Interested in some data about app sales? I wrote a Ruby script which parsed my worklog files for timestamps, calculate the difference, add it up and then return in a human-readable form the amount of time it took to develop Calendar Paste. So I logged about 115 hours of active development time, planning, tinkering with the website and whatnot—and I definitely spent more hours on this project before I began logging my progress.
I was trying to fix a non-issue with YAML by throwing Ruby gems at it. nanoc and Jekyll and the like provide YAML metadata for their content files: Google said this is called YAML Frontmatter. So I was looking at a way to parse YAML Frontmatter of plain text files, searching for gems – until I found the laconic answer on StackOverflow: what’s wrong with YAML’s standard features?
I put my personal nanoc boilerplate setup on GitHub. Maybe you find the deployment process useful.
Deployment Process
I assume you’re public html folder is called htdocs/ and you can create new folders below your domains folder but outside htdocs/.
I also assume you use my Rakefile: upon rake build it will checkout the branch ‘deploy’ and put all files from output/ in there. Uploading from ‘deploy’ to the production server will only copy the HTML output, not the nanoc setup.
Initialize bare production git repository on the server:
git init --bare ~/doms/example.com/git
You’ll want automatic updates when you push to the server. Use git’s own post-receive hook:
# add to ~/doms/example.com/git/hooks/post-receive
echo "Updating website ..."
cd /the/full/path/to/doms/example.com/htdocs || exit
unset GIT_DIR
git pull origin
echo "Update complete."
Make it executable:
chmod +x post-receive
Initialize git repository in htdocs/. This will point to the bare
repository on the server and check out the current version:
# given you're in ~/doms/example.com/htdocs
git init
git remote add origin ../git
# setup branch to pull from:
git config branch.master.remote origin
git config branch.master.merge refs/heads/deploy
Setup production server locally:
git remote add production ssh://user@example.com/~/doms/example.com/git/
git remote show production
Commit changes locally and put them on the server:
git commit
rake build
git push production deploy
You can push all branches via git push production to backup your code.
Only the branch ‘deploy’ will be visible to the public.
I like this interactive guide a lot, because it focuses on basic rules of nice-looking typography which result in a quite beautiful example page.
The reference to http://modularscale.com/ was nice, although I seem to fare well with a selection of the traditional scale: 16, 18, 21, 24, 36 (measured in pt; I use ems, though).
I think about publishing sales stats on my website; maybe this would be a cool add-on for the upcoming e-book as well. I already sold the app 12 times in the past few days without any marketing whatsoever. I’m curious where I’m heading with this niche app.
Also, I got some cool feedback and suggestions! However this is going to turn out financially: It will be a fun ride, that’s for sure.
I got the usual Objective-C method declaration: When you reference this method, its proper name is tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath:. Removing all the parameter declarations and the return type by hand is really tedious. I wrote a Keyboard Maestro macro to remedy my pain:
I’m working on something pretty cool. The project website is in the making. Until then, I want to sketch what it is: a iOS event template builder. Also, I’m working on an ebook which covers the app development process.