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December 31, 2006
Eat your own dog-food
I'm officially working on a CMS.
What the hell does that have to do with Dog food?
The saying means that a company should always use its own products. If there is a problem with the CMS (currently unnamed but not unloved) then I should be the first to know about it.
Microsoft apparently uses its own products. No wonder it takes them so long to develop new versions of their operating sytems - har har!
This means that as soon as it is up to snuff, I will be converting 5thpercentile to start using my CMS.
Its not that I dont like MoveableType - I do and use it myself and on customers sites with happiness and satisfaction all round. Its just that I am a lazy fecker and I need some pressure (other than the ever present threat of homelessness and starvation) to get me to finish the project in a reasonable time-frame.
Wish me luck! I hope it tastes good!
Posted by dottie at 4:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
'Templates' is a reserved word in Rails
Feck it!
I had started coding up my CMS (slick! wait til you see it!) and had chosen to use a table in the DB schema called, innocently enough I thought, 'Templates' which of course held all the templates that the system would be using to create nicely formatted XHTML from the data stored in the DB.
I kept getting a weird error whenever I tried to add a new Template:
undefined method `assign_variables_from_controller' for ...
Head.Scratch. WTF?
Poked about a bit in the API, restarted WebBrick a few times and then decided to hit Google.
Templates is a reserved word huh?
OK
I rolled back all the migrations (how great are they? Very. Very very. Very very very). I decided to rename the 'Templates' table to 'JellyMoulds'. Then I thought I should be less flippant with the application that was meant to be making me my living in the coming months.
Clickety clik - off to dictionary.com - and a quick check in the Thesaurus.
I settled on 'Stencils'
I still might go back to 'JellyMoulds'
;)
So don't forget - TEMPLATES is a RESERVED WORD IN RAILS
Posted by dottie at 4:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 9, 2006
Obscure tags
Well.
I went through the list and the only ones I don't use are:
- blink - for reasons
- data url - would be useful for CMS and the like if it was cross-browser supported
- abbr - again lack of cross-browser support
- bdo - why you would want to reverse you text I dont know - unless you feared persecution from the Roman Catholic Church of course
- del & ins - if you are maintaining documents and need to show the history of any edits this might be useful, but why not use a wiki or version management tool? silly.
- ruby - microsoft losing the plot again -
WTF does this tag do?? - marquee - hmm. Can't believe this is still supported....
- isindex - jaysus. I mean... jaysis! WTF? A tag that goes in the head of the page rather than the body?
- big - you'll be asking me to use font tags next!
A nice little roundup. They almost made me feel nostalgic for the good old days of tables and spacer gifs. NOT!
Posted by dottie at 7:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack