My name is Joel
I work on the web making stuff I like. I live in Boston(-ish) with my wife and our English Bulldog.
That’s it. I’m going naked.
No, not without my clothes. That would be, just … not right.
This website had been in its previous state for a while, probably the last year or so, with little traction. The vast majority of this stagnation being due to my working on implementing a design put together by the always amazing Erika Greco (she designed my wife’s site – Bit By the Beauty Bug). I loved what Erika had done – and I worked on getting it juuuust right for a long time. After months and months of on and of work on implementing this beautiful work I decided – “It’s time to get back to the basics”. There’s no need to get stuck in the cycle of working and re-working ad nauseum (my name is not George Broussard).
So, I’m deciding to strip everything down to the barest of mark-up and style and concentrate on letting this “brand” or “identity” grow organically through either the content or whatever incremental changes I feel are right. Instead of trying to hit a done target, let’s get real and let this grow organically to a point where I feel it’s done enough.
What does this do for me, you might ask? It allows me to write without a nagging voice in the back of my head saying “you can publish this once the new redesign is live”. When new projects I’m working on launch – I’m just going to post something about it instead of worrying that “the portfolio section of the site isn’t done yet … oh the horror!”.
Over time I hope to make some incremental changes to make things less ugly, but only time will tell. I’ll be documenting things as they change for posterity’s sake so I can review how time has treated it, and maybe share its mutation with everyone with hopes any and all feedback would make me better.
So, please bear with me while I hang out here all exposed and vulnerable and stuff. It’s only appropriate to bring in 2010 like Baby New Year.
Air Edie
These photos were taken one afternoon when I went to take the little Chubbster out to the courtyard. I ran into our neighbor Andrew as he was out their with his super-duper high-tech Nikon DSLR. Edie went nuts and the photos above are the result. A huge thanks to Andrew and an equally large thanks to the dog for being such a photogenic weirdo.
Using Google Apps Email as Your App’s SMTP Server
Something I’ve held out on for a while now has been to switch over the settings for ActionMailer in my application(s) to point to my hosted Google apps account. I figured it was probably time to do so as piping email notifications through my comcast email account is generally, probably, a bad idea (courtesy of the “No Duh” department).
Seems like it should be rather easy, no? Just change action mailer to resemble:
ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = {
:address => "smtp.gmail.com",
:port => 587,
:domain => "hosteddomain.com",
:authentication => :plain,
:user_name => "account@hosteddomain.com",
:password => "omgsup3rsecret"
}
Meh. Looks easy enough, right? Except for the fact Google’s got some magic TLS authentication thing going on – you’ll run into an error in your mailers resembling Must issue a STARTTLS command first.. Enough to make you work a little harder to get the magic working.
For those of you/us that are running Ruby 1.8.7 and Rails 2.3.x the answer is rather simple – add :enable_starttls_auto => true to your smtp settings, which will result in :
ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = {
:enable_starttls_auto => true,
:address => "smtp.gmail.com",
:port => 587,
:domain => "hosteddomain.com",
:authentication => :plain,
:user_name => "account@hosteddomain.com",
:password => "omgsup3rsecret"
}
And for the rest of you/us (that would be me) that are still sticking with Ruby 1.8.6, there is an answer in the form of the action_mailer_tls gem. Following the readme will get you to right where you want to be – shoveling all the mail you would like into the ether that is the interwebs.