everyday

A couple of minor bug fixes:

1. If you clicked on the word “tags:” at the bottom of each post you were taken to a page listing all of the tags used in this weblog. If you clicked on any of the tags, you were then taken to a page for editing the tags! So now, when you click on a tag from the list of all tags, you will be taken to a page listing all of the entries that have that tag. Still no “tag cloud” but getting closer!
2. The “updated” problem! When I was making new posts, they were all being listed as “updated”, until I went in to the database and physically changed the “updated_on” date to equal the “created_on” date. This was an error in my original logic, I was under the impression that “updated_on” would stay null until the post was actually updated. It turns out that “updated_on” is set whenever a change is made to the database, even when a new post is created. The fix for this problem was the addition of a column (field) in the posts table that would allow me to flag a post as being updated or not. This is actually more functional than my original approach. Before, if I were to make a minor edit to a post, the post would have considered itself to have been updated. While this wasn’t wholly inaccurate, it was misleading in that most people assume that an updated post has a moe substantive update than the correction of a grammatical error or a simple HTML tweak that doesn’t add anything new to the post. Now, when I edit a post I have to implicity set the “updated” column to display to the user that the post has been updated.

In case anyone is wondering, the second of the two fixes was accomplished easily using Ruby On Rails migration feature. The steps are outlined below

1. At the command line, enter: (I probably should have called it something like AddUpdatedColumnToPosts!)
   

   ruby script/generate migration AddUpdatedFieldToPosts

2. Edit the new migration as follows: (Note that MySQL does not support Boolean columns, but Ruby On Rails know this and handles it for you!)
   

   class AddUpdatedFieldToPosts < ActiveRecord::Migration
     def self.up
       add_column :posts, :updated, :boolean, :default => false
     end
     def self.down
       remove_column :posts, :updated
     end
   end

3. At the command line enter:
   

   rake migrate

4. Make the neccesary changes in the post controller, in my case I had to change to the logic that determined if the post had been edited or not.:
   

   <% if updated_on > created_on %>

   to:
   

   <% if params[:updated] == true %>

5. Once everything is good on the development side, commit the changes to the Subversion repository:
   

   svn add * --forcesvn commit -m "fix updated_on problem"

6. Now it is time to migrate the “Production” database! Log in to the server via the Secure Shell client of your choosing, navigate to your application’s directory and enter:
   

   rake migrate RAILS_ENV=production -t

7. If this all goes off without a hitch (it won’t, trust me!), then your final step is to “deploy” your updated application code:
   

   rake deploy

The beauty of all of this is that I am doing completely disconnected development on my computer at home, once everything works the way I want it to I simply upload my changes to the server, make the neccesary database changes and deploy. If it fails at any point, I can very easily revert to the previous state! I love Ruby On Rails!

This post has been updated to show what an updated post looks like.

I finally figured out how to create a tag cloud. Yay for me! It was rather difficult, not because the actual implementation was difficult, rather, because I don’t really understand the Ruby programming language yet. I am learning more every day though. I was able to take an example of a tag cloud from craz8’s weblog and work my own solution. I think my solution is a little more elegant because I was able to remove a recursion, hopefully making it faster, but definitely making it look prettier (the code that is).

Here is some code from the helper that builds hash for the tag cloud:

def tag_cloud(tagged_items)

separation = 2
min = tagged_items.values.min.to_f
max = tagged_items.values.max.to_f - min
mult = (seperation / max)

tagged_items.each do |tag, count, fsize|
yield tag, count, ((count - min) * mult) + 1
end

end

Here is the call from the view that displays the tag cloud:

<% @page_title = "tag cloud"%>
<% @page_sub_header = "tag cloud" %>
<% tag_cloud(@tagged_items) do |tag, count, fsize| %>
<%= link_to(h(tag), {:action=> ’show’, :id => tag.id}, {:style => “font-size: #{fsize}em”}) %>
<% end %>

Easy wasn’t it?

You may have noticed that when clicking on the individual tags below any particular post that you will be taken to a list of the most recent posts that also contain that tag. While this is great, it was a little flawed. You see, it wasn’t ordering the results properly! They should be ordered by the date they were posted. Well, as it turns out the fix for this was relatively simple (as most things in Ruby and Rails are).

Original code:

@posts = if tag_name = params[:id]
Tag.find_by_name(tag_name).tagged
else
Post.all_posts
end

Corrected code:

@posts = if tag_name = params[:id]
Post.find(:all, :include => ‘tags’, :conditions => ["tags.name = ?", params[:id]], :order => “posts.created_on DESC”)
else
Post.all_posts
end

Hopefully this helps anybody with a similar problem. When I was working on this I kept running into MySQL errors about an invalid column name, the “?” in the condition was all it took to fix that. I don’t really know what that “?” does, but it works!

So I finally got this weblog up and running on Textdrive. I had run into a whole assortment of problems that I will chronicle in future posts to help alleviate the frustrations of others that may be attempting anything similar. Now I have to upload all of my previous posts from everyday (version 1). Please feel free to comment!

Commenting is not working right now, I am working on it!

This is so Technorati believes that I own this weblog: Technorati Profile

Some of you may have noticed that this weblog has been down for a while, so here is a re-cap of things I probably would have written about:

• I now have a girlfriend, and she is great! There will be more exciting news on this topic in the future.
• I now have a new job! I will be working for a high school district as a network technician.
• I finally got my Ruby On Rails powered weblog up an running. There will definitely be more entries on the trials and tribulations I suffered while working on this

Yet another update with no proof! I have worked out many little bugs that were, well, bugging me. The most buggy of them was the tagging. I wasn’t able to display a list of posts by tag if the tag had a space in it. So a tag of “Ruby On Rails” wouldn’t show any posts, but a tag of “RubyOnRails” would (no spaces). So the solution? After some time spent searching through the acts_as_taggable documentation and chatting with some fellow developers on IRC, I found that the following was the problem:

def show_by_tag
@posts = (Post.find_tagged_with(:any => params[:name])).reverse
@tag = params[:name]
end

Here is what I needed:

def show_by_tag
@posts = (Post.find_tagged_with(:any => params[:name], :separator => “+”)).reverse
@tag = params[:name]
end

Note the “:separator => ‘+’”. That is the key. You see when I go looking for a tag, it is listed as “Ruby+On+Rails”, the spaces are replaced with “+” symbols since the browser can’t have spaces in the address bar. So, after I pulled out a great deal of hair, and stayed up way too late I got it working! Yay Me!

Next major step will be testing, getting the code into Subversion for control and getting the new version of this weblog hosted. Keep your fingers crossed.

I am almost finished re-writing this weblog engine in RubyOnRails! And it is way better to boot. So far I have implemented the following:

• user authentication
• access control lists
• tags
• comments
• pretty URLs (sort of)

There has been a good deal of hulabaloo on the web regarding RubyOnRails (RoR). Claims that it makes coding 10 times faster abound, unfortunately I don’t think this is true. Perphaps when I get up to speed with RoR this will be the case, but not so much now. The list of things to do grows shorter, but it still exists:

• archive list
• tag cloud
• gallery