Posts

Adding Page Caching to Sitemaps

The shortest distance between two points is not a straight line. The shortest distance is zero. Admittedly, we’re not about to fold space or do time travel, but you get the idea. Likewise, for any web framework, the fastest way to deliver content to clients is to not use the framework at all, but let the webserver serve static files to clients. In Rails this means using page caching and leave the heavy lifting to the webserver. Keeping your cache fresh and still maintaining stellar performance might seem like a daunting task, but Rails gives you quite a bit of help, so it is actually not that hard to do. ...

Creating Sitemaps with Comatose CMS

For some time now, I’ve been using Comatose CMS for client sites. It is quite possible the smallest Rails based CMS, having only the features you need for most sites and flexible enough to allow you to extend it if you need to. Whenever you’re doing content publishing, you should make it as easy as possible for search engines to find and catalog our content. In this post I will show you how you can create a simple Sitemap from a Comatose CMS. ...

Hello world, webby!

You might wonder what is going on with this site right now, and it might look very incomplete at the moment you are viewing it. I am rebuilding the website using Webby, a small web generation tool. It is purely a learning experience, but with a very tangible end goal: an easy-to-manage blog. Predictions are that the site will be updated at highly irregular intervals, as I am hacking away at just about everything at once. ...

How to create un-indexable content for missing javascript warnings

At Gazebo we love to use unobtrusive enhancement to make our solutions available to the biggest possible audience, and greatly improve the experience for users with sophisticated user-agents. This usually means: Create semantic, valid markup, which can be read by any browser, including phones Add styling via CSS, to make it look nice in modern, sophisticated browsers Sprinkle a little javascript, to make it all behave nicely for supported user-agents To control decoration, when javascript IS available, I usually add js-enabled or something similar to the classname of the <body> element. This allows me differentiate the styling of widgets for when javascript is available, and allows a controlled fallback decoration, for when it is not. ...

Fixing Bus Error / Segfault in Rcov

We have recently run into problems with “rcov”:http://eigenclass.org/hiki/rcov crashing with seemingly random errors, like /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activesupport-2.1.1/lib/active_support/core_ext/symbol.rb:11: [BUG] Bus Error ruby 1.8.6 (2008-03-03) [universal-darwin9.0] Having CruiseControl.rb suddenly claim that all builds are broken, get’s to be very annoying. Working on a large project without coverage reports is just not the same, once you get hooked on thoroughly testing the application you’re working on. After some hunting around on Google, it turns out that others have run into similar problems. ...