Entries for the JOK Chasing Sprint closed this evening which was a great relief. This was to have been the year of the Web 2.0 entry system but, in reality, other commitments meant that my annual rewrite of the system only got as far as a stateless interface. This should stand me in good stead for next year though… Rails still continues to be a pleasure to use and the more I learn (I splashed out on the PDF version of the soon to be released Agile Web Development with Rails: Second Edition) the better it gets. New improvements to the development process this year were Git for version control and Capistrano for deployment. These certainly gave me more a lot more confidence in making updates to the live system.
Archive for the ‘Web’ Category
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Friday, February 20th, 2009WordPress upgrade
Friday, January 9th, 2009I’ve finally had a chance to upgrade to WordPress 2.7. It’s relatively painless since I’ve switched to updating via Subversion. The only problem I hit was with text widgets. I was seeing an error along the lines of “Warning: array_keys() [function.array-keys]: The first argument should be an array in wp-includes/widgets.php on line 1044” which, if you Google it, currently appears at the top of a whole host of other people’s blogs. Deleting all (three) of my text widgets and recreating them seemed to fix the problem. It’s good to see that threaded comments have finally made it in to the base product. I’ve previously experimented with a couple of plugins but never turned them live for users as I’ve never been entirely happy with the way they’ve been implemented. (As a consequence though you’ll see that some historical posts already have threaded responses from me.) I have to say that, right now I’m not a big fan of the revamped admin pages but that may be just lack of familiarity…
Rails update
Saturday, November 15th, 2008It’s that time of year where I get my online orienteering system out of mothballs ready for the next JOK Chasing Sprint. My first task was to update the application to the latest Rails 2.1.2 which proved to be harder than I had anticipated. I’m used to working with enterprise software where it’s a given that you can’t break users’ existing applications.
Day off
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008
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Thursday @ WSTC
Thursday, May 8th, 2008Went along to see my UK colleague Andy Piper‘s presentation on "Using Social Software to Improve Your Effectiveness at Work". Andy’s an engaging speaker and his presentation was well thought out and put together. As a result I signed up for a twitter account but we’ll have to wait and see whether it gets much use let alone improving my effectiveness at work. It did also prompt me to revisit an internal file sharing tool which, having previously not realised that access could be restricted, I had discarded as much of the material I want to share is of a confidential nature.
OpenID support
Wednesday, February 13th, 2008The observant visitor to this site may already have noticed the addition of OpenID support for logon and commenting on this site. This is easy to achieve with the WP-OpenID plugin. For now I have enabled the option to auto-approve comments submitted with an OpenID. I know having an OpenID doesn’t necessarily make you a good person but, at least for now, its more effort than your average spammer is prepared to go to.
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Immersive slideshows
Thursday, February 7th, 2008If you spend a lot of time looking at large numbers of photos on the web then take a look at the PicLens browser plugins. It builds a 3D wall of photos from a page and allows you to zoom around them and view each one full screen. In my case, particularly useful for browsing photos on Flickr.
Upgrade weekend
Sunday, January 13th, 2008Finally had a chance to put in place a whole upgrades on this site. First up was WordPress 2.3.2. I then needed to upgrade Gallery2 for the latest version of the WPG2 so that’s now at 2.2.3. The WPG2 plugin now acts a lot more like I’d expect a plugin should. Two minor niggles. Firstly, it adds its own page which appears with all the others on the right. You can rename it but I’d rather like to get rid of it completely! Secondly, it doesn’t work with Gallery URL rewrites. Need to investigate that further but it is mitigated to a certain extent by enabling Lightbox support so you won’t usually get to the image page from a blog post anyway.
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