Hello Jekyll.
I’m behind the curve and finally moved my old neglected website to a new neglected website. This has, for a long while, been on my list of things to get to. The reasons why are too many to count, but at the core the wordpress experience is a terrible chore. Jekyll, once it’s all set up and ready to go, moves into the background. It’s an afterthought. I can now concentrate on writing - not updating it every few weeks, not learning a new UI every several point releases, not worrying about security vulnerabilities, and a complete lack of a WYSIWYG editor. Free at last!
This is the first time I’ve published a site with Jekyll so here are a few tips and resources I picked up:
- Ben Balter’s wordpress to Jekyll exporter plugin. I couldn’t (wouldn’t) have been able to move over the last several years’ worth of embarrassing drivel to this without it.
- The posts exported from that plugin are saved with permalinks not containing the trailing index.html. Jekyll will complain if that path doesn’t contain a file. The following will run through the posts with sed and tack on the
index.html to the end of your permalink:
find . -name \*.md -exec \
sed -i "" '/permalink/s|$|index.html|' {} \;
- As advertised, the jekyll-s3 gem just works. It took me all of a minute to get things set up and my files uploaded to S3.
- One bump I ran into had to do with using Amazon’s cloudfront CDN in front of S3. The root url for my domain, without
index.html, displayed some sort of permission error. If I went directly to the cloudfront address it worked fine. After plenty of googling I gave up. S3 alone is fine enough for me right now.
- S3 is one of a few hosting options that don’t make hosting your site with a naked domain possible. To get around this use the free naked domain redirect from WWWizer.
- If you’re using GitHub pages then using prose.io is a no-brainer. It hooks into github seamlessly and allows you to publish directly from the app. If all blogging platforms had UX half as good, the internet would be a better place. Excellent work. (Hat-tip to Kyle Fiedler for introducing me to prose.io)
- If you like editing markdown locally then check out Mou. It’s my editor of choice. On the iPad I’ve enjoyed Byword, thanks to its integration with Dropbox.
- Heard from Pieter Joost on twitter letting me know about wercker. Werker is a content continuous delivery platform in the cloud. You can leverage its power to do the content generation and deployment process for you. Check it out if you’re in need!
Finally, I must give credit where credit is due. If it weren’t for my friend Dan Pererra’s willingness to let me lift the markup and style from his own website, perrera.com/blog, then I don’t think I would have made this move. It’s clean, responsive and, like Jekyll, it puts the content up front and center. Check out Dan’s, and all his wonderful business partners’, work at the Outfit. They’re all fantastic people (and great to raise a glass with). Thank you, Dan!
06 Oct 2011
#
I started writing this over at Hacker News and figured I would re-post it here.
I, just now, walked into my home office after a trip to my doctor for a check-up … a check-up I’d been putting off for 2 years or so. The timing is impeccable with what happened yesterday in Mr. Jobs’ passing. Health and my personal well-being have never been more important to me than it is now. I have lost a little over 50 pounds in the last 6 months because, well, I couldn’t ignore my health problems any longer. It got to be increasingly important that I pay attention.
Other than the weight, what else have I lost? My sister, Anna. She was 36 years old. Anna died from a pulmonary embolism while she was getting ready to go to work as an ICU nurse. Ironically, she was a nurse who rarely (if ever) saw a doctor and ended up passing away because she didn’t know she was prone to easy blood clotting. I miss her tremendously, as a human being and a true beautiful spirit, more than I can write here. She was way way greater than the sum of her parts.
If that type of profound loss is not a wake up call, I don’t know what is.
Why will I miss Steve Jobs, the icon — a man that I’ve never met? Not the iphones and macbooks and ipads that I’ve bought and enjoyed immensely – but the lesson that tomorrow is no sure thing and to live today as if it’s not. This particular lesson is what I’ll always remember about this man. He helped us get all of this wonderful STUFF, purchased with money, but the journey that got Apple there is entirely without a price tag. So no, I won’t miss Steve Jobs, “the man” like I’ll miss Anna. I will remember his legacy for what it provided me – the reminder to always stay foolish, always stay hungry.
While reflecting on things related to loss I’ve learned how important it is to hug your family members – tell them how much you love them. Next, tell them to literally take care of themselves – both physically and spiritually. You and I want them around, and happy, for as long as possible.
#
Was just pointed to an article at Wired about this:
If millions of Christians suddenly disappear from the face of the Earth as the opening act for Armageddon, Threat Level thinks most nonbelievers will be too busy freaking the hell out to check their e-mail. But if they do log in, now they can be treated to some post-Rapture needling from their missing friends and loved ones, courtesy of web startup YouveBeenLeftBehind.com.
For just $40 a year, believers can arrange for up to 62 people to get a final message exactly six days after the Rapture, that day when — according to Christian end times dogma — Christians will be swept up to heaven, while doubters are left behind to suffer seven years of Tribulation under a global government headed by the Antichrist
Wow. There are no words to describe my complete and utter disbelief (aaaahhhh, a double entendre — see what I did there?).
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I have a strange love/hate relationship with our Wii.
On one hand, I love it for the few really great titles that have been released since it was introduced – Phantom Hourglass, Mario Galaxy, Guitar Hero 3, and the very latest in the Wii pantheon of “most favorite” … by a long shot … the new Mario Kart. All of these games have miraculously perfected (for the most part) what can be done on the hardware available to it. All provide hours, weeks even, of fun that can be had. Mario Kart alone has gotten me to break through the barrier of getting Sara’s entire family playing one game all at once. That’s a feat I would have never, ever, suspected to be overcome. For that alone, I give the folks at Nintendo mega props. Kudos for getting the non-gamer to enjoy sitting in front of a TV as a family, playing your console.
Which leads to this question – what about the non-casual gamer? The gamer who bought the Wii hoping to milk literal *months* of time paying for and playing your console’s games? What about the gamer with the wireless 80211G router sitting in the corner of the room beckoning for the flood of packets that will connect to the thousands, nay – millions, of other Wii owners also connected to the internet? What if you’re one of those gamers who dashed to your local store to purchase Mario Kart with hopes that you’ll finally get a chance to race your friends in Waluigi Stadium and Delfino Square with seemless internet support?
Guess what pal? You got screwed. This is where the “hate” part comes in, not necessarily for the Wii in general, but for one particular aspect of it.
I’ve been playing this version of Mario Kart for almost a month to the day now, and while it’s a fun game to play at home with a friend or two, it’s crystal clear that Nintendo dropped the ball on its internet game-play. Not only for Mario Kart, but for all of the internet enabled games. Why? Let’s run it down.
- Putting your disc into the Wii and bringing up the game, or even jumping into the Mario Kart Wii Channel, will not automatically sign you into WFC. It will, instead, make you log into WFC before you can check to see if your friends are online. If they’re not online, shouldn’t it just leave you logged in for the off chance that your friends will log in soon? No. Not unless you sit there staring at the WFC menu screen while you wait. Instead, you’ll log OUT of WFC and head back to your Kart Menu.Why?!Why not leave a user logged in throughout his whole game-playing session? I should be able to play a single player game, working my way through the circuits, and maybe get a notification that “Matt” just logged in, and joined a regional network game.
- 12-digit numbers to be associated with, instead of a “Gamer Tag”-ish scheme like the folks in Redmond came up with. When you run into your friend at work, and you exclaim – “Dude – I just got Kart last night! I’m PSYCHED! I played it for a while and even got online!”. Your friend will reply with something to the effect of – “Perfect! Now we can play against each other online!”…pause …“So uhhh … what’s your 12 digit ‘license’ number?”After said exchange, someone in the background would be cue’d up to press the play button here. Because the both of you will be left thinking how stupid it is that you have not just one, but two random numbers you will never remember. You WILL both be irritated and wondering what the hell the deal is with all these random “friend codes”. Having said that – Add me to your list … 0731-5563-2578 … and let me know what yours is. I promise I’ll add you, no matter how irritating it is :).
-
After some friends bought their own copy of Mario Kart, I started receiving some messages to my Wii Messageboard saying something to the effect of – “Matt has sent you his Mario Kart information. If you would like to add him to your list, click Start”. Alright that’s not so bad. It keeps me from having to input those stupid numbers, right? Not too shabby!When I thought of sending my own notification to those people I found worthy enough of going through the trouble of bugging for their Wii friend codes and inputting them into the Wii, I was left scratching my head. Where in the hell in this game is it that I send my message from? ** **I even went so far as to look in the manual! (If you’re a male reading this right now, you might now think less of me. Who the hell reads the manual for help, right?) Guess what? Nothing in the manual that I could find.
After a bunch of google’ing (most of which was completely fruitless. What are you going to come up with when searching for “Wii Message board Mario Kart”? That’s right – a few hundred ACTUAL wii message boards!) and copious cursing, I found it. In the WFC menu at the very bottom, not only inconspicuous, but also sharing the same menu button as other option. Why? Wouldn’t they suspect their users will want the fastest and easiest way to get connected with their friends? At the very least they could have documented how to do so, no?
So there you have it – “Invite Wii Friends”. Tonight it was only the second item it will have to cycle around to. Other nights it was the third, because a tournament was being featured in that same button. The kicker with this bit? After I sent invitations to about 5 or 6 friends, it would not show up anymore. That’s just perfect.
- Lastly – the lack of any web presence for the game. If you go to the official website it’s pretty much just a bunch of marketing. No way to manage your friends. No way of viewing your best times/score. No way of viewing the rankings in your area, state, country, anything. With all that data they undoubtedly have, couldn’t they put something together that could at least generate some ad revenue? Instead of a single site that noone will care to go back to again?
If I were a true nit-picker (contrary to this post, I really am not) I could probably come up with a handful of other gripes, but I won’t. These four points above are the tip of the Kart iceberg, and are enough to only get me to come to my semi-neglected website to vent about how Nintendo screwed the pooch on what might be the one most important part of their Mario Kart franchise.
Disconnect? I really don’t want to, but I guess I have no choice.
I’d like to know what you think. Leave a comment at the bottom of this post’s page and let me know if I’m off base or not.
Over at Thredded I am still using Rails 1.2.3 (I’m a little gun-shy to upgrade to 2.0) and, of course, felt that slugged links were necessary for both search engine optimization and making things like assessing site analytics a little easier. It doesn’t even need justification as it’s a matter of fact and necessity for any and all social platforms – blogging, forums, etc. With RoR 1.2.3 the best way to get your links slugging it out was to incorporate a plugin like acts_as_sluggable. It works like a charm, really, and I’ve never had any case where I needed extra functionality.
… Until now. I’ve started incorporating some auto-updating magic to Thredded and needed to grab a lot of data back from an AJAX call (sorry Steve – XHR) in the form of JSON. All well and good so far. But, when new links needed to be built on the client side, I didn’t have my handy built-in Rails ActiveRecord overrides to spit out my new slugged-up link! What to do?!
I dug through the plugin source and found the function that built the url’s slug -
def make_slug(string)
string.to_s.downcase.gsub(/[^a-z0-9] /, '-').gsub(/- $/, '').gsub(/^- $/, '')
end
… And thought the quickest solution was just to rewrite it as a simple JS function.
function slug(id, title)
{
title = title.toLowerCase().replace(/[^a-z0-9] /g,'-').replace(/- $/g,'').replace(/^- $/g,'');
return(id '-' title);
}
#
With the amount of music I listen to while working it’s imperative that the eardphones I wear are comfortable, noise-canceling, of decent quality and easy to tuck away. I made the obligatory shot at trying out the stock ipod earbuds way back in the early ipod days, but they didn’t fit my oddly shaped ears. The sony earbuds were pretty good but were too easy to break down with replacable earbuds too easy to fall off and lose. I didn’t want to continue repeating the cycle of purchasing new ones every 6 months, so I made my first leap into the world of semi-expensive eardphones/earbuds with a pair of Shure E2C’s after my mother’s dog, Bailey (God love him), literally ate the last pair of Sony eardphones I would end up owning.
You would think, pay a reasonable premium for the product with the great reviews, and enjoy, right? I thought the same when I first bought the E2C’s. Great sound, fit very snug in my ears, came with multiple styles of earbuds (plastic, foam, etc) and turned out to be what I thought was a great purchase. Worst case scenario – they don’t work out, something happens, and I return it thanks to Shure’s great return policy. To my great dismay this turned out to NOT be the case. After the post-purchase consumer/product honeymoon phase, the wire covering around the part of the headphones that wrapped behind the ears, started to fray. It seemed as if it just withered away after a good amount of time using them – about 9 or 10 months – to the point where the wire covering started digging into the skin behind my ears. The sound quality started to then degrade before the final straw, the exposed wires seemingly shocking me every few days. It’s possible that the shocking part could have been psychosomatic – but after the 5th or 6th time, I would doubt it.
The most disappointing part after all is said and done is that this happened to not one, but two different pairs of E2C’s in the past couple years. After the first pair frayed I purchased the second with hopes that if it happened again, I would be more vigilant on getting it replaced by Shure thanks to the 2-year warranty policy. The warranty, however, instead of being the warm and fuzzy blanket to console myself in the malaise that is my failed, faulty and disintegrating earphones, is more trouble than it’s worth.
If they fail, I would have imagined they would *replace* the headphones. Do it like some computer retailers do – charge your credit card for a new replacement, ship it out to you immediately with instructions on how to ship it back. Once returned the charge on the credit card would disappear, right? That’s the kind of customer service I would expect especially since earphones are something one would use on an almost daily basis! Do I want to wait a few weeks while it’s being REPAIRED without my Flaming Lips, Ice Cube, Gnarls Barkley, Justin Timberlake or iTunes radio? No, not really!
But that’s how it goes. The onus is on you to send it back for *repair* and while you wait either be content in your sphere of silence, or purchase another pair of earphones to tide you over until your next pair of rice-paper wrapped earphones show up at your doorstep. To that, I say – “Fare thee well, Shure, for you have lost yourself a customer”. I am now jumping on the Etymotic Research bandwagon with hopes these last longer, and provide better customer support when I either do something stupid to destroy them (leave them to be eaten by Bailey) or the sweat glands around my ears melt these into oblivion as well. I’ll hold my breath and hope that the return policy with the people at Etymotic is better than Shure’s.
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… can be an immense pain in the toochis. Actually, it is, unequivocally, an immense pain. You can’t hope to solve it, you can only hope to momentarily fend off. The ipod, camera, external hard drive, keyboard, mouse, power cable … all expected to live in peace and harmony in the vicinity of what is most likely a laptop.
I had just (temporarily) solved my problem when I ran into this product via Uncrate called the Space Station, from BlueLounge. It tucks all of your cables underneath a small stand to rest your laptop up against, to place a small monitor on top of, maybe? From only the photos on the BlueLounge website you get the feeling that this might be a winner for those trying to come up with a solution to their own exponentially multiplying cable problem.
Has it really been (well over) a year since I last posted a single thing on
this weblog? It goes without saying that that is a crying shame. Woefully
neglected is too soft a phrase to use when it comes to signifying how little
I’ve done with joeloliveira.com in the past year and a half. This site turned
into an abandoned wasteland – deserted and stagnant.
Why? It borders on cliche, and could probably be filed within the “cop out”
category, but for me it begins and ends with my not having the energy or
motivation to write for my own website when I got home from work. I probably
could have written a paragraph or two while from work, but never felt that was
fair to my employers. What about those hours outside of work? Surely there are
moments I could steal past 5 or 6ish to write something? Absolutely! But then
the question still remains -
What to write about? There are numerous topics I ponder in the course of a
day but for months – no one single target subject. I’ve usually just posted
whatever events I’ve attended, fun nights out with friends, stupid miscellanea
found on the internet – nothing of consequence for the majority of folks on the
internet. To my friends and family – of course I know it’s interesting to YOU,
but to communicate over the internet in such a blanket manner feels a bit too
detached.
What now? Well things have changed – drastically! A little over a month
ago I left my job at Molecular, an internet consultancy. The company I’ve left
to work for is a very small and fledgling little operation – my own company.
After months of preparation, nerve-wracked second guessing and laying
groundwork with hopes I could pull this off I actually did it. As difficult as
it was to leave such a great group of people at Molecular and all the
opportunity they’ve allowed me in the past three years I decided that it was
the right time to make this next big step.
So far, so good. I’m excited. I am already engaged with a local ad agency
helping them with a handful of their (immense) interactive clients. This
site is going to evolve into my portfolio for anyone looking for a resource to
bang out nice, clean, rich interfaces with XHTML, CSS, javascript, and other
interesting and challenging web-based technologies.
To give you an idea as to what types of things I’m involved with – The past
year and change I’ve actually been encouraging and helping Sara with [her own
weblog][2]. Have I not told you about it yet? For shame! [Go visit and take a
look][2] at the wonderful work she’s been doing. In addition to playing
occasional tech-support and copy editor for Sara I’ve been putting in most
spare hours working on my own project(s). Instead of writing about it – I’ve
been trying to DO it. Think it’s difficult to post on a blog every day? Try
doing it when you’re attempting to master new tools in addition to supporting
the users who are helping drive your new project. It’s not easy.
The ultimate end-game will be to afford myself the time to work on those few
previously mentioned projects that have grown over the past few years to
something I’m hoping could blossom into something beyond “pet project” status.
Once I’m a little more comfortable with their status I will post announcements
here.
In the meantime, this site will very occasionally feature commentary on the
things I find interesting about what’s going on in my industry, maybe some
personal anecdotes, and hopefully some useful original content. Let’s just hope
it’s not another 16 or 17 months until I write another post.
03 Nov 2006
I’ve been holed up in my cave, growing a beard.
I have a strange love/hate relationship with our Wii.
With the amount of music I listen to while working it’s imperative that the eardphones I wear are comfortable, noise-canceling, of decent quality and easy to tuck away. I made the obligatory shot at trying out the stock ipod earbuds way back in the early ipod days, but they didn’t fit my oddly shaped ears. The sony earbuds were pretty good but were too easy to break down with replacable earbuds too easy to fall off and lose. I didn’t want to continue repeating the cycle of purchasing new ones every 6 months, so I made my first leap into the world of semi-expensive eardphones/earbuds with a pair of 
… can be an immense pain in the toochis. Actually, it is, unequivocally, an immense pain. You can’t hope to solve it, you can only hope to momentarily fend off. The ipod, camera, external hard drive, keyboard, mouse, power cable … all expected to live in peace and harmony in the vicinity of what is most likely a laptop.
I’ve been holed up in my cave, growing a beard.