Yeah, me too. This blog is typo, but to be honest, I’m not a big fan.

Here’s the problem.. I don’t really want a “rails application” at all - what I want is to be able to add blog features to my current applications.

With the need for mongrels et all, what I really think we need is either:

1) An application that you can point multiple domains to, e.g. blog.domain1.com, blog.domain2.com etc. that can be a single install / application with a single environment that is multi-purpose.

2) A blog plugin, that works off a single controller for admin, and a single controller for view that can be thrown into any rails application.

I’ve been working on 2, and it’s turning out pretty well, but at this point it’s too application specific to throw out to the open source community. The focus is on simple simple simple and seo seo seo.

What started off as a standalone project, has now been integrated into Billabill here.

Features include:

• SEO: Independent control of stub, title, H1 and tags
• SEO: Blog title displayed as H1 or H2 depending on context
• SEO: Blog summary used as full article teaser reused as meta description
• Full page caching with a very simple cache clearing mechanism
• Routing setup so that categories become root directory for posting
• Category stored with a post - no separate table. There’s really no need

It can do more than you can see at Billabill, but I’m not using everything, e.g. the ability for any post to be tagged as a header, footer or sidebar menu item.. Again, features on the front without any extra complexity.

What it would need to be great though is:

• Simple THREADED comments with subscription.. why are blog comments linear!
• RSS - 10 minute job, but I haven’t done it yet
• A parsing engine to allow you to easily include links to other internal pages
• A parsing engine to include flickr content etc.

Anyhoo. If I get a chance I’ll try to bundle this up and turn it into a plugin because I really think that is the answer.. just like you can add a WordPress blog to any php site, you should be able to add a rails blog alongside any rails app.

gedit is Textmate for Linux

I’m a recent convert to gedit for my rails development after reading a digg article about how to make gedit act like Textmate. Well I’ve never used textmate, but after just a short spell of using some textmate like features, I’m sold too.

Gemini

One of the two plugins that I’ve grown to love is Gemini by Gary Haran for the auto-insertion of closing tags.

I like it, but it also drove me nuts in it’s default form, in that it auto completes the single apostrophy - fine in code, but if you are jumping back and forth between code and text creation then this is really annoying. Words like “doesn’t”, “hasn’t”, “don’t” etc. all kick off the closing quote - not ideal.

Removing and adding rules to Gemini

The beauty of Open Source is you can change it. If I knew Python, what I should really be doing is contributing with a “configuration” screen for Gemini, but I don’t - so I’ll just hack it.

To remove the single quote rule, open the file:

/.gnome2/gedit/plugins/gemini.py

and search for

“class Gemini:”

  start_keyvals = [34,  39,   96,   40,   91,   123,  60]
  end_keyvals   = [34,  39,   96,   41,   93,   125,  62]
  twin_start    = ['"', "'",  '`',  '(',  '[',  '{',  '<']
  twin_end      = ['"', "'",  '`',  ')',  ']',  '}',  '>']

and change to:

  start_keyvals = [34,   96,   40,   91,   123,  60]
  end_keyvals   = [34,   96,   41,   93,   125,  62]
  twin_start    = ['"',  '`',  '(',  '[',  '{',  '<']
  twin_end      = ['"',  '`',  ')',  ']',  '}',  '>']

Restart gedit and you are good to go!

Adding rules, eg. % for Rails

Adding is pretty much the same process. In Rails views, you often use:

<% content %>

so it would be great if Gemini had a rule for % and that’s really simple. Looking again at this block of 4 lines of code, what we have is 2 lines that state ASCII values, and 2 lines that show the character.

By modifying and adding % and it’s ascii value 37, we end up with:

  start_keyvals = [34,   96,   40,   91,   123,  60, 37]
  end_keyvals   = [34,   96,   41,   93,   125,  62, 37]
  twin_start    = ['"',  '`',  '(',  '[',  '{',  '<', '%']
  twin_end      = ['"',  '`',  ')',  ']',  '}',  '>', '%']

Restart gedit, and typing “<%” in a view now kicks off the <> and %% rules - awesome.

You know the way you set something up once in a while ( when you are not using Microsoft products ) and think to yourself, “That’s Nice”.

Mongrel and Apache working together just gave me that joy.. So simple, especially in single instance Mongrel setup.

Basically:

1) Start Mongrel

cd /rails_app/
mongrel_rails start -d -p 3000 ( where 3000 is an available port)

2) Check Mongrel http://that_domain.com:3000

3) Tell Apache Create a virtual_host entry for the site in question and add:

ProxyPass / http://127.0.0.1:3000/
ProxyPassReverse / http://127.0.0.1:3000

I like this blogging application ( typo ) but I don’t LOVE it.

There are certain things that “bug” me:

• Sometimes you get stuck in Cache Hell in the production environment where you just can’t get the thing to update!
• Performance is really horrible.. and I don’t know why. A blog is an incredibly simple application from a data architecture perspecitve. Even with caching, typo is slooooow. In the development environment it’s painful

That’s the worst of it and only half of the reason I’m building a new blog. The other half of the reason is:

• There is still no KILLER rails blog application. Typo is OK and Mephisto seems to be a dead project
• Why not. It’s creative, and I need that right now
• There are some features that I really want out of a blog that NO blogs do

So - it has begun. Already happily up and running in a development environment and will be rolled out in Beta for a listingly blog. It’s FAST, it’s INNOVATIVE and it’s DIFFERENT without being too different.