Projo Blog

As I wrote in another blog entry about 9 months ago, I use Rackspace as the cloud file hosting platform for Projo. Aside from the basic utility of serving up files efficiently without burning up my own server’s bandwidth, you can also make some impressive optimizations to your site by serving your static content from a CDN.

Why serve static content from a CDN?
If you load content from a different server or a different subdomain of your own site, then the browser will typically treat it as a separate source and load the files in parallel with other files. If you were to simply load everything out of your own host, you’d see a lot of blocking behavior (files will queue up approximately 4 at a time, and they will load whenever the browser gets around to it).

How to make a public container in your Rackspace Cloud Files manager
Log into Rackspace, and click on Hosting > Cloud Files and then choose a container in the list that you’d like to treat as your “CDN folder”. If you don’t have any containers, just create one.

Once you’ve decided which container you want to be your public container, click on it, and the settings for that container will appear in the lower part of the window. Click on the checkbox that says “Publish to CDN”. Et Voila! You’ve successfully created a CDN.

How to make the CDN url look like its coming from your website, not Rackspace’s
After you enabled the CDN, a URL showed up above that checkbox. Copy that url and log into the admin panel wherever your domain name is managed. Once inside, find the area that allows you to update CNAME records.

Once inside, add a new CNAME record that points cdn.yoursite.com to your copied rackspace cdn url. Once that updates, you’ll be able to go into a browser and load your files as if they were at cdn.yoursite.com/someFile.jpg

Awesome!

So, when I first wrote projo, we wrote it as a pseudo-mvc. I say that because there was some structure that separated logic from views, and the data abstraction was pretty thin. After continuing to waste time developing the same types of things over and over again, it became apparent that we really should stop working on features and just rebuild the framework.

Then we built Projo-MVC. Basically its a regular old model-view-controller with some of our own custom things going on in the routing and whatnot. But now that the whole thing is finished, man is developing additions to the projo project a breeze. I wish we’d done this from the beginning. However, I’ll tell you what I’m glad we didn’t do — use someone else’s MVC. If we had, we’d have missed out on all of the great lessons we learned this year.

Depending how the development of the framework continues, we may even release an open source version of it on GitHub. Wouldn’t that be magical?

Oh ya, and remember how there was that post about developing the API in recess php? Well, now that we did this, we’ve really abandoned that idea. Sorry recess!

Big news, everyone: we’ve finally added the ability to upload a file to a task.

What’s interesting about this is that we’ve done the whole thing via a cloud-based file system. This means that our servers will never get bogged down by file storage and therefore the server will remain fast even as the capacity begins to fill up.

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API’s can be hard work, but typically its a good thing for both you as a site owner as well as visitors to the web application.

By consuming a REST API on your own site, you enable yourself to consume data asynchronously which ultimately speeds up the site’s performance. Also it allows you to do lots of template caching server side due to the separation of data from views.

I’ve decided to start developing the REST API this week and after some grappling with how to do it, I decided to 1. use a framework, and 2. use Recess PHP as that framework.

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Good news everyone — the rapid task creator’s development has gone very well this week. It and its respective milestone and project versions should be released into production early next week.

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Hello all,

It has recently become apparent to us that one of the big obstacles to user retention is the somewhat cumbersome process of task creation. The solution, we think, will be to make an inline task submission text field on the actual tasks page.

Something UI/UX designers and evangelists like to preach is the minimizing of clicks needed to complete critical processes. Since our system is a housing system for work items, being able to produce them in fewer than 3 clicks would be really nice. In fact, the hard goal we’re aiming for is to make it not require any clicks at all.

One way to do that is to have a create task field that automatically is active and ready to type in on page load. Once you’ve typed your task, you can simply hit enter, OR of course you can hit the “create” button next to it.

If you have any ideas you’d like to shoot our way, please do at support@projomgr.com.

A couple jobs ago, I was proudly serving as the Technical Director for a interactive media startup in Southern California. Part of my duties was to help with our marketing efforts by contributing written content to our website and print materials. I’m not going to say I am a stellar writer or anything, but I definitely have become impatient with overly meandering writing in the corporate sector.

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This weekend I spent the weekend in Palm Springs to visit some of my girlfriend’s family. After grabbing a lovely Saturday evening dinner at the local Italian spot, we decided to go back home and watch The Matrix. None of our group had seen the movie in a pretty long time and I must say that since that movie debuted, there’s been a lot of evidence of its overwhelming influence in the movie industry.

So many modern films make use of the time warp / 360 panning slow mo / hyper-film-noir / discoloration tricks nowadays, it almost felt like I was watching a caricature of a modern action film. Overall, the Matrix still rocks. It will always be the most superbad futuristic action flick that I have seen in my lifetime… probably.

Anyway, while watching that, I spent another hour or so banging out some code on the massive undertaking which is the Projo Templater. Let me tell you a bit about it.
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Its been about six months since this project started, and now that we’ve begun granting accounts to a select bunch of users, it became clear that one of the ways we can keep them informed of the progress and stability of the project is to do regular blog updates.

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