Typo 4.0.3 To Mephisto with Rails 2.0

Nov 272007

I have just completed (well apart from moving any assets over) the switch from Typo to Mephisto. It was fairly painless. There was one :dependent declaration that needed fixing in the converter code and other than that pretty much everything I needed to know was in these two posts.

How I converted Type to Mephisto

Finally switched to Mephisto

The solution given for fixing your routes found in the later of these I found also needed this line:

Mephisto::Routing.redirect '/articles' => '/'

to get all my permalinks to work. The result on my memory usage is pretty dramatic and hopefully I won’t get as much spam…..

Facebook Friend Invites

Nov 272007

I have been messing around with Facebook apps recently and I found a couple of articles to be very helpful:

Tutorial On Developing A Facebook Platform Application With Ruby on Rails

Continuing Facebook Applications With Ruby on Rails

Fist in your Facebook

Continue reading »

Trackback Nightmare

Nov 202007

Further to the DDOS attack turns out that they had managed to create 43,046 trackbacks before it was stopped – so much for Akismet, or is it Typo – actually thats probably a little unfair considering I haven’t updated in a while!!

Anyway its still going on, I’ve just turned them off on the blog and set the server to deny all access to any url containing ‘trackback’. What a pain in the arse these bots / people are.

DDOS Attack

Nov 162007

Apologies to anyone who found this blog down over the last couple of days. For some reason I was subject to a DDOS attack!!! Wouldn’t really of thought of myself as a entertaining target really, but there you go…..

FCKeditor Plugin 0.4.2 Released

Nov 162007

I have released a new version of the FCKeditor plugin, it contains a few fixes, a couple of new features and the 2.5 beta version of the editor itself. I chose to use that version as it comes with support for Safari!!

One of the changes is a new rake task (based on code from David Jones over at Resolve Digital. This provides the ability to download and install any version of the editor you like (including the nightly builds). Simply run

rake fckeditor:download VERSION='2.4.3'

VERSION can be any of the existing versions (2.5b, 2.4.2, etc) or if left blank the nightly build will be installed. The version printed out of the currently installed version of the editor is actually hardcoded (I realised having created the release!!) so please ignore that for now.

Other fixes include fixing the file upload to check for StringIO as well as Tempfiles, and a load of tiding and some fixes (including the basis of the code to allow the use of the text area helper without instantiating an object) from Hongli Lai. There are a couple of issues I have noticed with the editor itself but I will post them a little later.

The plugin is available from Ruby Forge or by doing this:

ruby script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org//var/svn/fckeditorp/trunk/fckeditor

There is also a demo

The Down Side To Programming Rails!

Oct 112007

Or is that what all those tests are really for!!!!

Check out some other great cartoons at xkcd.com

Ten Undisputable Truths!!

Sep 122007
  • God exists
  • There are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq
  • Afganistan is now a much better place
  • Our destinies are controlled by the movements of the celestial bodies
  • The world is flat
  • President Bush deserves to be in power
  • Life coaches are qualified to do what they do
  • The internet is a series of tubes
  • Religion is a good thing
  • There are fairies at the bottom of the garden

Thanks to Richard Dawkins for reminding me I do have some reasonable opinions!!

Acts As Paranoid – Has One With Deleted

May 252007

Out of the box acts_as_paranoid comes with the ability to define a belongs_to relationship as including deleted records (although to get it to work you need to add require File.dirname(FILE) + ’/lib/caboose/acts/belongs_to_with_deleted_association’ to the init.rb file):

class ModelA < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :model_b, :with_deleted => true
end

This works quite nicely for that ModelA, but what happens if you want to include the deleted ModelA’s from ModelB through a has_one relationship…… its falls over. However that is easily fixed.

Continue reading »

FckEditor 0.4.1 Available

Apr 102007

This is a quick bug release to fix the outstanding install error. Sorry for the delay in providing a fix. You should have no problems now running:

rake fckeditor:install

Simple Semantic Web

Mar 152007

Following on from the content labels chat I had with Paul Walsh (documented here!!!!) I had some further thoughts about adding semantic content to websites.

I seems to me that a lot could be gained if we added something like the tag concept to the actual element itself, then when linking to other sites I could tag the link with meaning.

This would turn the web into a sort of topic map with the links themselves carrying information beyond just being a pointer.

Just a thought……

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