Boris Masis

One of the things that’s not immediately obvious about Amazon EC2 instances is that they could fail, in fact Amazon says: It’s inevitable that EC2 instances will fail, and you need to plan for it. An instance failure isn’t a problem if your application is designed to handle it. The EC2 forum posts are littered […]

Git pulls are a fairly easy way to deploy your code, and we’re doing just that at my new event promotion startup. We wanted to take our release process just one small step further by tagging our releases so that we know exactly what is running in production and when it got there. Instead of […]

We recently released a feature that allows our users receive a text message if a bus they are awaiting is running late. It’s all pretty simple, we take the output of this form and run a little excel macro to convert the entered data into email addresses. We then email the affected parties and they […]

A common web development concern is the www subdomain. Do you host at http://www.site.com or http://site.com? Which ever you choose you want to be sure that visitors who type in the other get re-directed properly. If you use IIS you can setup a new website to do such a permanent redirect, but that solution doesn’t […]

We sure love our wufoo around here, and one thing we’ve been using more and more is smart routing for our entries. For example, when someone fills out a lead form we want to route the entry to the appropriate sales person based on the state of the inquiry. Wufoo doesn’t natively provide “smart” routing […]

We recently completed work on AuPairVideos.com. The site went from concept to launch in just over a month, in part thanks to its lightweight single-page design. We ended up writing ~150 lines of code in each layer: 152 lines of HTML 165 lines of CSS 159 lines of JavaScript 147 lines of PHP 88 lines […]

Tools such as Quick Ribbon are great for generating simple and effective ribbons such as this one: A small problem though is the potential to block content underneath the ribbon transparency area. For example, that “About Us” link is obscured by the large square ribbon image. A simple workaround is to split the ribbon image […]

If you’ve ever setup an SSL certificate you know that its a hassle. Renewing your SSL certificate is likewise un-intuitive and takes more steps than it should. It turns out that paying for a certificate renewal does not automatically renew the certificate you have installed, you actually have to install the renewed copy. Our setup […]

IE8 came out today. Along the way Microsoft fixed a bunch or rendering bugs, which is great, but you might run into problems of you previously used conditional comments such as: <!–[if IE]> <link rel="stylesheet" href="patches-ie.css" type="text/css" media="all" /> < ![endif]–><!–[if IE]> <link rel="stylesheet" href="patches-ie.css" type="text/css" media="all" /> < ![endif]–> The trouble is that IE8 […]

Update January 19, 2014: I’ve updated the zip file for PHP5 compatibility. This includes changes from Jared Swets for the install portion (see comments), and single quote escaping for the title and body. Update February 17, 2011: I’ve updated the zip file with changes from Harry Saal (my original versions of index.php and tiddly1.php are included with […]