Let the system do what it’s good at

I can’t believe nobody ever thought to just use the image data to build an image gallery. Seriously? It took me a grand total of like 20 minutes, plus another 20 of screwing around trying to find the gallery script that was already in the system. (Which I don’t like, but that is another story.)

Learning by osmosis

I have all these printouts posted in my office that Linda (former interim designer?) had printed out from Hannon Hill & some schools about how Cascade works. They’ve just been kind of background noise on the wall; I look at them from time to time, but not too in-depth.

But today I was braiding my hair to get ready for this lunchtime exercise class, and I was looking at one of the printouts, and something about “block chooser” leaped out at me. And I remembered that in data definitions, you can let most fields allow multiple entries. And then I realized that you could probably do that to include multiple RSS feeds on a single page. (Or even to create a page with just one, but to make sure that it got the right template etc.) I guess I’ve been looking at that every day for weeks and only today did it click together.

So: hurray!

Learning Rails, Take 2

I happened across Code School’s “Rails for Zombies” today (I’d seen a link to “Try Git“, was impressed, and started poking around), and holy cow, it might actually stick now!

Three things about it:

  1. Immediately they recommended going through “Try Ruby” if you didn’t already have familiarity with the language. That got me a taste of the syntax, which is pleasantly sane.
  2. There isn’t any futzing about with setting up an environment. Where I got stuck (initially) was just in setting up the environment on my machine.
  3. Lots of little bits of trial and error, following VERY short videos. With two monitors, I’ve got the slides open nearby so I can skim back and forth to see the exact syntax & whatnot. I’ve been doing all the extra credit just to get it to stick better.

So I’m optimistic.

Links

I added a widget for the “webdev” tag on my personal Pinboard account. I’m sort of a web-based magpie, and Pinboard has been my nest for a while. (As in, I was an alpha user, although I didn’t switch until…I’m not sure, maybe when there was a rumor that MS was buying Yahoo, and I got freaked out about Delicious? But before the rumor that Yahoo was closing Delicious, and before they actually sold it to the guys that started YouTube. Seriously, I’m glad Pinboard is one guy’s thing with an actual stable business plan.)

If you’re at all interested in the sorts of things that I’m following in the web development would, check it out. I get links from all over; some I save to read later, some as reference, and some just in the hopes that someone else will see & find it useful. Enjoy!

post types in wordpress

One of the downsides of only doing personal projects in WordPress for 5 years is that there’s all this new stuff that I’m only vaguely aware of. So I guess I’m using this to try some of it out. Like this “format” thing — I turned the last one into a “Status” and that took away the title. Interesting. What about an “Aside”?

Elaine Nelson

July 5, 2012

Today feels oddly like both a Monday and a Friday. But it’s Thursday, the day after a holiday. Despite that oddness, I have gotten some things done.

when you get lost at an easy step

It’s really hard to get up to speed learning something in a group if you get stuck or lost right off the bat with something that ought to be really easy. Thus, this micro-class in Ruby. Gonna start over from scratch later. Much later.

Also, curiously enough, I’m having a hard time using the laptop on its own, because I keep wanting to touch the screen to navigate, like I would on my Asus Transformer. On top of that, it doesn’t help that I don’t yet know my way around terminal on mac.

Doesn’t help either that it’s the middle of the afternoon, which is not my best time to do anything.

making things easier for myself

Go figure: I used the instructions I wrote last week on how to create a content type in Cascade to go through the process of backing up some work that I’ve done. (It’ll be wiped at the end of the week during a system upgrade.) And I think I got everything. Next up will be actually re-creating the darn thing. I really do love it when my own documentation works as intended.