Completed Dark Souls 3!!!
→ posted on February 20, 2017microposts
I've started keeping track of various notes in markdown format and I wanted to use Gitbook to group them together. I'm using the npm module to build it locally. It's a useful tool and theThe completed book looks nice. However I would like to add some customisations e.g. links back to my main page.
It's not easy to add simple customisations. Or more like it probably is but it's not well documented how to do so. Editing the header is a bit awkward as you have to modify the theme yourself. I'll probably end up just adding a header above it using an iframe.
One thing I did find out how to do was to add links to the sidebar. You edit the book.json to add a links section like this
{
"links": {
"sidebar": {
"Gerard Condon": "http://www.gerardcondon.com",
"Github": "https://github.com/gerardcondon/tools-docs"
}
}
}
→ posted on February 15, 2017development
This is a really good round up of Apple links from Michael Tsai. I just found Steve Blank's post on Tim Cook as Steve Ballmer a couple of weeks ago and since then there's been a few more posts on where Apple is going.
I've bought a fair few Apple products over the last 10 years but I'm not sure when I'll buy one again. The phones are admittedly excellent but I get 80% of the experience on my cheap Android phablet for a quarter of the price. Also it's really the hardware and local software experience with the phones that are good. Any Apple service has tended to be terrible e.g. iCloud - especially compared to Google's services on Android.
Also iTunes has always been a disaster. And now their laptops seem to be becoming glorified toys - any port I used has been removed. They have a fascination with thinness but I'd trade a few mm for battery life. I'm not sure what I'd do with one now over a Chromebook - especially given that Chromebooks are about a quarter of the price and soon you'll be able to use Android apps on them.
They never really did much with the Apple TV. I have an older model and it sits unused under the tv now. The remote for that was terrible - looks over usability. Given the way the app store took off on iOS, I thought they had an opportunity to push it as a gaming box. However that never happened. I think gaming seems to be a real blind spot at Apple and it never got the attention that music or movies got. It's a shame really.
My first iBook got me into the Mac ecosystem and the halo effect lead to more purchases but recent hardware updates (or lack of it on the desktop) are pushing me out again. It's more likely that Google has the halo effect now and that I'll be switching to their ecosystem completely.
→ posted on January 24, 2017apple
Google and Samsung announced some new Chromebooks which will be able to run Android apps. These look fantastic, especially for the price. On my current Macbook Air, I basically spend the majority of my time in the browser anyway so moving to a Chromebook wouldn't be that much of a big deal.
→ posted on January 15, 2017tech
I came across the idea of microblogs from Manton Reece's blog. The idea is that instead of just using the blog for long content, you can post short Tweet like items there also. Needless to say you can just use Twitter for this but it's more fun to do something unneccessarily complicated! I have form here - like using Octopress for a blog instead of WordPress.
Basically, instead of using Twitter to publish short notifications, you can post them to your own site and if necessary to the likes of Twitter from there. Having control of your own content gives you independence from third party sites - if Twitter shut down tomorrow then my posts would still be available here. If I'm putting content on the web then ideally I would like it to be on my site under my own domain name. I've decided to add them first to my chess site and then if they work out there, try to port them to Octopress.
That blog is written using Middleman, which has the ability to use data files.
Any yaml file in the data folder is available to the Middleman app using a data.filename.foo like syntax.
This means that I can create a yaml file containing the microblog posts and then use that to generate the appropriate html pages.
I have a microposts.yml file with each entry having text and date entries. This is sufficient for the moment but also yaml is flexible enough that I can add more attributes later.
yml
- text: here is another post
date: 2016-11-19
- text: here is a post
date: 2016-11-20
I use the Middleman blog extension to generate the blog portion of the site.
I want to keep using this as it handles rss, tags, archive pages, pagination etc.
It works by generating posts from files in a source folder. In order to integrate with this, I want to generate a file per micropost in the correct location.
Under the source folder I split out my posts into two folders manual and automated.
I updated the regex in config.rb to handle this blog.sources = "posts/{type}/{year}-{month}-{day}-{title}.html".
Middleman will process these equally but now I can check what type the post is by using data["type"].
In the config.rb I delete the contents of the automated folder on each build.
I tried using before_build hooks but they were being called too late - the Middleman data structures were already created with the previous contents of the automated folder.
This lead to build errors and issues with sitemaps etc.
So I just perform the File operations directly in the config.rb. This ensurs that they are executed before the blog extension processes the posts folder.
Then I iterate through the micropost data from the yaml file and create the appropriate file in the automated folder.
# config.rb - Clear out automated posts folder
automated_posts_folder = "#{config[:source]}/posts/automated"
FileUtils.rmtree(automated_posts_folder)
FileUtils.mkdir(automated_posts_folder)
post_counter = 1
data.microposts.each do |micropost|
post_content = "---\n"
post_content += "title: mp#{post_counter}\n"
post_content += "date: #{micropost.date}\n"
post_content += "tags: microposts\n"
post_content += "micropost: true\n"
post_content += "---\n"
post_content += "#{micropost.text}"
File.write("#{automated_posts_folder}/#{micropost.date}-mp#{post_counter}.html.md", post_content)
post_counter += 1
end
I've added micropost: true metadata to each of my generated files so that I can check if the post is a micropost using if data["micropost"].
This allows me to customize how I display these posts - in particular I don't show a title for these posts.
Speaking of titles, some special handling is required for these as the Middleman blog extension uses these for the generated html file names.
I added an attribute display_title to the BlogArticle class which will return an empty string if the post is a micropost.
This allows me to specify a fake title for each micropost using an incrementing ID counter.
The blog extension can use this fake title as normal but it will never be seen by the viewer of the blog.
Instead anywhere that a title is required in html markup I can change it to use the display_title attribute.
The fact that Ruby has open classes makes adding this very easy - I can do it in the config.rb file and don't need to go mucking about in the Blog extension code.
# config.rb
module Middleman
module Blog
module BlogArticle
def display_title
data["micropost"] ? "" : data["title"]
end
end
end
end
This means that I can display these microposts just using the main text and not displaying a title. They interleave nicely with longer form blog posts.
Using the Middleman Blog Extension means that I also get RSS integration for these posts. I edited the xml templates to remove the title if the post is a micropost. Now in my RSS reader, they show up with the body text as the title instead of the fake title needed to make the extension work.
This current implementation is basic enough and I have a few ideas of how to improve it in future.
→ posted on November 20, 2016development
After updating the site to add JQuery, I noticed that the Github aside and the sidebar toggle no longer worked.
Opening up the console I saw the following errors
TypeError: Object 0 has no method ‘charAt’
and for the Github plugin
Method JSONP is not allowed by Access-Control-Allow-Methods
Googling for these lead me to Daniel Hilgarth's blog where he has two posts on how to solve the charAt and jsonp issues.
→ posted on November 20, 2016octopress
I noticed recently that the Octopress Twitter plugin for my sidebar was broken. The reason is that Twitter no longer supports the APIs that the plugin accesses. Instead now they have a widget page to generate html code that will embed a list of your tweets on your page.
I created a widget for myself and customised it by adding the nofooter transparent noheader attributes to data-chrome.
These remove various headings and background colouring so that it blends in with the site a bit more.
To add this to an Octopress site, you replace the code in source/_includes/asides/twitter.html with this new code.
I also added a follow button which displays a Twitter formatted follow button and a count of your subscribers.
The full code is as follows
<!-- source/_includes/asides/twitter.html -->
{% if site.twitter_user %}
<section>
<h1>Latest Tweets</h1>
<a class="twitter-timeline" data-chrome="nofooter transparent noheader" data-tweet-limit="5" href="https://twitter.com/gercondon">Tweets by gercondon</a> <script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<a class="twitter-follow-button" href="https://twitter.com/gercondon">Follow @gercondon</a>
</section>
{% endif %}
→ posted on November 9, 2016developmentoctopress
I wanted to learn how to create websites using Bootstrap so I've created a chess site at www.gerardcondon.com/chess. This is a static site developed using Middleman. It uses Bootstrap and pgn4web to display chess games and allow the viewer to play through them.
→ posted on December 9, 2015developmentchess
I updated my Rails test app from 4.1 to 4.2. However when I pushed to OpenShift I got the following error
You have already activated rack 1.5.2, but your Gemfile requires rack 1.6.0.
Using bundle exec may solve this. (Gem::LoadError)
I found the answer on Google Groups here. The root cause is that OpenShift is dependent on Rack 1.5.2 and Passenger 4.0.18. The proper fix will have to wait until they update their versions of that software. Until then to fix this error, ssh into the OpenShift app and in the app-root folder run
gem install rack
→ posted on June 15, 2015development
I was doing some sample Rails apps recently and was looking for a place to run them. Heroku would have been my first port of call but given the limits on database size for the free account, I looked around to see what else was out there. I ended up on OpenShift. The free account gives 3 gears (or VMs) with 1GB storage on each. This is better for me as I can run a proper database on it without the 10000 row limit. The 1GB storage is also persistent so you can use it to store assets.
Redhat has an rhc gem which allows you to control your gears from the command line. You can create new apps from here or you can do as I did and create them from the OpenShift web page. They have a large list of pre-configured applications covering languages such as Java, Ruby, Python and frameworks like Node and Rails.
I selected the Rails 4 application. This forks the Rails 4 example repository from Github. The name you give your application forms the basis for its url i.e. appname-username.rhcloud.com. You can choose a database - the options for Rails are MySql and Postgres. This creates a blank Rails application - to add OpenShift support to an existing application you can follow the steps here.
After a short wait a screen pops up with the database credentials and instructions on how to clone the application to a local git repository.
After I clone the repository I typically change the configuration. I want to also store the application code on Github, so I rename the origin repository to openshift.
git remote rename origin openshift
Then I add a new origin remote using
git remote add origin git@github.com:gerardcondon/rails-app.git
and I do an initial push to this remote
git push origin
The current master branch is still tracking openshift/master so now I change this to track origin/master using
git branch master -u origin/master
Now by default changes are pushed to Github when I run git push. When I want to deploy to OpenShift I have to manually specify it using
git push openshift
After the push, Openshift will stop the application, perform any db migrations and restart it again. There is also support for adding in your own operations at various stages in the deployment.
If I want to clone the repository on a new machine then I clone from Github and add an OpenShift remote using
git remote add openshift ssh://<<openshift repository ssh url>>
The repository's ssh url is available from the application's dashboard on OpenShift.
→ posted on June 7, 2015development