This morning I checked our site and was welcomed by this:
Hilarious, but it’s so true. Ask anyone who has a public drawing site what the most commonly drawn “thing” is. Better yet, take a look at what people draw on bathroom stalls next time you’re at a bar.
Like I mentioned earlier, Village 2.0 features the all new MudTyper Version 2. MudTyper 2 has two components: MudTyper Server, a light weight Cocoa HTTP server and MudTyper Renderer, the font renderer. On the Village website, MudTyper is integrated behind the rails application.
An overview of the architecture is shown below:
A POST request from the browser is sent to a Rails Metal URL periodically (as opposed to responding to keystroke events). The Rails Metal method verifies sessions, and request parameters and forwards them over to the MudTyper Server. The MudTyper Server then sends a request to MudTyper Renderer to create either a file that is saved to disk or a base64 encoded string depending on the user’s browser. The browser receives the image as a response and includes the rendered image into the page.
With this architecture, it is possible to scale for increased load. We can run multiple instances of MudTyper Server+Renderer, and use mod_proxy to get Apache to handle the load balancing.
The new Renderer adds a lot of new support, including support for OpenType fonts with full kerning support, as well as many OTF features. For instance, we can now render Galaxie Cassiopeia’s contextual alternates, adding smooth transitions between letters.
It’s been a long project, but finally, Village Version 2.0 launches! We (Village and BuzaMoto) worked really hard on it and I think the site turned out great. I urge everyone to check it out. For the curious, the site was built with Rails, and runs an all new version of MudTyper, which supports OTF with kerning in addition to many OTF features (including contextual alternates). More about MudTyper in the future when I have time to write about the more interesting technical aspects of it.
Just before the end of 2009, we launched a new e-commerce website for ProjectNo8. The site was designed by my friend Christian Schmidt. For this website, we decided to build it using Spree, an e-commerce framework built on Rails. Spree was great to work with and really sped up the development time. It was still flexible enough to implement everything we needed to, and it was familiar since it’s built with Rails.