About Kevin Way

An entrepreneur, a full-stack web engineer, and occasional poker player. Kevin writes about data-driven marketing, web apps, and miscellanea.

Author Archive | Kevin Way

Nagios check for WooFramework

By on April 30, 2012

We just released check_woo, a nagios plugin to monitor the WooThemes WooFramework. It’s a quick way to make sure that the WooFramework piece of a WooTheme’d WordPress installation is up-to-date.

Bookmark and Share
Read full story · Comments { 0 }

Ruby for Phidgets

By on December 16, 2011

We’re pleased to announce that you can now control Phidgets using Ruby.  Phidgets are low-cost USB building blocks, that make it easy to interact with the real world programmatically.  They provide a wide range of sensors (distance, force, touch, motion, environmental, input, current), motors (servos, steppers, DC motors), RFID readers, displays and other goodies.

We worked with the great team over at Phidgets to add Ruby to their supported languages.  You can check out the Getting Started with Phidgets in Ruby guide, or check out phidgets-ffi on github.

Bookmark and Share
Read full story · Comments { 0 }

User-friendly Safari extension prompting

By on August 13, 2010

With Safari 5.0.1, Apple has made it easy to write browser extensions. For one of our sites, we wanted to prompt visitors to install the extension if they were running Safari. The problem is that there is no good way to query the browser to tell if the extension has been installed. It appears that there is a method for determining this but it’s reserved only for apple.com. The best way we’ve found so far is to render an element into the page if the browser is Safari >=5.0.1 then hide it with a stylesheet in the extension.

Check out the following example for displaying content based on whether or not the extension has been installed:

Continue Reading →

Bookmark and Share
Read full story · Comments { 0 }