I’ve just started experimenting with LESS for a new web development project. With my programmer head on, LESS looks like it has the potential to speed up my CSS coding (which I do by hand) as well as enabling me to abstract my CSS with variables (very handy), nested rules, mixins and even mathematical operations (yeah baby)!

However, installing LESS on my OS X “Leopard” machine wasn’t quite as simple as advertised. I should just be able to go:

sudo gem install less


But that resulted in an error:

ERROR: While executing gem ... (Gem::RemoteSourceException)
HTTP Response 403 fetching http://gems.rubyforge.org/yaml


I ended up scratching my head for a moment — before turning to my good friend and problem-solving guru, Google, for help. I was advised as follows:

wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/45905/rubygems-1.3.1.tgz
tar xzf rubygems-1.3.1.tgz
cd rubygems-1.3.1
sudo ruby setup.rb
sudo gem update --system
sudo gem install less


That worked a treat.

Then, in Terminal, I navigated to my source directory, renamed my style.css file to style.less and issued the following command:

lessc style.less --watch


LESS then generated a new style.css from my .less file and went into watching mode — automatically compiling my .less file into its .css counterpart whenever it detected changes in my source (ie: when I hit save in my text editor) which is a rather cool.

It’s early days yet, but so far LESS is looking like a tool that I can really make use of. I don’t need to change my workflow (aside from starting the watch/compiler process) and I get a degree of CSS flexibility and freedom that I didn’t have before. That’s neat.

For some time now I’ve been wanting to install the Alternative PHP Cache (APC) on the Media Temple GS server upon which this website is hosted. Tantalised by the performance improvements that I’ve read about, APC became my Holy Grail. But I couldn’t get it to install on the GS server, until now.

I’ve documented the steps I used to get APC running here, in case they’re useful to anyone else.

1. Telnet or SSH onto your GS server
2. mkdir /home/#####/data/lib (where “#####” is your Media Temple account number)
3. mkdir /home/#####/data/lib/php
4. wget http://pecl.php.net/get/APC-3.0.19.tgz (at the time of writing, this is the latest stable version - adjust as necessary)
5. tar zxvf APC-3.0.19.tgz (again, adjust as necessary)
6. cd APC-3.0.19
7. phpize5
8. ./configure --enable-apc --enable-apc-mmap --with-apxs2=/usr/sbin/apxs --with-php-config=/usr/local/php-5.2.6-1/bin/php-config
9. make clean
10. make && cp modules/*.so /home/#####/data/lib/php
11. Finally, add the following code to your php.ini file:
    extension_dir = /home/#####/data/lib/php/
extension = apc.so

That’s it. APC should now be installed and you should be able to measure a significant improvement in your PHP script performance.

Scaffold is a new type of CSS framework, built with PHP, that allows speed up your development time by doing the hard work for you. It is different to other CSS frameworks, like Blueprint and 960.gs, but it’s power lies in it’s ability to extend the CSS language. You can even generate the CSS found in other CSS frameworks dynamically, like grid classes to quickly build layouts.

Now this looks interesting. Recess is a PHP development framework based on the Model-View-Controller principle.

RED is a framework for testing HTTP resources; it fetches responses, analyses them, and then based upon the responses it may interact with the resource more to see how it behaves. In this manner, it’s very purposefully encouraging RESTfulness.

A “must have” for web-designers everywhere.

Thematic is a free, open-source, highly extensible, search-engine optimized WordPress Theme Framework featuring 13 widget-ready areas, grid-based layout samples, styling for popular plugins, and a whole community behind it.

Further Reading:

The History of Visual Communication
Visualisations and Infographics
Information Aesthetics

I know I’m terribly late to the party with this but Cappuccino, an open source framework that makes it easy to build desktop-caliber applications that run in a web browser, looks pretty fscking awesome. I’m going to have to play with this.