Archive for the ‘Web’ Category

Rails Overview: Intro and Getting Started

Thursday, May 24th, 2007

So, here goes… there’s plenty to say so my overview of Ruby on Rails is going to be a multi-parter. Note, this isn’t going to be a tutorial – there are plenty of those about. This is my view on what makes Rails hot and where it’s not based on my experiences as a Rails newbie. My background, for reference, is with J2EE professionally, and PHP on the side.
(more…)

Hosting by the slice

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007

A couple of months back I was looking for somewhere to host a Ruby on Rails app (of which more in another post shortly). In the end I settled for a Virtual Private Server from US firm Slicehost (who are themselves Rails developers). For just over £10 a month I get 10GB of storage, 100GB of bandwidth and 256MB. Bargain! I’d love to use a host in the UK but I’d easily be paying twice that and getting half the spec (unless someone out there can point me at a good deal I’ve missed).
(more…)

WordPress 2.2

Sunday, May 20th, 2007

Having missed the previous security update I decided to upgrade to WordPress 2.2. I’m glad to say everything seems to have gone smoothly (although PlusNet managed to take the site down again at one point which had me a little worried). Nothing really different for you, the reader, to see. Widget support is now there out of the box but then I had the plugin installed previously anyway.

OpenStreetMap lecture

Monday, April 23rd, 2007

I’ve mentioned OpenStreetMap before on this site so I’d thought I’d plug a BCS Hants lecture this Thursday on the subject. It’s a shame I won’t be able to make it.

Welcome back blogroll

Friday, March 16th, 2007

Apologies to those whose sites have recently been absent from the links in my sidebar. The modifications in WordPress 2.1 to use the same categories for posts and links managed to break my pages. Having just moved up to WordPress 2.1.2 this is now fixed so the blogroll returns.

Restricted access

Thursday, February 8th, 2007

My colleague Simon Kapadia informs that he can’t access this site from our standard issue 3G cards due to “Vodafone Content Control”. Fortunately if you’re over 18 you can remove the access control (which I’m guessing I must have done at some point in the past) but make sure the children aren’t watching!

Another WordPress upgrade complete

Friday, January 26th, 2007

I’ve now moved this blog and Christine’s up to WordPress 2.1. I’m still waiting for the WPG2 patch which resolves an issue with g2image and TinyMCE but as I rarely post via the web then this isn’t too much of a problem. More problematic was that WordPress now appears to add an extra paragraph tag in around the images which broke the style applied to the Gallery one-image class. Having moved that to the ImageFrame_none class everything appears to be functioning again.

One slightly annoying side-effect of the fact that categories are now shared between links and posts, when combined with my earlier fix, is that the empty Blogroll category now appears in my sidebar. Maybe one day I’ll implement the fix properly and hide entries that don’t have any posts in themselves or their sub-categories! In the meantime I just have to sit back and enjoy the new 2.1 features.

Update 28/01/07: Looks like wp_list_cats has now been fixed so that the hierarchical view does show empty categories with posts in sub-categories (indeed, the post count includes these) so I can remove my earlier fix.

WordPress upgrade and widget fix

Tuesday, January 16th, 2007

I’m glad I didn’t get round to moving up to WordPress 2.0.6 as, 10 days later, 2.0.7 is out. The upgrade itself went pretty smoothly. I’ve also fixed the categories widget in my sidebar. By default it doesn’t show categories without any postings but, in a hierarchical view, it doesn’t take in to account that sub-categories may have postings. Having selected Sidebar Widgets in the plugin editor, I located the widget_categories function in question. In the call to wp_list_cats I added &hide_empty=0 to the end of the parameter. You should now be able to see my People category (empty) but also its Family and Friends sub-categories (with postings).