dreamhost so I have always used their one-click installers which have been awesome. Then WordPress came out with the built-in upgrader which makes it even easier. Well it worked perfectly. It’s as easy as upgrading your modules.

Excellent Service by Data Robotics

Braxton — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 05:07:52 +0000

Today I had a near crisis on my hands. We use a Drobo to hold most of our day to day files. It contains roughly a terabyte of data. We have been using for well over a year now, actually probably closer to two. It has worked great for us thus far with no problems at all. In fact, we just finished a server migration and the fact that most of the data was stored externally on the Drobo made the transition much easier.

One of the great features of the Drobo is that you can add or upgrade the drives easily. Well today I finally decided to add a little extra storage to the Drobo. So I simply took the new drive and inserted it into the empty bay of the Drobo. It was most of the way in but wouldn’t quite seat completely. So I just gave it a little push and as soon as I did, I heard a pop and all the lights on the Drobo went blank. I immediately thought, “Oh Shit, I hope I just didn’t just lose all our data.” The main idea of a Drobo is to have redundant data in case a drive fails, but I never consideered what would happen if the Drobo failed. So I tried everything I could think of to get the Drobo to come back up. It finally got power again but didn’t do anything else.

I finally called support and Wanda was very helpful and walked me through all the normal procedures and eventually came to the conclusion that it was dead. She also politely reminded me that my Drobo was out of warranty. So I thought I would just have to bite the bullet and buy a new one. But then she told me she could sell me an extended warranty for about half the price of a new Drobo. Then I could use that warranty to get a replacement for no cost. Sounded great to me. She said she would talk to her senior support engineers and get back to me. Within minutes, Steven called me back and told me that they wanted to send me a new Drobo at no charge whatsoever. I didn’t even have to buy the extended warranty. All I had to pay for was the overnight shipping, and he even apologized profusely for that.

So tomorrow I should have a new Drobo that I can just pop my existing drives into and power up and be back in business. Now that is what I call service.

My Default WordPress Plugins

Braxton — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 00:11:10 +0000

I maintain several WordPress installations and always use most of the same plugins. I can’t ever remember which ones I need to install when I setup a new one, so this is mainly a reference for myself. I use some different ones here and there, but these are the main ones I use.

Akismet
Google Analytics for WordPress
Lucia’s Linky Love
OpenID
Optimal Title
Post-Plugin Library
reCAPTCHA
ShareThis
Similar Posts
Subscribe To Comments
WordPress Database Backup
WP Super Cache
wp-cache

I would provide links to all these but as of WP 2.7 you can just search for them by title right from within your admin panel.

Slowly but Surely. IE6 brought closer to EOL

Braxton — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 16:19:47 +0000

Just wanted to point out this bit of great news. 37Signals will soon be dropping support for IE6. Kudos to them. IE6 has been a thorn in web developers’ sides for years. It is time that we put it out to pasture. You can help by adding a notice to your site that users should upgrade. Grab a badge from Save the Developers and add it to your site like I have.

Trulia Blatantly Ignores Googles TOS – Cloaks Sites

Braxton — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 14:41:49 +0000

Eric Bramlett, a local seo expert, discoverd that Trulia, a popular real estate search site, has been cloaking their partner pages. This is clearly against Google’s TOS and there is a good chance they will get penalized by Google. Well after eading his post, I did a little more snooping my self and found they were cloaking the of the following pages as well:

http://www.americantowns.com/ct/fairfield-real-estate
http://www.kiplinger.com/money/realestate/
http://www.silvar.org/

Update: Trulia has taken down their cloaks. It’s amazing what a little peer pressure will do.