jacob swanner

another new blog

2008-12-27T00:00:00-05:00

I think I’ve changed my blog about as many times as I’ve written posts. This time I’m using Jekyll created by Tom Preston-Werner, and used by GitHub Pages.

I’ve been looking at Jekyll ever since it was released, and was really intrigued by the way it works. Now that I’ve been using it for the last few days, I’m really liking it. The biggest thing I’ve been trying to wrap my head around is the best way to deploy/update it.

I thought about just putting a git repo on my server and pointing the DocumentRoot at the _site directory. That way any time I wanted to add a new post, I would push the changes to the remote repo on my server and issue the jekyll command on the server. One problem I had with that approach is that I keep my repos in /home/git and web apps live in /home/deploy, with those users being in different groups and having different permissions. And, I just didn’t like serving this site from where I kept my repo.

I decided that I would keep the repo and deployment of the site separate, and just write a Rake command to push a new copy of the site to the server. What I ended up writing is basically a poor man’s Capistrano, but it works and is easy enough to maintain.

One of the downsides, but also one of the reasons I like Jekyll, is that it is just a static site. Because of that, there’s no facility for comments, tags, etc. I thought about using a comment service, such as Disqus and others, to provide that functionality; but, none work the way that I think they should. So, I think I’m going to write my own… not that I necessarily like to re-write the wheel, but it sounds like a fun project to work on. And, if it doesn’t work out, I’ll just switch to Disqus or something similar. So, for now there will be no comments, but feel free to email me: jacob@jacobswanner.com

I’ve still got a few things to finish up, such as creating an atom feed, adding a list of related posts, and tweaking the style sheets; but, for the most part I’m pretty happy.

screencasts and blip.tv

2008-12-13T00:00:00-05:00

So, I’ve been kicking around the idea of making some screencasts for some time. When I did my last presentation at ORUG, instead of doing a live demo, I used pre-recorded videos; I did this for a couple reasons, one to dip my toes in screencasts and two, instead of everyone there having to suffer through the mistakes I would inevitably make, I could edit out all my mistakes.

I always intended to put those videos online somewhere, but never did. Main reason was that those videos were intended for use at a presentation, and therefore did not include audio to explain what I was doing; because, I explained what was happening in the videos in the presentation. /rant

Fast forward to today, I still haven’t made any other screencasts and my blog has been fairly stagnant as well. I’m hoping to change both of those problems. I have some ideas for screencasts and how I want to make them. In order to make the screencasts the way I want to I need new software. So, I made a test screencast using a demo version of an application (ScreenFlow), and then uploaded it to blip.tv to see how it would look. Below is an embed of the same video. So, hopefully I’ll get off my butt and actually make the real screencasts I’ve been rambling about.

Update: After creating the last video and making the blog post, I realized that the makers of iShowU make a new product, iShowU HD, which does allow me to use iSight to add a video of myself. Below is an embed to a video using that software.

florida voters: amendment 2

2008-10-01T00:00:00-04:00

On the ballot this election cycle will be a proposed amendment, an amendment that defines marriage as being only with one man and one woman. According to Wikipedia the following is the text of the proposed amendment:

Inasmuch as marriage is the legal union of only one man and one woman as husband and wife, no other legal union that is treated as marriage or the substantial equivalent thereof shall be valid or recognized.

At first I thought this amendment was completely retarded because it would change nothing. Same-sex marriage is already illegal in Florida, in fact there are 4 laws in this state that make it illegal; yes 4 741.212(1), 741.212(2), 741.212(3), and 741.04. Therefore, if this amendment didn’t pass nothing changes. And, if it does pass, same-sex marriage is already illegal, so nothing changes. The only change would be if it did pass our state constitution would then define what marriage is, something in my opinion does not need to be there (no matter how it defines marriage).

Well, after looking into it a bit more it turns out that it could have other effects besides just whom one is allowed to marry. In other states that have passed “marriage protection” amendments, those amendments are being used to take away benefits from public employees, and could be used take away benefits and pensions from domestic partners. Not fuckin’ cool.

To learn more, there are sites that are for and against the proposed amendment.

Side note: I find it interesting that the site for the amendment has a red color scheme, while the one against has a blue one.

OpenID delegates

2008-04-09T00:00:00-04:00

This is more or less to add to what James Duncan Davidson has already said about OpenID and delegates.

Even though I had been using OpenID for a while prior to his post, I hadn’t set things up to use my own domain. After his post, I realized how easy it was to do. In his example he’s using myOpenID, which I don’t use; so, I had to figure out how to do it using my provider, Verisign Labs PIP. I had to do a bit of searching to find the server URL (https://pip.verisignlabs.com/server), but after that it was simple.

So, to amend James Duncan Davidson’s three easy steps, replace the HTML snippet in step 2 with the following:

Today I also tried out another OpenID provider built on Google App Engine, which authenticates with your Google ID; that’s a plus if you already have a Google account (such as Gmail) because that’s one less account you have to remember (isn’t less IDs part of the point of OpenID?). Anyway, the HTML snippet you need to use that provider is the following:

Update: The above provider built on Google App Engine is currently a bit buggy. I would shy away from changing any of your accounts to use that as your OpenID URL directly. That’s another plus of using your own domain as your OpenID URL, you can change the server you use on your site without having to change the accounts that use your OpenID URL.

lazy blogger, acts_as_conference

2008-02-14T00:00:00-05:00

When I put this blog up, I had all the intentions in the world to really use it. I wanted to write about all the cool/interesting/weird things I’d discovered. But, that is definitely not what has happened. But, I really want to start using it more.

I have ideas for things to write about. I recently attended actsasconference, I really enjoyed it, and even learned a little in the process. I’ve been attending the Orlando Ruby Users Group (orug) meetings for a while now, and presented at the last one. What I’ve learned from these activities are just some of the things I want to write about on here.

merb 0.9 & haml

2008-02-14T00:00:00-05:00

I’m currently playing around w/ merb 0.9, and using haml. Trust me things are not starting off super smoothly. But, I am enjoying using something new, something that’s changing daily; reminds me of when I first started using Rails, and all the frustration of not being able to figure something out, followed by the joy when it worked.

That said, there will probably be quite of few posts dealing with all the things that hang me up along the way, so that I have a place to come back to in the future to find the answers.

It appears as though there used to be a file called dependencies.rb (before I tried Merb). In this file you’d specify what dependencies your app needed, using something like:

dependencies "RedCloth", "merb_helpers"

dependency "RedCloth"

That was changed, and would then declare your app’s dependencies in config/init.rb. Apparently, since yesterday that has changed again slightly. You still declare your dependencies in config/init.rb, but instead of going in the body of the file, it now goes in the after_app_loads code block, as such:

Merb::BootLoader.after_app_loads do
  ### Add dependencies here that must load after the application loads:
  require "merb-haml"
end

Some might have noticed that you no longer call the dependency method, but just plain old require.

new host

2007-06-24T00:00:00-04:00

I switched to a new hosting company, (slicehost). It’s a little bit more than I was paying before, but has double the memory, along with other pluses. I’ve only been using their services for a few days, but I’m already glad that I switched.

proper blog

2007-06-11T00:00:00-04:00

I’ve upgraded my server specs, and loaded a proper blog (mephisto)

website uploaded

2006-11-10T00:00:00-05:00

Website has (finally!) been uploaded on to my server, so I now have a proper website

domain purchased

2006-11-04T00:00:00-05:00

Today I finally purchased my domain name (jacobswanner.com), as well as getting a web host (www.vpslink.com)