It came to a head at the weekend when no amount of restarting, prodding, shaking or hitting would allow me to login. A quick call to Apple support tracked it down to an issue with startup items (probably should have worked that out myself!). Here’s the fix:

1. When starting up your computer hold down the Shift key.
2. The Startup window should then display “Safe Boot” in red text (OS X 10.5). If you do not normally login the the Startup window will appear regardless. Safe Boot disables any startup or login items (i.e. something that might be causing the problem)
3. Once logged in (assuming you have logged in) go to System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items and remove any you think could be potential problems or remove all.
4. Add items back at your leisure to see if it breaks things again. Then, remove the rogue item(s)!

This might not solve everyone’s startup problems hopefully it will be useful for someone. Although, I do find it a little bemusing that a naughty startup item can effectively lock you out of your computer.

I use the internet. A lot. Do I use enquiry forms? Not if I can help it. I’m always scared that the data will disappear into the ether or drop into some rusty old email account that’s checked once in a blue moon. Somehow, tracking down an email address that is displayed in any old corner of the site seems, to me, more reliable than an enquiry form. But that’s just me.

People might not want to use the phone, especially when they don’t understand the domain. They could want time to consider and compose their enquiry. Working and living IT means it can be quite easy to make the assumption that everyone is comfortable with sending emails, but this isn’t always the case. If this was a site selling knitting patterns could we make this assumption? I don’t think so. Enquiry forms are intuitive for non-technical people.

Enquiry forms are also open to spam. One way to stop this is to add a Captcha. Whilst this may stop rogue use of the form I feel it says “I don’t trust you” to any website viewers and potential clients. They also have usability issues and, ultimately, looks messy. But, displaying your email address also attracts spam. There are ways round this also (obfuscation using odd punctuation, replacing with images etc.) but these are less user friendly.

The new epiGenesys site is not going to have an enquiry form. There will be a boldly displayed email address and a phone number. If people are not comfortable with emails then they are invited to use the phone. We believe this covers all bases and keeps the contact page a lot cleaner. Displaying the email address will result in spam but probably no more than the existing enquiry form already does (and most of that should be caught by Google’s lovely spam filtering). But really, has anyone ever had an important or useful email from an enquiry form anyway?

The code we were using was a nameless script that wouldn’t run on our development server. As the script was over 3 years old, rather than try and debug it I hunted around for a new one. A popular result on Google was MagpieRss. A quick glance looked like it was up to the job but it was another script that seems to not have been updated in about three years.

I then came across SimplePie. SimplePie is an up to date PHP aggregator that is simple to use and does exactly what I want it to do. Whilst they claim to dislike poor documentation, I had to dig around a few of the tutorials before I got the hang of things but once I did it became far more intuitive to use.

Whilst displaying a single feed on your webpage is a doddle, adding multiple feeds to the same page is just a case of defining an array of feeds to scrape from. SimplePie also caches feeds, which is useful when parsing (notoriously unreliable) Twitter feeds. I like!

My first port of call was (creator of Ruby on Rails) David Heinemeier Hansson’s How to build a blog engine in 15 minutes in Ruby on Rails. This wasn’t a success (wooups!). I also tried various others with varying degrees of success.

Now maybe this is just me being a n00b and picking the wrong tutorials but I’ve never had this problem with any other language. It seems the stumbling point is with the removal of Dynamic Scaffolding from Rails 2.0. As most introductory tutorials want to get you off the ground as quickly as possible they tend to use scaffold, a lot.

A couple of places that have been a help are Jonathan S NG’s Tutorials andAkita on Rails.

These meetings are a great way to keep up to date with what your colleagues are up to. It also gives you the chance to sort out what you’re going to be doing for the rest of the day, and, by presenting this information to your peers, it keeps you on your toes.