A lot can happen in a little over 2 years...
In my last post, I
had proposed an attempt to tackle the FizzBuzz problem. PowerShell was done, PHP was barely started but I never pointed
to it in a subsequent post or finished what I wanted. The project url has
completed and checked solutions for PHP and Node.js. I had mentioned
b. F#, Objective-C, CoffeeScript, C/C++, Go, Dart, and Haskell are the planned languages I've mostly touched in passing or know about.
,
as well as C#, Pascal, and Ruby but I may never get to them.
Shortly after that last post, I switched jobs from .NET to web development focusing on PHP with HTML, CSS, and Javascript. That one action shifted much of my focus from most of the languages in that list. With ES6 coming and recently finishing a CodeSchool course in CoffeeScript, the Javascript landscape is looking pretty awesome. Elixir and the Phoenix Framework have recently stood out as upcoming contenders for my mindshare as well.
My last post taught me that while I may know of a language, it doesn't mean I'll have a genuine desire to pursue it. It can also easily become difficult to want to pursue development outside of your day job. Staying current, however, is always worth pursuing. Tooling and efficiency around web development seems to have come a very long way.
To keep this post brief, I plan on making more updates as I feel a lot has changed for me in the past 2 years that I'd still love to share.
This is almost pointless to mention but the standard templates give you a very specific copyright with respect to atom feeds (Copyright (c) x-y)
. The file source\_includes\custom\footer.html
includes a way of gathering the system time in the form:
Copyright © {{ site.time | date: "%Y" }}
I simply replaced the current hard-coded year with the ruby code above so that when the site is generated, it always gives the current year.
In case any of you are wondering how to insert code blocks with liquid syntax, see this post.
This is more involved but luckily gist makes it stupid simple to include here. Everything is pretty much a rip off of the category_generator plugin and includes with just minor tweaks to use the tag object.
_config.yml
plugins/tag_generator.rb (an almost complete copy of category_generator.rb)
source/_includes/archive_post_tags.html
source/_includes/custom/tag_feed.xml
source/_includes/post/tags.html
source/_layouts/tag_index.html
The following goes on line 23 in my atom.xml file, or right before the content tag. A better alternative would be to detect an excerpt and only display that or the content, not both.
{% if post.has_excerpt %}<summary type="html">{{ post.excerpt | xml_escape }}</summary>{% endif %}
Install RailsInstaller from here. I use the version with Rails 3.2.
curl.exe
, libcurl.dll
and libidn-11.dll
to C:\RailsInstaller\bin
.libidn-11.dll
was necessary to include.C:\RailsInstaller
as cacert.pem
. SSL_CERT_FILE=C:\RailsInstaller\cacert.pem
. My plan is for this post to serve as an index to the upcoming posts. Unlike the ASP.NET MVC posts that fizzled (sorry), I need to chronicle these changes in the event I need to dissect them again.
Here's the collection in no particular order:
[start year]-[current year]
and this post simply explains the what and why.One thing in the FAQ that particularly bit me during the WordPress conversion was Using Non-ASCII Characters In Your Blog. Most conversion posts cover this but I'm in the habit of always having this as part of my environment just in case.
The primary reason for my approach so far was to be a close representation as possible of the WordPress site to combat 301 redirect woes. Tags will eventually disappear I think but I like the exercise of making sure they're around in full. The platform seems to support "something" so it's fun to see how far I can go with it.
In case anyone was watching, I switched the blog from a generic WordPress with a slightly customized theme to octopress. I'm using the excellent Octoflat theme with a few notable tweaks. I reintroduced the search and feed buttons as well as expanded the navigation to allow nested menus. The theme allows for nested menu elements and while 2 levels deep is highly acceptable, I happen to use 3.
I'm writing this post using the excellent MarkPad which serves all of my needs perfectly. You don't need a markdown editor, but having one with live-preview that reinforces the markdown syntax is killer. That I can insert a URL and it automatically format the document accordingly is a small but useful touch.
I plan on posting the various tweaks that make up this blog. While there aren't a ton, I think a few of the concepts are worth expanding on. I don't claim these tweaks are original by any means but I found a lot of ideas needed to be fleshed out a little more to be acceptable for my tastes. Yes, I'm anal.
I expect nothing but great things from this migration though it took roughly a month of quite a few tinker sessions to get things where I wanted it. I blame using Ruby on Windows to be a big culprit but also my n00bness got in the way in some areas. It also took me quite a bit to grok how deployments functioned but now that everything gels, I don't expect any issues.
The site will continue to be a slight work in progress as I button up some of the loose ends. I have a few design tweaks in mind and I'm looking to expand my portfolio with more current projects. Not everything I've done in the past 2 years can be seen unfortunately but there's quite a body of work piling up, waiting to be shown.