I just spent the weekend moving all our svn repos to git. Yes. All of them. There have been plenty of great articles written about why git rocks, but for us it comes down to branches. The ability to painlessly create a branch for a new feature and then merge it easily later is crucial work doing new development on large production systems.
We started off by moving a couple of our open source projects over to github.com. I’ve gotta say, Github is really impressive. Great UI, generous free git hosting, nice pretty graphs… So if we love github so much, why is this an article about setting up your own git server? Because we’re a small company, with lots of projects in our portfolio. The repo to cost ratio on github made it impractical for us to move all our svn repos (which we hosted on our own server) over to github.
I had tried previously to set up my own git server (before finding github), and had gotten bogged down, and after a few hours of poking around the internet decided it wasn’t worth the effort. Then recently a friend of mine showed me me gitosis. Gitosis makes setting up your own git server trivial. Literally 15 minutes later I was up and running with my first git repo on my server. I won’t go into all the details on how to set up gitosos because you can read about it on Garry Dolley’s blog. It took a few more hours to migrate over all our svn repos, but we’re now swimming in the joy that is 100% git usage.
Tags: git github gitosis
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How to pick a web hosting company is something we run into quite a bit. I suppose it only makes sense as we are a web development studio. This question can get answered in a few different ways. For this post, I’m going to use the average small business website as my example.
Step 1: Figure out what you’re going to do with your site
All too often, first timers pick their web host by cost. They find some company that offers hosting and a bag of cookies for $2.00/mo and immediately sign up. This is by far not the best idea. It’s much easier to sign up on a good web host then move your hosting from one host to another in the future. The first thing anyone should do is decide what they’re going to put on their site. Maybe a blog? Or perhaps it’s just a 3 or 4 page site advertising your new plumbing service. You might even be thinking something more advanced like an online forum to discuss healthy foods and medicines. Any of these 3 simple website have a wide range of technologies and services needed from the web hosting company. After you’ve figured out what you’re going to do with your site, go to Google and search for a host that supports what you want. So lets just say you’re going to run a small business website on Wordpress. Go to Google and search for “Wordpress hosting.” Start looking through some of the hosts. So thats it for Step 1. Decide what you’re going to do with your site. Continue Reading »
Posted in Just for Fun | 1 Comment »
We’re always looking for ways to produce cleaner, smaller and faster code. Haml is a rails plugin that brings a couple of things with it. The first being HAML and the second, SASS. Both are ways of condensing and streamlining coding for Ruby on Rails and CSS. You’ll find plenty of people who don’t like HAML.
Being a development/design shop, quality control is very important to us. Anything that cuts down the amount of typing and syntaxing is going to benefit our clients and us. The less typing we (26AM, twentysixam) has to do, the less room for error. This also means faster troubleshooting and updates for our clients. SASS creates the possibility for variables within CSS. Why update a color attribution in 10 places when you could update it in one. Why type a definition 4 times when you could do it once?
The beauty behind HAML is that it is an indent based coding style. An indent means a new definition. It’s that simple. It’s been a couple weeks and we’re fans. Some people may think we’re lazy, on the contrary, we’re fast. We want to put out projects faster and more accurately. Because of this fact, we’ve started using HAML.
Tags: CSS, HAML, Rails, SASS
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We get asked on at least a weekly basis, “What does 26AM mean?”
So I thought I’d settle the speculations surrounding our studio. Twenty Six AM came about at about 2:00AM one morning about 2 years ago. I was pretty fresh out of college and really didn’t like the name I’d used throughout college: Sudarma Studio. It was 2 in the morning and I was browsing other studio websites and decided to call my new studio: 26AM. 1 year later Josh became the other half of 26AM as our programmer/admin/developer. 26AM really reminds us of the hours that we put in to make great projects. Whether it’s 2 in the morning or 1 in the afternoon, we put in tons of effort to make great sites and designs. And that is how we came up with 26AM. At times a reminder of our humble past and at times a reminder of our desire to work hard.
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