AJ MorrisScreencasts | AJ Morris

How to Cron Job Your Web Apps…or If This Then That Your Way to Automation

AJ Morris — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 15:59:55 +0000

I have just come across a cool app called iftt.com or If this then that. I have to say it’s a pretty sweet app! It hooks up to a lot of the great web apps out their today to create automated tasks. It’s so cool I’m just going to show you what it can do!

Icons, Menus, and Headway, Oh My!

AJ Morris — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 20:29:13 +0000

I was in the Headway forums the other day and had someone ask how to create ??a menu that contains icons. I gave him the basic,’well you need to use CSS and do this and that to get it to work,’ type answer, and I got back the general ‘well I don’t know CSS or what you’re talking about,’ answer. So I decided I would take 15 minutes or so and make a screencast showing you a very easy way to get some icons to the left of the navigation text.

This screencast runs about 19 minutes in length. I hope you enjoy!!

Twenty Ten: A Walkthrough

AJ Morris — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 20:10:45 +0000

Continuing on our WordPress 3.0 journey, today we’re taking a look at the new default theme, Twenty Ten. It’s replacing Kubrick, a theme that has been installed with WordPress since 2005. I didn’t go in as deep of depth as I would have like, for instance, I didn’t mention in the screencast that it is coded in HTML5. I also didn’t mention that the navigation has drop-downs already builtin. Either way, the screencast does talk about some pretty good features of Twenty Ten and I think you’ll find it enjoyable.

Please stay tuned for next week when we take a look at creating a child theme. And don’t forget, if there’s something you’d like to know more about, please comment below.

Using Permalinks in Development

AJ Morris — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 15:00:32 +0000

Today’s screencast is #2 of my series about WordPress 3.0 and a local development environment. It’s all about getting Permalinks working on your local system. Of course this only applies to people using Mac OS X, but the same methods should apply. Watch the video below, or watch it in HD!

Code

Below is code from the screencast.

.htaccess file

User’s Conf file

New WordPress Development Series

AJ Morris — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 18:44:48 +0000

I’m sponsoring a new WordPress screencast series about setting up your local development and some of the new 3.0 features. Over the next couple weeks, we’ll be taking a look at things like, setting up your development machine, using permalinks locally, TwentyTen and child themes, menu management, and much more. I encourage you to check out the series, pass it on to your friends. If you’re new to WordPress (Yes there are still some! ) let me know if you are having issues following along, and I’ll see what I can do to help. Any feedback on what I’m covering (or not covering) would be appreciated as well. If I’m missing something and enough people would like me to cover it, I’ll look at doing it.

And without further ado, here is the first video of the series.

Covering WordPress 3.0 Features

AJ Morris — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 15:30:52 +0000

In my last post I had a brief overview of some features from WordPress 3.0. I’m currently working on about 5 to 6 screencasts to cover them, but unfortunately I do not have one done today. Instead I thought I’d ask you if you’ve played with WordPress 3.0 (It went into RC3 last Friday, June 11th) and what features you were looking forward to. Is there any specific feature you’d like me to cover in greater detail? I’m planning on covering Menus, Custom Post Types, Author Templates, WP and WPMu code merge (and how to setup a local dev environment). If there’s something else you’d like to see me cover, let me know now so I can start planning it out.

What’s next? Well after I finish this series on WordPress 3.0, I’ve got a few ideas, but would love to hear from you. Do you want me to continue on WordPress for awhile or move onto something else? Let me know in the comments below!

Growl Notifications in Tweetie

AJ Morris — Wed, 06 May 2009 07:00:54 +0000

If found it a little difficult yesterday to figure out how to get growl notifications working until @colognerunner told me how he got it working. Figured there were others that were having problems, so I make a quick little screencast showing you what I did.

Objective Resource for Faster iPhone Development

AJ Morris — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 00:27:28 +0000

I recently came across Objective Resource for developing iPhone applications that talk with a Rails backed website. According to the site,

ObjectiveResource is an Objective-C port of Ruby on Rails’ ActiveResource. It provides a way to serialize objects to and from Rails’ standard RESTful web-services (via XML or JSON) and handles much of the complexity involved with invoking web-services of any language from the iPhone.

I’ve had a chance to play with it this weekend and have found it to be pretty easy to work with. The developers of Objective Resource have created a pretty good Getting Started Guide you can follow, or you can watch a screencast of it as well. They even offer an example project for you to work with that gives you both the iPhone app (via Xcode) and the Rails app so you can see how everything works together.

One thing the example project does not include is accessing a Rails app that has authentication. Of course I was thinking I was all setup for this, but soon realized that I did not add my Active Resource functions in so that my app would work with XML/JSON requests. Luckily, while I was out in Denver, CO for iPhone Development Training (by Pragmatic Studio) I was able to get my hands on a copy of Advanced Rails Recipes by Mike Clark. I was extremely pleased that Mike graciously gave me the copy he had laying there for free. The particular recipe in the book that helped me was the Authenticate REST Clients. After I rewrote my authentication piece of my Rails app, I was getting data back and into my iPhone app. It was a very good feeling!

I thought I would include the screencast that the Objective Resource developers created. It runs about 6 minutes and is definitely worth a watch if you are looking at using Objective Resource for your next iPhone app backed by a Rails app.

Getting Started with Objective Resource from Josh Vickery on Vimeo.