A Planet Aggregator for dakota.net.nz
I have just set up the Rails Planet at www.dakota.net.nz to aggregate the two logs currently hosted there (this one right here included). Rails Planet is used at www.planetrubyonrails.org and does not appear to be in active development. As such I found there were a couple of querks to getting it set up.
Amoungst other things I suspect are mostly specific to my set up one big problem I faced was getting access to the admin interface. Since there was no default login with the install and there did not appear to be an initial setup phase I had no way of creating a user in order to then access the admin interface.
The solution I found was to comment out line 4 of app/controllers/admin/base_controller.rb:
class Admin::BaseController < ApplicationController
layout "admin"
# before_filter :login_required
end
This essentially disabled authentication for the admin interface so I could access it without a login. Once I had set up a user account I then uncommented the line again and restarted the server to ensure the authentication was back in place.
Hopefully this helps anyone who is having similar problems.
Urimod : Modify URIs in HTML
Urimod is a small perl script to modify URIs in HTML. More specifically it is a tool to change URIs/URLs from mixed type (i.e. relative or absolute) to another (relative to document root). Urimod can change URIs in a whole directory tree of html files or in a single file. It is most useful for ensuring a consistent URI format across a website. Urmod can change URIs in anchor, image or link html elements.
Check out the urimod page for more info.
Internet Time Travel
In one of my earlier posts I refered to the web.archive.org (“Way Back Machine”) archive of my old site. I found this quite an interesting experience looking at my old sites and seeing how they had changed over time and it got me thinking about how other, higher-profile, web sites have changed over time.
So, here are some examples of some sites we love (and some we hate) and how they have changed over time. Archives started in 1996 so, whilst many of these sites existed before this time, we are unfortunately only able to see archived content from this date onwards.
www.google.com
Yes, that is Google’s original logo. It’s easy to forget where Google have come from and in such a short space of time. In 1998 they had just started out and their only buisness was internet search. Now they offer a huge range of services and their arsenal is growing by the day. Interestingly, of all the examples here Google’s home page has changed the least. The most marked change is the refinement of their logo. Refinement is the word - throughout the whole time Google has managed to maintain it’s identity.
View www.google.com in the Way Back Machine.
www.zeldman.com
Zeldman has chopped and changed his site many times over the years. At times evolving. Other times changing radically. The most enduring design being his latest incarnation.
View www.zeldman.com in the Way Back Machine.
www.alistapart.com
Also the brain-child of Zeldman, A List Apart has been around since 1998. The site initially had a fairly consistent style but has undergone a number of revamps recently.
The site was used to advocate standards compliance around 2001/2002 by adding an .ahem css rule to their style sheet which would hide a standards warning in standards compliant browsers. Unfortunately, the Way Back Machine does not archive the imported style sheets containing this rule so the archived versions show this warning in standards compliant browsers aswell. Since this was the method also used to link all the style sheets in the 2003, 2004 & 2005 incarnation of ala, the styling is completely broken for this period in the acrhive. Note, however, that the content is perfectly preserved - hurrah for standards!
View www.alistapart.com in the Way Back Machine.
www.microsoft.com
The redmond software company was already a behemoth by the time 1996 turned up and their site had been a round for some time. The attitude to standards then appears to have been “What Standards?”. Though they appear to have finally cottoned on. There appears to be a bit of a black hole in 97 - which I can only presume is the result of a robots.txt or the like preventing archiving of the material.
View www.microsoft.com in the Way Back Machine.
Got another good example? Add you thoughts below or use trackback.
So you're starting a weblog...
Yeah. Original huh?
It was inevitable really - I could only resist this trend for so long. I have had a bunch of stuff I have been wanting to publish for a long time but have had nowhere to do it.
The name signal grey comes from a site I created back in 2001 before weblog’s even existed. You can view the web.archive.org archive of the site. Of course, this, along with everything else I produced at the time, is full of bad stuff - pop ups! - I didn’t even know that standards existed at that point. At this time I believe the closest thing to blogging software was NewsPro (now known as Coranto) which I used for similar purposes on my sites.
I don’t see myself updating this daily and it is not intended as a journal of my daily life. I already have a bunch of stuff that I have accumulated and would like to share via this site. I will be adding this info as time allows.
