All new sites I’ve pushed out in the last couple of days, but am not very sure why.

When I’m involved in a big project I have to do something creative once in a while to blow off some steam, and I got these domains in the .me landrush a while back so thought “why not”?

The goal of the sites is to create a collection of comments and links around a certain subject over time.

It creates subdomains on the fly, to make a flowing url, e.g.

http://bush.shafted.me

I think it’s kinda fun, and it does have full twitter integration, so having created a post you can optionally send a notification of it to your twitter buddies.

Enjoy.

Agile? Love it. Much talk about agile is how it helps deliver things to the client, but I want to talk about how it fits into work habits.

I think in layers

I like to sneak up on the end solution in stages, and agile works with that just fine. I’m also more of a “beginning” person who gets lost a little in the “middle” and sometimes finds it hard to say “finished”, so the definition of tight stories, each of which has it’s own start, middle and end works well.

I race to the finish

Iterations allow me to pull that race-to-the-finish energy out of somewhere. That’s a good thing. Typically I personally do about 50% of the work in the last 33% of the available time, so when the available time is 90 days, the last 30 are miserable. Breaking the project up into iterations has really made life better, and the overall project less stress free. If you are “plodder” this may mean nothing - but for us who for some reason leave everything until the last minute, the more last minutes there are in a project the better.

I like ticking boxes

Although I DON’T like writing stories, test cases and tasks, I DO like ticking a box that says “Done”. It feels good, especially in a team environment.

I don’t like the available tools

Now the not so great news. In my current project, what worked really well was sticky notes, and paper stuck on the wall - but it’s hard to deliver status reports from that to a client. We have a company account for an agile online tool, and eventually the job of maintaining paper and this system became too much. To a certain extent, the visibility of the big picture of the project, and that at-a-glance notion of how things were going was lost.

What I want from a tool is:

• Visibility
• Ease of use
• Minimalism
• Layers of functionality - so I can pick and choose how deep I want to go

.. so I’m going to build it.

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.