The Blog of Oscar Godson

Finally after months of work I finished Deploy*. Comes preloaded with CSS resets, XHTML Strict/Transitional, jQuery library (uncompressed, minified, and packed), and these five jQuery plugins:

• ThickBox
• Color
• Corner
• pngFix
• Form

If you would like anymore just shoot me an email. They are very easy to implement. Also, if you find any bugs, typos, or anything let me know!

Deploy* can be found at ProjectDeploy.org

I had this problem after purchasing MacJournal 5 from the MacUpdate bundle. The program looked great and had everything I wanted for a blogging application as well as a digital notebook. When I tried to add my blog however, it wouldn’t work. [skip to bottom for the the easy steps or read the blog for the story.]

Everything I tried had failed. I contacted the developer and we went through lots of testing and shooting emails back and fourth with new ideas. I was about to give up hope when Dan, the creator of MacJournal, asked me to record the network http requests it’s sending out through Terminal.app. I did so and read the XML it generated. It said that the transfer was exhausted. I thought that was odd so I checked my servers error logs and found out that the Wordpress script was failing on a specific Wordpress line each time. When i went through the PHP code I noticed it was failing at the point of upload.

I couldn’t think of how to fix it when, bang, it hit me.

For you non-programmers, for safety reasons php restricts the size of the file you can upload, and how long you have to upload that file. It sets these settings in the php.ini file.

So here is how to fix this fluke.

• First login through (s)ftp to your server and locate the php.ini file. If you do not have one of these go up another directory. In most cases the server inherits php.ini file settings from folder to folder unless overwritten by another php.ini file.
• When you locate it open it up. You will see a lot of gibberish if you are not a programmer. No need to worry, just go to line 228. If you don’t have line numbers in your text editor (such as textedit) then search for “max_input_time”. From here you will replace the numbers you see there to the right of max_input_time, memory limit etc.

max_execution_time = 30 ;
max_input_time = 600 ;
memory_limit = 20M ;

Make sure your settings are not commented out altogether by checking if there is a ; in front of each of those settings above. It should look exactly like that. Now save!

Now you are all set. It should be working. If not, check your MacJournal set up. This is the set up you will need, of course, replace blogurl with your website.

In Manual set up you should have something like this:
Name: Blog Name Here
Type: Moveable Type
URL: http://blogurl.com/
POST URL: http://blogurl.com/xmlrpc.php
User: Username
Blog ID: 1

Deploy* has been coming along quite nicely and should be ready for a final release by the end of the month. I have been taking feature suggestions and bug requests frequently. With this launch I am going to try to launch boozker.com which will have all of The BooZker Network websites and projects.

Deploy* has been totally redesigned, but kept the same framework.

Major features added since 0.9.5:

• Project naming feature.
• jQuery plugins with auto-installation.
• Using XML, any jQuery developer can easily add their own plugin to the XML using their own personal version of Deploy*

Bug fixes since 0.9.5:

• ThickBox (the pop up for the “License” and “Coming Soon” links) works correctly across browsers.
• Opera support
• IE6, IE7, IE8 Beta 2 support
• Firefox 3 Windows fix where logo was pushed off the screen to the right.

Planned Features for version 1.0

• Document tree on download page to show you what was included in your Deploy*
• Choice of packed or minified CSS when you choose “resets”
• Project contents appear in title bar for making bookmarking easier

Future Features

• CSS frameworks to get you started faster
• More JS frameworks with plugins
• PHP frameworks
• Empty include files (header.php, footer.php, and functions.php)

More information will be available in a week. As always, if you want a feature in this version, or an upcoming one please send them to me now. Bug reports can be filed through email as well.

I have finally released Deploy* today. You can find it at http://oscargodson.com/deploy until its reached a final release. Once it reaches version 1.0 I’ll put a link on my web site or give it it’s own domain name.

So what is Deploy*?

From the Deploy* tool’s documentation:

Deploy* is a free, open source, online tool which allows users to quickly deploy a web project folder in only a couple seconds.

It offers a couple unique features from other project folder downloads such as customization, valid XHTML, HTML, and CSS, but the most unique is bookmarking.

Deploy*’s bookmarking feature allows the user to go through the form only one time and then bookmarking the next page (deploy.php). When the user returns to that bookmark it instantly generates another .zip folder with all the settings the user had previously entered.

If you have a Mac you could add that bookmark to your dock and it’s only a click away. Windows and Linux users could also add the bookmark to their desktop and it will always be right there waiting.

Info on creating the bookmarks on the desktop and dock* (Mac users only) is coming soon!

I have done it all from scratch (except the jQuery stuff!). From a technical stand point, Deploy* takes the users form and, based on that form,  creates a folder called deploy_xxx123, grabs files from a files directory puts it in that previous folder, creates new directories such as css, js, images, etc and also creates a HTML or XHTML file based on what was chosen and when all that is done zips it and names it deploy.zip.

Download the source code if you are interested.

As of now, V0.9.5 all browsers are supported, however, IE6, IE7, and Opera are having some small CSS and JavaScript issues that will be worked out by version 1.0.