PageKite – An awesome tool for serious web developers

By Josh Highland in Programming, software, Tech

If you have done any serious web development, you know how important it is to have a local environment to work in.

It’s not very hard to set up a local web server, database server, and just start banging out code. If you have a mac, you don’t even need to install anything to start a PHP or Python project.

Development problems comes into play when you reach a point in your project when you need to start making inbound calls for things like oAuth or web hook callbacks. For these sorts of things to happen, you need your dev machine exposed to the world, and presented in an addressable format, or upload the whole project to a production server – both, a pain, and a time suck when you are developing.

Exposing your web server to the world usually requires a few modifications and a little bit of know how. Once ready to expose to the world, you need to open firewall ports and advertise your IP Address. If you are like me, and program on the run (office, home, coffee shop, airport, etc), I don’t always have access to router / firewall / port forwarding settings. Technically it’s against the Terms Of Service of my internet provider to expose a web server on my connection, so I CAN’T open any web server ports.

Enter PageKite to save the day.

PageKite is a cool project out of Iceland (yes Iceland!), that solves the problems I listed above. PageKite makes local websites or SSH servers publicly accessible in mere seconds, and works with any computer and any Internet connection. It’s also 100% Open Source. It’s dead simple to use. You just need python installed on your machine (which serious web developer doesn’t have python installed?), and the pagekite.py file from pagekite.net.

For $4 a month, you can’t beat the ability to run a simple lite weight script that securely exposes your web server to co-workers, API services, and anyone else you can think of. You probably don’t want to run a production level server via PageKite, but it gets the job done for development work, and it does it in an amazing way.

The best part is the fact that it doesn’t matter what type of connection you are on, you can expose your work to whoever wants to see it. No firewalls, no dynamic IPs, no hassle. I’ve used PageKite to build my last two Shopify apps, SEO Meta Manager, and Order Lookup App. It’s been nothing but an awesome experience. PageKite has found a permanent place in my web dev tool box.

check it out at http://PageKite.net. The Video below is a bit long but explains it very well.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a66r23jnKA[/youtube]

iTunes 11 – Bring Back the Old iTunes Look

By Josh Highland in mac, music, software

iTunes 11 sports an all new interface and thats great, but if you are like me, you just want to use the features that you’ve become used to. I’ve figured out how to get most of the old features turned back on in iTunes 11.

  • Get the sidebar back by clicking the button in the upper left corner, and then click “Show Menu Bar” on Windows. Then select View > Show Sidebar.
  • Get the status bar back by clicking View > Show Status Bar.
  • Click Songs in the top bar, and sort by Artist for the traditional list view.

Now, iTunes 11 should look close to iTunes 10. I have found that I need to use the album view to show artwork. The Song view no longer shows album art.

Working with Shopify .css.liquid files in TextMate

By Josh Highland in Programming, software, tutorials

I’ve been working with Shopify.com for some time now. One of the(many) cool things that Shopify has going for it, is the TextMate bundle they offer. It really makes writing Shopify Liquid code much nicer.

If you’ve ever working on a Shopify theme, you’ve most likely delt with a .css.liquid file. It’s a CSS file that contains a tiny bit of liquid code (mostly for linking to assets like background images). By default, TextMate will treat these file like liquid files. They really should be treated as CSS files.

To fix this, in TextMate, press cmd+option+control+L. This will open the “Bundle Editor”. Expand “CSS” in the navigation pane on the left.

In the right window, find:
fileTypes= (

Add “css.liquid” to that list. Look at the below image for an example.

 Restart TextMate and you should be read for some Shopify CSS goodness.

Improving the SEO of a Shopify store

By Josh Highland in internet, Tech

Shopify SEO

I love Shopify. It’s an amazing e-commerce SaaS (Software as a service) application. Shopify is basically an online solution for people who want to run an e-commerce store, but don’t want to deal with the headache of maintaining secure servers and source code. I’ve used them for years, and have built several stores based on their platform.

One of the things I really like about Shopify is their pro-developer attitude. They have a robust API and they want people to build thing on their platform. They even have an app store where developers can create and sell plugins to extends their platform. http://apps.shopify.com/

Recently, I launched a Shopify app to help store owners improve their stores SEO. “SEO Meta Manager” allows users to easily modify their products titles, meta descriptions and meta keywords. This allows Shopify store owners to control how search engines see and list their products in search result pages. For $5 a month, it’s a must have add on for anyone who is serious about their store.

SEO Meta Manager is an powerful tool for any Shopify store owner.
Better search results = More visits to your store = More sales = More $$$ for you!

http://SEOMetaManager.com
http://apps.shopify.com/seo-meta-manager

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTtdbvvkd3Q[/youtube]