05
Aug 09
Any spare moment I get, I have been trying to finish up the bildrCode beta, but as I get closer, I seem to slow down. The last 10% takes 50% of the time right?
One of the major things I did was not even on my list of things needing to be done. Someone finally wrote a good article on mod-rewrites, and I had to take advantage. For those of you who don’t know…
When you go to http://www.adam-meyer.com/blog/ you are going to my site, and requesting the folder called blog. If you went to blog/this/that, you are going to a folder called that, who is in a folder called this, who is the blog folder. And so on.
Well this Rewrite thing changes all of that. You can have adam.com/400 actually go to adam.com/includes/files/api/index.php?fileId=400. So I took this idea and made the bildr code URLs much nicer. Before you would download a file and it would be like code.bildr.org/includes/php/download.php?id=82 . But now is actually code.bildr.org/82.zip . I made a rule that when you see the .zip extension, that the person actually wants “/includes/php/download.php”. This is also good, because now hovering over the link, the person knows they are about to download a zip file. I did the same for the dynamic java script files used to embed the bildrCode into the wiki articles. code.bildr.org/includes/php/render.php?id=795 is now code.bildr.org/795.js . I actually went a little nuts on the last one and actually made the page output a legit javascript file where before it thought it was html.
I also cleaned up/ rearranged the site a bit. Added some icons. Oh icons, what a pain you are, and how I wish I had a graphic designer to work with. All mine seem to be shots in the dark until I hot something. New is the ability to commit your session and comment on it. This is a change from before where you your session was committed automatically. I think this change makes it a little more like SVN.
So speaking of Icons, here are some boxes I was working with. Feel free to use them if you can. There is a PDF link below.
PDF here
22
Jul 09
I made some more Icons for whoever wants them (no credit needed). I was doing something that needed some small file icons so I whipped these out. (size shown is at 200%)
PDF here
So I got something else working I had been banking on. The sudo-API for bildrCode is working now. I even wrote a plugin for the bildr wiki that easily allows users to add the code to an article (the entire point). So as of now, all that happens is you request a file with the ID of the project you want, and it spits back javascript who then places the code on the page in a nice clean box with tools and a drop down to select the language. The code is even highlighted and inserts it’s own css along with it.
I got this idea from github who does this nearly the same way. It’s a little funny because I could actually use this to display code on any site. I will have to figure out how to stop that from happening.
So if all goes according to plan I will have bildrCode in beta version by the end of the month. After that I will be constructing a video to go along with the site that will help show my vision for the site and hopefully get people excited enough about the project that they will want to help out.
The next step after bildrCode will be to build a javascript schematic editor (yeah right). But if it could happen, it would be truly awesome. Imagine building schematics in a collaborative manner!
19
Jul 09
So something I have been putting off I managed to hack together yesterday, but it works. That is the ability to download code from the bildeCode. On any project module or session of code you can just hit the download button, and download a zip file of all the code in the proper files. This may sound like something rather simple, and it may be to some. But the interesting thing is that there are no real files on bildrCode, so how do you zip them. When you click the download button, the server grabs everyting needed out of the database and creates actual files and folders out of them (in a random named secret file for security (see below)), then zips it all together, deletes the files and folders and downloads the zip to your computer. To the user it is just like they clicked on a link to a zip file.
The security thing is like this. I was thinking how dangerous this could be . You can write any code you want on bildrCode, and pressing this button makes them actual files. That means a user could write malicious code, press download to make it real, navigate to the file, therefore executing them live on the server, and hacking us in 2 seconds flat. Im hoping that by doing all of this in a randomly named temp folder, and deleting it as soon as the zip is done will take care of this. But I think I have a lot more security to work on.
Anyways, I have been looking at letter pressing a lot lately, and I have been working on a latter pressed look in photoshop for some icons etc. I was making this nice one for the download button, but didn’t use it. I think it came out great, so I tried (to some success) to make a few others. But I offer them to you for use in what ever you want. You don’t even have to give credit.
