Agile Interactive Development

We understand that the Internet is more than just the World Wide Web, and that your content should flow to where it's most needed. We are an interactive design and development consultancy specializing in creating rich content management systems to feed your content to websites, mobile apps, and whatever new technologies are just around the corner.

We are small, fast, and versatile. Contact us for quick solutions to your digital content questions.

Recent posts

Family Independence Initiative
2011.07.15

There's an interesting article in the NY Times today on the Family Independence Initiative, a program (of sorts) which creates social networks among poor families and incentivizes goal-setting for the future. The program is a response to the idea that people actually lose their initiative in the presence of "authorities" who are telling them what to do or how to act. It creates social support networks among families, and encourages incremental change through small financial incentives. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/out-of-poverty-family-st...

Beautiful photography site
2011.06.08

Just stumbled upon one of the most beautiful websites we've ever seen. Launched just yesterday, http://burkardphoto.com is the portfolio site of Surfer Magazine photog Chris Burkard. It's a lean and clean blend of AJAX and layered divs which resizes beautifully to showcase Burkard's amazing work. Inspiring.

Regular expressions tool
2011.06.08

We were working on a custom .htaccess friendlyURL rule this morning, and found ourselves forced to confront our old nemesis, Regular Expressions. Sometimes you have to rely on others when fighting evil, and in the heat of battle we found this great browser-based tool for building and testing regular expressions:

http://gskinner.com/RegExr/

Plus a good tutorial which references it:

http://blog.themeforest.net/screencasts/regular-expressions-for-dummies/

Backing up a MySQL database via cron
2011.06.05

I needed to create daily backups of a MySQL database, so I set up a cron job to manage the task. I wanted to dump the database to a gzipped file labelled with today's date. It turns out the command is fairly simple:

mysqldump --opt -h localhost -u [username] -p[password] [database name] | gzip > [path/filename to save location]-`/bin/date +\%Y\%m\%d`.gz

Here's how it breaks out (brackets [] indicate a string to be replaced for your specific installation):

  • mysqldump: Executes the mysqldump program, which produces a batch file that can be used to restore the database.
  • --opt: From mysql.com: "Use of --opt is the same as specifying --add-drop-table, --add-locks, --create-options, --disable-keys, --extended-insert, --lock-tables, --quick, and --set-charset. All of the options that --opt stands for also are on by default because --opt is on by default."
  • -h: The hostname. Here I specified "localhost."
  • -u: Specifies the database username.
  • -p: Specifies the database user password.
  • [database name]: The name of the database.
  • gzip > : Indicates that the file should be gzipped to the specified location.
  • `/bin/date +\%Y\%m\%d`: Appends the date to the filename.

You can edit the crontab directly, though I used the Crontab tool in Plesk.

Never Lost website honored by the MUSE Awards
2011.05.31

We are very pleased to announce that Never Lost: Polynesian Navigation has been honored by the MUSE Awards, which recognizes outstanding achievement in museum media. The site, which was designed and developed by Dave Beck while at the Exploratorium and after forming DBeck Creative, won a Silver in the Online Presence category. Please spend some time at the Never Lost site!

Click here for more info about the MUSE Awards.