February 2012
5 posts
January 2012
11 posts
“It’s better to tell a short story well, than a long one poorly.”
– http://37signals.com/16
rails subdomains using webrick (script/server)
weekendonrails:
subdomains using webrick (script/server)
run this in the terminal:
mate /etc/hosts (or vi /etc/hosts if you don’t have textmate)
add “127.0.0.1 <SUBDOMAIN>.localhost.local” to your /etc/hosts
save
boot webrick by typing script/server
navigate your browser to http://<SUBDOMAIN>.localhost.local:3000
done.
“Hell is other people’s meetings”
– Merlin Mann
1 tag
That Thing I Was Going to Lookup
Earlier I ran an errand and while I was driving I had a thought and remember thinking “I need to look that up when I get home”. I got home, did a few things, ate dinner and just a minute ago, I realized I wanted to look something up. I have no idea what that something is, but I know there is definately a something floating around in my head somewhere that needs to be researched. Right...
2 tags
CoffeeScript Makes Writing JavaScript Suck Less
For years I’ve been working in languages that are loaded with “punctuation”. Semicolons, parenthesis, curly braces are just everywhere. Between C#, JavaScript and CSS, I think I reach for the opening and closing curly braces more than any other key on my keyboard. I recently decided to learn Ruby on Rails 1 and have found the sparse use of curly braces, parenthesis and other...
ifttt →
Pretty cool service to integrate your other services.
2 tags
More on Marked
So I recently decided that I would finally try to catch up and learn Ruby on Rails. As I go through the online guides, screencasts and tutorials, I like to keep notes for myself, usually in Evernote, but I am pretty much obsessed with TextMate so I find myself using it for notes before moving them into a notebook. Just the other day, I realized that I could take my notes in TextMate, use Markdown...
Happy New Year
I started out writing a very long post about all the stuff I did in 2011… It was a bigger year for me than I had originally thought. I decided to spare you all the really long post and just say this, if I have half as much fun and do half as many things in 2012 as I did in 2011, I’ll consider it a success!
Happy New Year!
December 2011
26 posts
1 tag
Happy Holidays
I just wanted to wish my small following Happy Holidays!
Some Light Reading
I also wanted to pass something along. A friend has been doing quite a bit of writing in his free time and after a year of hearing about it, I finally had the opportunity to read two of his works this week. He has shared one publicly on his blog and I’d like to pass it along… it is an interesting spin on the...
7 tags
The Beauty of Tagging
I’ve recently written about note taking and de-cluttering with Yojimbo. The common theme through both of these posts was organization of digital “stuff”. Both posts touched on how tagging has changed the way I store and find this “stuff”.
Tagging in Expected Places
Tagging has become ubiquitous on blogs and web sites that rely on user generated content such as...
Nice tip for multi-line editing in TextMate →
2 tags
nvALT Alternative For Windows Users
If you made it through my post on note taking and were interested in nvALT, but use Windows. I found an alternative that works just as well. It is called ResophNotes and is a free alternative for Windows.
I just installed it on my work machine the other day and so far it looks pretty good. I haven’t quite figured out how to navigate the entire app through the keyboard yet, but that is just...
4 tags
Clearing Out The Clutter With Yojimbo
The Problem
I wrote at length the other day about my current system for taking notes. Something else I’ve been working on fixing is how I store files. You store files in a hierarchy of folders and for most of us that’s just how it is. I’ve learned to work with the limitations of the hierarchical folder system and for the most part, it works for me. I create directories in a way...
2 tags
Renaming Files on a Mac
I have to admit that I felt a little stupid for not being able to figure this one out, and while I still do feel pretty stupid after I looked it up, I felt a little better.
Renaming a file in Finder on a mac is done through a “delayed click” where you basically double click with a long pause between clicks. The keyboard shortcut is the return key. I had to look this one up on google...
4 tags
Alternating Item Styles in ASP.NET ListView
I recently took my old blog offline, but this was one of the posts that I know at least a few people benefited from, so I am republishing it here for anybody looking for this information in the future.
If you have used the asp.net listview control, you know that you place your output elements in between the ItemTemplate tags. You may or may not have noticed that there is also an...
Path Website →
I’m not sharing this because I think the world needs another social network. I thought the video as the page background was a cool idea.
8 tags
Taking Notes
Every once in a while, I think back to when I never had to write anything down. I barely took notes in high school and college and I did just fine. I could remember everybody’s phone number, even addresses and directions. Then technology stepped in and I didn’t need to remember as much, so I got a bit more lax about memorizing things. Then I started working in technology and had so...
8 tags
Adding Code Formatting
The Goal
I wanted to have the ability to include code snippets in my blog posts and have them nicely formatted. I wanted this to happen without any additional markup in my posts and without having to modify my workflow in any way. This meant I needed code in my template to handle this automatically. I see no reason to reinvent the wheel, so I set about picking a javascript library to handle...
4 tags
Marked
When I decided to start using Markdown and TextMate to handle all of my blogging, the one thing that was lacking was a nice way to preview the output. TextMate has a markdown preview, but it wasn’t exactly what I wanted, so I would publish everything as a draft and preview it in the browser. This pretty much defeated the purpose of removing myself from the web based UI provided by Tumblr.
...
4 tags
Scheduled Automator Backups
The Problem
I recently setup Backblaze for backing my computer up to remote storage. I have Time Machine setup on my machine, but that backup goes to a local drive. That is great for recovering files that I mess up along the way, or restoring my system if I kill it while experimenting with something in the terminal, but in the event of theft, fire, etc. the time machine drive goes with the...
2 tags
A Public Apology
I Would like to publicly apologize to my one loyal reader, and anybody else who has been a subscriber to my RSS feed from a previous address. I know I have changed the location of my blog multiple times, forcing anybody who cares to update their RSS feeds and I know I have a habit of letting each blog die a slow death due to neglect, but for the foreseeable future, I like what Tumblr has to offer...
6 tags
Posting to Tumblr via TextMate Part II
So immediately after setting up my environment to allow me to write and publish directly through TextMate, I had to follow-up and do a couple more things.
I setup a basic template in TextMate so the YAML header information (post title, type of post, tags, etc.) would be pre-populated.
Experimented with footnotes
I ran into another problem and learned something interesting
In writing this...
6 tags
Posting to Tumblr with Markdown via TextMate
It seems that when I want to create blog posts locally, I am left with a lot of overhead in terms of copying the file’s contents into the online editor, adding formatting or removing formatting, depending on the editor used to create the post and I find myself in a position where I am so caught up in the cumbersome process that I end up writing less than I should.
I’ve known about MarkDown for...
November 2011
6 posts
“If there are no stupid questions, then what kind of questions do stupid people...”
– Scott Adams
Comments!!!!
Tumblr doesn’t support comments directly, but certain themes directly support disqus for commenting, so I just added it. Took about 3 minutes total. Ok, this post doesn’t really warrant the multiple exclamation marks I used in the title, but it’s been a long day and I was happy to accomplish something so easily.
It's Called a Radio Button People!!
That’s right, it’s radio! Not radial! If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read this before you ask somebody to add a “radial button” to an application. And while I’m venting about small annoyances, if an application has a name… use the name, don’t just refer to it by some made up name or the name of a similar system that was in place 10...
Switching to Tumblr
My blog at vanslaars.net has been lying dormant for quite some time now and I think it will remain that way until I repurpose the entire domain for something other than a blog. I’ve been using tumblr for a little while for another blog and I like the platform. I like the options for different types of posts, the dashboard layout is nice and I have an app for my iPhone, so I can post pictures...
July 2011
3 posts
