Site Updates

I am constantly trying to update rubyrailways.com with useful features and enhancements (feedback is warmly welcome – even the present look was influenced by a lot of your comments). This is the last set of updates:

  • Ajaxified Comment Preview

    is a handy WordPress plugin which can create a preview of the comment you are currently writing before you actually post it. Check out any of the posts (e.g. this one :-)) and scroll down to the ‘Leave a Reply’ section to see it in action (you don’t actually have to comment if you just would like to play around).

    Markdown should work with the comments, too. For adding a comment which contains code, I recommend to use the <pre> tag to preserve whitespace (unfortunately SyntHiHol (see next bullet) does not work here).

  • SyntHiHol

    is a code highlighter, you can see it in action in my last post for example. All you have to do to achieve these nicely highlighted code blocks is to write the code in a div with the attribute “lang” (possible values include ruby, python, java, php, c, c++, c#, bash, …. nearly 70 languages!). Cool, isn’t it?

  • Akismet

    though I don’t think so there is anybody who does not know akismet, for completeness, sake, it’s “a plugin which identifies and blocks comment and trackback spam on blogs with integration to various blogging systems”. In the dark pre-akismet era I have received 10-15 spams a day on average. Guess how much did I get since the installation? Exactly zero. It sounds unbelievable but it’s true

    . I have just checked – akismet caught 370 spam comments during its 1-month reign.

  • Installed trac

    a web-based software project management tool – well this is not of too much interest to the readers of this blog (yet) but maybe someone is interested in my experience.

    Currently this site is hosted on dreamhost, and fortunately I have found the DreamTrac script for trac installation on DH. Well, I think now, after all the struggling I would be able to install trac with this script for the first try – but the current installation took me about 3 hours and 8 tries.

    However, this was not the biggest problem – after all I have managed to install and configure trac – it was much worse that the script (or trac configuration?) overwrote my .htaccess file in the home directory, which caused the main site (http://rubyrailways.com ) to stop – and even worse, it exposed my whole home directory to the world! 🙂
    Since I did not count with such side effects, I have found and corrected this problem after a few hours only.

    If this would not be enough, ther is one ‘minor’ problem with trac on dreamhost: for me it is so slow that it is practically unusable (takes about 20-30 seconds, sometimes more to load). I don’t know what can be the problem – it’s fastcgi enabled, and though not explicitly optimized, I don’t think so it should look like this… Any ideas?

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