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.

Click HERE to see what IE users see when they visit this blog

A crazy idea? Well is it? We as designers and integrators waste SO MUCH time dicking around with our customers’ sites to bend them around multiple quirks of various IE versions. When it comes to our OWN sites - well, why not just say, “screw it!” Don’t get me wrong, if this was a community site with a wide audience I wouldn’t dream of it, but it’s a blog - and the topics covered limit it’s appeal.

Let’s face it, how many Windows users ( or anyone else for that matter ) are going to be interested in the stuff that I post? On top of that, excuse the judgment, but how many Windows users who haven’t installed Firefox are likely to be part of my target audience?

Aside from that, I simply don’t care. I simply do not give a flying monkey if they can’t can’t get in. MY TIME is more important to me than their convenience.

So, how do you block visitors to your Typo blog that use IE?

Really easy, and you don’t even have to hack the application.. infact you CAN’T do it by hacking the application because of the way Typo caches pages. Instead the logic has to be in the views themselves in a way that they work on either a live page or a cache. JavaScript is the answer.

Just add a snipped of code to the layout page of your chosen theme. Looks like that is always ( ? ) /themes/THEMENAME/layouts/default.html.erb

<SCRIPT language="JavaScript">
<!--
var browserName=navigator.appName; 
if (browserName=="Microsoft Internet Explorer")
{
window.location="/no-ie/index.html";
 }

//-->
</SCRIPT>

That takes care of TRAPPING incoming Internet explorer browsers, and it displays instead

/public/no-ie/index.html

If you’d like to use my page, feel free to download it here

I’ve decided to stop shotgun blogging and consolidate all topics right here no it’s own domain.

The goal is two fold;

• Blog often in a place that can be perrmanent
• Be my own server admin on a site that isn’t critical

To that end, this blog comes to life on slicehost.com. I’d go into all the server setup, but that would just help you hack it - so I won’t. The blog itself is TYPO, a Ruby on Rails application.

If you use it, WATCH OUT, I’ve already found a bug. The screen to manage which plugins appear on the right is a bit out of control. My advice is to PUBLISH after every incremental change you made through drag and drop. If not, you might end up with a nasty NIL issue and the inability to change the sidebar further.