Posted by h3rald
Sat, 30 Jun 2007 12:00:00 GMT
So finally my site is back up, I don’t have to worry about coding anymore: just writing about whatever I like, no more Cake, no more MVC, no more frameworks…
What do you mean no coding anymore? You’ve been bragging about how this Rails thing is fast, how you can develop things easily, and this, and that… You know what you have to do now
^ That was my fiancée, actually, and she’s right: my web development days are far from being over, actually. I admit I tried to get away from it, but she kindly reminded me (and she can be very persuasive) that now I have to fix ItalySimply, the site I created a while a go (4 years?) with a mixture of Mambo (the CMS, now Joomla) and spaghetti PHP.
A sort-of-real-estate thingie visited by people who want to move to Italy or simply buy a house here. And it’s due a makeover, to be honest.
How am I gonna manage this? Let’s see…
COW
COW - Code On Week-ends. my web development methodology: simple, effective, basically my only choice. Actually the full name is COW (IYL): Code On Week-ends If You’re Lucky, i.e.: if we’re not going out, if there’s nothing better to do, if I feel like it. No deadlines (almost), no plans to follow, nothing.
No, I’m not terribly motivated to take on this project, but I already thought about two things to get me going:
- Get Agile Web Development with Rails - I read bits of the first edition, and that’s what got me started with Rails, now it’s time to buy the real thing.
- Blog about it - I’ll try to keep a diary of my coding efforts and share the most juicy bits with the rest of the world. In this way I’ll also have content for my site and the three people who read this blog will have something (hopefully) interested to read.
The Cunning Plan
Instead of getting out of troubles by simply tidying up some PHP code or migrate the site to Joomla, I’d like to re-code the whole thing from scratch using Rails. Ideally I’d like to migrate quite a bit of the content (including the hundreds of houses with pictures which were published over the years), but at the moment I’m not thinking about it: after all, in the end the site will be so addictive and easy to use that adding hundreds of houses back on will be just so much fun! Right? Yeah, right…
First of all I’ll spend quite a bit of time planning the application and what has to be done, then I’ll have to practice a little bit with Rails, and then, eventually, I’ll end up writing some code. Of course, suggestions and ideas will be more than welcome throughout all the process.
Let’s see how it goes…
Posted in Blog | Tags Rails, web20 | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by h3rald
Fri, 29 Jun 2007 17:28:00 GMT
If you asked me what file manager I used on Windows, up to a month ago I’d have answered something like: A43 or CubicExplorer, for sure anything but Windows Explorer.
Well, it turns out that I had to change my mind after all…
There’s a multitude of “Explorer Replacements” which aim to be more feature-rich, more user-friendly, less bloated than Bill’s favorite, and I indeed tried quite a few of them, mostly the free ones of course.
The only problem is that whenever I got close to choose “the one”, I noticed that there always was one or two features missing somewhere, which were present in another and vice versa. Additionally, to be totally honest, the level of integration with Windows and other applications was never complete.
These are a few stupid, silly things which tend to be lacking or at least are not 100% functioning - not in all the file managers I tried, but at least in some:
- Environment variables integration - Alternative file managers normally are not able to parse Windows environment variables.
- Icon overlays - Some file managers can’t render Subversion’s icon overlays.
- Strange context menus - Sometimes right-clicking on a file or a directory may not open the standard Explorer context menu
- Open Folder - Third-party application allowing you to open a folder, will always open it through Windows Explorer
- auto complete address bar….
- Special Folders - Some special folders (e.g. Control Panel) are now accessible using alternative file manager, but others may not (e.g. Network Connections). At any rate, typing “Control Panel” will not open the Control Panel in an alternative file manager.
What about trying to “patch” Windows Explorer instead of using another program altogether?
I never really thought of that until LifeHacker featured the QT TabBar shell extension by Quizo. That was my epiphany: I immediately thought I was going to “patch” Windows Explorer using a few really useful (and free, of course) Windows Shell Extensions.
Here’s my file manager now:
Yes, it is Windows Explorer, with just a few addons:
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Posted in Articles | Tags review, software, windows | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by h3rald
Fri, 22 Jun 2007 20:38:00 GMT
…or better, on Rails.
Yep, this 7th (!) version of the H3RALD website is powered by the overly-popular Ruby web framework and by the Typo blogging platform.
Nope, I decided not to re-develop my website entirely from scratch this time, although I was tempted to, for three simple reasons:
- My “coding time” is close to non-existent nowadays, and even with a framework like Rails re-developing a site from scratch would have taken at least some time, which at the moment I don’t have.
- Typo is a fairly robust and feature-rich blogging platform, and after learning a little bit of Rails I could customize it to my needs straight away. URLs didn’t break thanks to Rails’ routing system, migration was easy enough, and developing the missing bits (like a rudimentary BBCode parser and a TextLinkAds sidebar) wasn’t hard at all.
- I wanted to take a break from my site, not code it again.
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Posted in Blog | Tags Rails, website | 5 comments | no trackbacks
