Created: 2009-07-01 16:16:48 UTC / Updated: 2009-07-01 16:16:48 UTC
I managed to Google phrases that turn up results from my blog this morning. This suggests that actually having page titles is already doing good things for my searchability.
Created: 2009-07-01 16:15:43 UTC / Updated: 2009-07-01 16:21:55 UTC
This blog has been down for most of a day now because I upgraded the kernel, as Ubuntu suggested, and that got VMWare's kernel modules to stop working. Not a big deal -- I ran vmware-config.pl again, it rebuilt the kernel modules and everything was fine.
It was a fine reminder of why I need to stop running my blog off my home desktop machine, though.
Created: 2009-06-29 21:21:02 UTC / Updated: 2009-06-29 21:21:02 UTC
I started working on this blog in march or so. I didn't have a fixed, set list of features. I just knew roughly what I wanted it to be able to do, and mostly I was looking for a good, effective way to express myself about programming.
After my most recent changes to get decent pagination and make it work with my post tagging, I think I've scratched my personal itch with this. I plan to keep using and maintaining it, of course. But I think this blog, as a little simple app, now does what I want it to do.
Not many of my projects get to that point, ever. That's one of the really cool things about building something I want, for the things I use it for... It's possible to get done. Somehow when I build for other people, I can always come up with an unending feature list of stuff they might want some day...
But when it's for me, I get to say, "okay, it works now."
I'm enjoying that a lot right now.
Created: 2009-06-29 16:11:02 UTC / Updated: 2009-06-29 16:11:02 UTC
I find that even when I'm doing geeky stuff, I don't always get around to posting about it on the weekend. Last week, in addition to the five posts I managed, I also screwed around with SWIG and Ruby. My big insight, such as it is, is that interfaces with function pointers are going to be hard here.
It seems like (and I haven't tested this) the right answer is going to be keeping an internal variable pointing to a proc, and having an extra function pointer in the Ruby binding that I can set, which calls that internal proc. So basically, a little hand-written mapping function.
It would be nice if SWIG could do that for itself, of course. But it looks like it currently doesn't, which makes its default Ruby interfaces much less useful.
Created: 2009-06-25 22:20:38 UTC / Updated: 2009-06-25 22:20:38 UTC
I've just added to my site's CSS file (yes, just one so far) to support will_paginate. I wrote it so that by default it applies to anything I output with will_paginate, though it would be easy to change the "DIV.paginate" selector to something like "#posts_paginate" so that it's specifically that one.
Here are the important bits I added:
That gives formatting for the whole page block (the first section, just DIV.pagination), and then separate sub-sections for the next_page and prev_page links, and for links within the pager. Normally only the ellipsis (...) within the pager will be the inherited DIV color. Links like the page numbers will usually inherit from the rest of the page, so be sure to override them if you want their color to change.
The ".disabled" block is for the next_page and prev_page links when they're disabled. You could do them individually with a ".next_page.disabled" or ".prev_page.disabled" block, but I'm fine with them being the same.
The ".current" block is for the current page, which I highlight in slightly unsaturated red here. And that's why I'm a programmer, not a graphic designer :-)
Created: 2009-06-23 16:53:27 UTC / Updated: 2009-06-23 16:53:27 UTC
Ah, here we go. I replaced my old hacked pager code with the following line in my view: "<%= will_paginate :id => true %>". And suddenly, paging works with tags, I have appropriate CSS classes for all the bits at the bottom, the pager disappears when there's only one page...
That would be why will_paginate is worth the trouble.
I need to redo my CSS to style it, but that's a pretty small thing. I guess will_paginate is more awesome than I gave it credit for. I still hope they fix the count thing :-)
