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I just googled something I’ve always wanted to know how to do in vim, and was surprised how quickly I found the answer.

In vim, there are separate modes for searching and commands. This generally works well as they have separate completion buffers and since I do them a lot, it keeps my command history from cluttering up my search history and vice versa. The area where I’ve wished that they were unified is when I want to convert from a search to a substitution expression. Normally in vim you do search expressions in search mode and command expressions in command mode. For example, if I wanted to search for trailing whitespace I might type:

/\s\s*

If I want to replace it with an empty string through the whole file I might type:

:%s/\s\s*//g

I can’t remove the / at the front of the command line with a backspace and replace it with a colon, so until I learned the tip I’m about to reveal I had to retype it. No longer.

The StackOverflow answer I found for the query, Convert vim / search to search and replace without retyping regular expression, suggests this remarkably simple technique:

You can type

/search_term

and then

:%s/<ctrl-r>// etc

where you actually press ctrl+r and then / to insert the search term.

It works! No longer do I desire for search and command modes to be unified.

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I find vim’s :lcd command to be quite useful. For a long time I didn’t use it, mainly because I didn’t understand how it works.

First, using it is simple. It works just like :cd. You type :lcd path/to/directory in command mode. The path is relative to the current directory, so :lcd .., :lcd ~/Desktop, and :lcd /etc/apache2 all work.

The :lcd command changes the path of the current window. The current window is the current frame within the current tab. Now, what’s really neat, is that a new window (created from commands such as :sp and :tabedit) gets the local directory of the window it’s created from.

Most plugins respect it. Both Command-T and ack.vim search within the local current directory. Another plugin, fugitive, bases its commands on the git repository of the current file so it works smoothly with different local directories as well.

Bang commands (like :!cp README.md ~/Desktop) also use the local current directory.

Finally, after using it for a while it gets easy to tell which directory I’m in. The status line displays the path of the current file based on the local current directory, so if I know where the current file is I can quickly figure out where the local current directory is.

I used it the other day with bundle show to dig through the source of two dependencies of my Rails project to better understand them.

If you use vim and haven’t got in the habit of using :lcd I highly recommend it. If you use another editor and wish it handled working in multiple directories gracefully, consider giving vim a shot!

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…and I like the new .on() and .off() API for setting up events.

I wrote some code that uses it, just for practice.

$.fn.tree = function(data) {
  var $el = $(this),
      html = [];
  
  function renderNode(node) {
    if (typeof node === "object") {
      html.push("<ul>");
      for (var key in node) {
        if (node.hasOwnProperty(key)) {
          html.push("<li><strong>" + key + ": </strong>");
          html.push(typeof node[key] == "object" ? renderNode(node[key]) : node[key]);
          html.push("</li>");
        }
      }
      html.push("</ul>");
    }
  }
  
  renderNode(data);
  $el.html(html.join(""));
  
  $el.on('click', 'strong', function() {
    $(this).closest('li').find('ul').toggle(200);
  });
};

$("<div>").appendTo("body").tree({
  name: {
    first: "Benjamin",
    last: "Atkin"
  },
  location: {
    city: "Boulder",
    state: "CO"
  },
  accounts: {
    social: {
      twitter: "http://twitter.com/benatkin",
      facebook: "http://facebook.com/atkin",
      gplus: "http://gplus.to/benatkin",
      identica: "http://identi.ca/benatkin",
      rstatus: "http://rstat.us/bat"
    },
    creative: {
      github: "http://github.com/benatkin",
      blog: "http://benatkin.com/"
    }
  }
});

Nothing too fancy.

Repositoryjquery
Ownerjquery
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After setting up some Heroku addons I got used to using environment variables to specify add-on settings. I then started using them for non-addon settings, and now I’ve started using them outside of Heroku a bit too.

One area where they work well is for a Heroku-deployable open source app with OmniAuth GitHub OAuth integration. Here is an example initializer (config/initializers/omniauth.rb) from a RailsCast:

Rails.application.config.middleware.use OmniAuth::Builder do
  provider :github, 'CLIENT_KEY', 'CLIENT_SECRET'
end

I would replace CLIENT_KEY and CLIENT_SECRET with my own keys, but I can’t commit them to a public repository, or else another person could use them and I could be held responsible. Rather than leave out my client key and secret using a .gitignore and a sample config, I can use an environment variable:

Rails.application.config.middleware.use OmniAuth::Builder do
  provider :github, ENV['GITHUB_CLIENT_KEY'], ENV['GITHUB_CLIENT_SECRET']
end

With a note in the README about the environment variables used, this should be easy for developers to set this up on their own private apps.

So far I’ve been typing environment variables into the command line when running apps locally and on my VPS, but that’s about to change. I may specify them in my nginx config, which is backed up to a private git repo. I’m not sure yet. Also I’m going to dump out my Heroku environment variables and back them up too.

Repositoryomniauth
Ownerintridea
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Here is a list of a few awesome sites offering tools for learning Rails:

PeepCode

Pricing: Starts at $12 for one screencast; Twitter: @peepcode and @topfunky

I bought my first PeepCode screencast back in 2008, before Rails and Merb merged. It’s been around for a while, but Geoffrey Grosenbach does a great job of keeping it up-to-date. There are now a number of screencasts about current topics of interest to the Ruby on Rails community, including Rails 3, Backbone.js, PostgreSQL, CoffeeScript, and John Barnette.

Railscasts

Pricing: Free weekly episodes, additional weekly episodes and revised episodes for $9/mo (RailsCasts Pro); Twitter: @railscasts

Railscasts is great for keeping up on Ruby On Rails, and because it’s free, it’s also great for recommending to people who are curious about Rails but not ready to spend money to help them learn it. Ryan Bates is great at explaining things. He covers a wide variety of topics in his screencasts and presents them in a nice format with code snippets.

Update: since I posted this Ryan Bates released Railscasts Pro, which is fantastic!

Ruby on Rails Tutorial

Pricing: $26 (book), $85 (screencasts), $95 (both); Twitter: @railstutorial

Michael Hartl is a physicist who does a number of other things (see his about page) including Web Development with Ruby On Rails. I’ve watched all of his screencasts; they’re fantastic. He builds a web application TDD-style and teaches many different concepts including MVC and how TDD can help with authorization (which is trickier than authentication IMO).

Rails Apps

Pricing: Free; Twitter: @rails_apps

I always thought that the Rails Starter App templates were cool, but they were missing something: in-depth tutorials and a comparison between the many different templates and quick-start tools. Daniel Kehoe has provided both and many more useful resources in his Rails Apps GitHub account.

Code School

Pricing: Free (one substantial free product), $45-55 (single paid products); Twitter: @codeschool

Code School is a set of tutorials designed to help developers to quickly get up to speed building web applications. Gregg Pollack and Envy Labs have been doing podcasts and screencasts for quite some time, and it’s not surprising that they still do it, because they’re very enthusiastic in front of a camera and a microphone.

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I put my SyntaxHighlighter Brush Pack on WordPress.org, using the excellent git to WordPress.org Subversion instructions to preserve history.

In order to check that it works, I moved my plugin (installed as a git submodule) outside the wp-content/plugins directory, went to Add Plugin, searched for it, and instructed WordPress to automatically install it. It works! The following CoffeeScript code was highlighted using it:

launch() if ignition is on

If you use WordPress and either CoffeeScript or Clojure, I’d love for you to give it a shot!

Repositorywordpress-syntaxhighlighter-brush-pack
Ownerbenatkin
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Faraday

Faraday is an high-level HTTP client library with middleware support, and support for multiple low-level HTTP client libraries. It can be used just by adding it to the Gemfile and running bundle install, just like RestClient can. Or, a different library can be added to the Gemfile and then used through one of its adapters.

Faraday Middleware

The faraday_middleware library, which was started by Wynn Netherland and has been maintained by Erik Michaels-Ober, contains a bunch of middlewares for authentication, response parsing, and convenient hash objects.

Faraday Stack

Faraday Stack is a pretty generic yet convenient API client. It encodes JSON, parses XML and JSON, follows redirects, and raises errors. In short, it works like many expect custom API clients to work, yet it can be used anywhere, just by specifying the domain. It doesn’t include authentication, which ships with many API clients, but that can be added easily by looking at the source for the stack and adding authentication from another library into it. It’s better than many custom API clients, so if an API client is the slightest bit frustrating, it may be a good idea to use faraday_stack instead.

I really like Faraday, because it lets me choose which HTTP library I’m going to use, which is different between Ruby and JRuby. I often use Faraday by itself even when a custom API client is available. I also will use it in irb (next time, pry) instead of curl at times.

Repositoryfaraday
Ownertechnoweenie
Repositoryfaraday_middleware
Ownerpengwynn
Repositoryfaraday-stack
Ownermislav
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After installing the CoffeeScript brush for SyntaxHighlighter Evolved, I wanted a Clojure brush. Rather than install another plugin, I created a combined plugin, with a generic name so I can add more semi-popular languages to it, called SyntaxHighlighter Evolved: Brush Pack. I’m planning on putting it in the WordPress Plugin Directory.

To show it off, here’s a Clojure web server example, from Heroku:

(ns demo.web
  (:use ring.adapter.jetty))

(defn app [req]
  {:status 200
   :headers {"Content-Type" "text/plain"}
   :body "Hello from Clojure!\n"})

(defn -main []
  (let [port (Integer/parseInt (System/getenv "PORT"))]
    (run-jetty app {:port port})))

Not bad. The :keywords and curly braces, which aren’t a part of Common Lisp or Scheme, are neatly highlighted. The code sample above, by the way, gets the port from an environment variable, which is how Heroku makes it easy for applications on different platforms to adapt to their environment.

For the CoffeeScript highlighter, which I mentioned in my last post, here’s app.coffee from express-sinatra:

express = require('express')
app = express.createServer()

# Setup Template Engine
app.register '.coffee', require('coffeekup')
app.set 'view engine', 'coffee'

# Setup Static Files
app.use express.static(__dirname + '/public')

# App Routes
app.get '/', (request, response) ->
  response.render 'index'

# Listen
app.listen process.env.PORT || 8000

This one also is ready to deply on Heroku!.

Please add an issue if you’d like to see another SyntaxHighlighter brush included!

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I archived this blog using HTTrack for a few months because it was killing my tiny (256MB) improperly-configured slice and I was considering switching my blog engine. It worked surprisingly well, except I couldn’t write new posts. My blog is still #1 for my name on Google and I didn’t detect any broken links. It wasn’t the first time I used HTTrack; I also used it to download a couple websites.

During this time I’ve been posting to tumblr and posterous. I had a short info page linking to both of these blogs and my then-archived WordPress blog, which was previously at http://benatkin.com/weblog/. During this time I’ve been following WordPress and watching it grow, and wanting to get involved with it. I still want to use other CMSes, but I decided that I would switch benatkin.com back to WordPress and explore other CMSes on different sites.

For several months I’ve had a slightly beefier CMS that I prepaid a year for. I got two extra IP addresses on it so I can run more than one web server and have multiple SSL sites. I’m running both Apache and nginx so I can learn both of them. I’m using Apache to host this blog, and nginx to redirect to it from the www and blog subdomains.

It feels good to be back on WordPress. Many friends have benefited from WordPress’s customizability and ease of use. I also like it from a software freedom perspective. I tend to favor non-copyleft licenses to copyleft licenses like the GPL, which WordPress uses, but the bottom line is that people are in control of their site and their data. They are free to switch hosting platforms and even export their data to another CMS and set up URL redirects if needed. Finally, there are many great plugins and themes available, due to the size of the WordPress community. I hope one day to go to a WordCamp.

If you’re thinking about setting up your own custom WordPress.org blog, I encourage you to give it a shot!

Some configuration details follow.

Continue reading →

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I like seeing URLs, whether in the link text or by hovering over a link. They are often truer to their content than what the person adding the link writes. I always have the status bar turned on in my browsers. It annoys me that there is no status bar on the iPad. It pleases me that Chrome shows URLs without taking up space for a status bar, by fading them in when hovering over a link. But a significant percentage of URLs aren’t worth a whole lot. They are either too long, or contain nothing identifying but numbers.

Some say that URLs will go away. But do they have to? If people still care about them, I don’t think so. That’s why we need URLs worth caring about. Just like we need buildings worth caring about, and neighborhoods worth caring about:

So how ’bout it?

(Yes, I realize that this blog’s urls suck, and don’t have to. I plan to change that soon.)

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I had some issues upgrading to Django 1.2.1, and needed to roll Django back to 1.1.2. I searched for “Downgrading Django”, and didn’t find instructions, so now that I’ve figured it out, I’m posting instructions here.

First, if you’re using easy_install, I suggest switching to pip. It has more features, is better designed, and uses the same repositories, so it’s easy to upgrade. To install it, type sudo easy_install pip.

To install Django 1.1.2, type sudo pip install Django==1.1.2. When I ran this, pip automatically removed the newer version of Django, and the two glitches I was encountering with the admin interface went away. Once I figure out what caused the glitches, I’ll upgrade back to Django 1.2 so I can take advantage of its new features.

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I added a new feature to grem: if you’re somewhere in your ~/github directory, you can simply type “grem” and the program will use launchy to open an appropriate page on GitHub in the default browser.

For example:

This is handy, because often I’m in someone’s repo and I wonder what else they worked on. All I have to do now is go up a directory or a few, and run “grem” with no arguments, and I’m there!

I chose to make it go to a repo, rather than a directory in the tree, when I’m in a subdirectory of a repo, for simplicity’s sake. This way, I don’t have to worry about when a directory has been added to a local copy of a repo but not the github repo.

What do you think? Is this command-line tool useful? Do you think my directory structure makes sense? Are there any other ways you can think of that I can take advantage of having a system for organizing my copies of repositories?