Note 2023-01-02 – This is an old post. It’s likely nothing here works anymore. Updated 2010-04-04 – The regex in the to_html methos was updated again to do an even better job of preserving whitespace. Updated 2010-03-21 – The regex in the to_html method on the SmugMug class was updated to preserve whitespace. Up until now to post photos from SmugMug I’ve crafted the link and image markup by hand, which is pretty tedious and prone to error. Read more

I switched the blog to a different back end and a slightly different style. I’m using Hobix (again, I used it back in… 2007?) and have made a bunch of modifications to support what I want to do. I have a fork of (a fork of) the original Hobix project at Github. I also have a bunch of local modifications (for things like Markdown support and permalink preservation – real exciting, I know). Read more

I just upgraded to version 1.99 of Capistrano, the remote deployment tool most commonly used for Rails projects. This is a prerelease of Capistrano 2.0 and installed easily with the following commands: sudo gem install highline sudo gem install -s http://gems.rubyonrails.com capistrano Highline is a new (at least on my machine) dependency for Capistrano and needs to be installed separately because it isn’t present in the gems.rubyonrails.org repository. Following the upgrade instructions I ran capify . Read more

Now, this is interesting.

I had a chance to play around with Capistrano this weekend. It’s a cool little tool and it works very well.

Discovered via. Dr. Nic: ZenTest. ZenTest scans your target and unit-test code and writes your missing code based on simple naming rules, enabling XP at a much quicker pace. ZenTest only works with Ruby and Test::Unit. autotest is a continous testing facility meant to be used during development. As soon as you save a file, autotest will run the corresponding dependent tests.

I really should start using Mauricio Fernandez’ rcov code coverage tool for ruby.

Over the past, oh, year and a half or so, I’ve followed the rapid ascension of Ruby on Rails to the top of the web development heap. In the process I read a lot of blog entries, a lot of “Hello World!” introductory articles and a lot of best practice documents. A big part of the thinking behind Rails is Test Driven Development (TDD) – the idea that you should write automated tests before writing code to make sure that a) you know what the code is supposed to do before you write it and b) once the code is working there is a quick, easy way to make sure it keeps working as you further develop your application. Read more

I’m playing with http-access2, a Ruby library for programatically accessing web pages. I want to write a web app that sits between people and a privileged admin interface and this seems like it will do the trick. It’s a little slow but I think that’s the SSL talking.