Articles tagged 'mike'
Ready to Rumble Oct 20 2008
Wow, so what a 48 hours it was doing the Rails Rumble! Really great to get something up and running in two days. Me and my boy Mike really got it hooked up and came up with something pretty cool we think.
Likis is a language wiki designed to encourage collaboration and contribution to build an extensive language resource, to help people learn languages. It allows wiki-style editing of language pages, phrases and words, and it also includes audio pronunciations, so you can upload a recording of a specific foreign language word or phrase to help others!
Check it out, and let us know what you think! Now I need to get some sleep…
CommentsAnnouncing: Feather Apr 26 2008
So after a few weeks of teaser posts, we’ve finally opened up the code on the software that powers this very blog, Feather. It’s been a collaborative effort so far between me and my boy Mike, but now it’s time to open source it, and hopefully people besides us will not only find a use for it, but will also find new ways to extend and improve it.
So what’s in the current codebase? As alluded to before, the core itself is lightweight. Basic article posting, and user management is all you’re really getting. The beauty is in the wide variety of plugins that are (and will be) available to extend the software further. Within a separate plugins repository, there are currently twelve plugins, that extend Feather to provide comments for articles, feeds, formatters for article content (Textile and Markdown), basic RSS importing for articles and comments, integration with ping services, the ability to setup hard-coded redirects on your site, sidebar and snippet content, overridden css styles, tagging, Twitter integration (to display your tweets in line with blog posts), and file uploads. The code in core and for these plugins probably isn’t perfect, but it’s good enough to power a few blogs already - and improvement is where you come in.
If you’ve got an idea for a new plugin, improvements to existing functionality, or you’ve found a bug, then by all means fork the project on GitHub, implement your code, and send us a pull request so we can merge the changes into the main trunk. Alternatively, send us your patch via e-mail, and we’ll look to include it within the application. If you submit two patches to either feather, or feather-plugins, then you’ll be given commit access to the repository in question, and will effectively become part of the core team. So what needs doing right away?
The biggest deficiency at the minute are specs - there are some specs in the core code, but it doesn’t cover a lot of the application, and ideally we’d be aiming for 100% coverage of the core controllers and models. We then need to devise a decent way of similarly shipping specs with plugins. When we start updating and improving plugins, we’ll need a way of handling data migrations smoothly and efficiently. On top of this, there are still outstanding useful plugins that need to be written, such as content search, and trackbacks, as well as integration with services other than Twitter. Lastly, there are bound to be bugs, so roll up your sleeves and fix them, it’ll be much appreciated!
We’ll be rolling out a Feather website soon, along with an official plugin directory to make installing plugins easier - for now, there’s a basic getting started page on the wiki over at GitHub, and there will be more information over the coming days on both mine and Mike’s blog. Any questions in the meantime, then let me know.
Other than that, what are you waiting for? Get your Feather on!
CommentsDrop It Like It's Hot Apr 13 2008
So anyone that isn’t reading this in a feed reader will see that my blog has had a serious overhaul - and I’m now running on Feather. Me and Mike spent quite a bit of time last week or so expanding the Feather feature set, and it now more than copes with my existing blog. I was able to import all my old posts, customize the default theme to something a little bit different, and add in a few custom snippets (Analytics, FeedFlare etc). I was also able to add redirects for old links to ensure that (hopefully) there isn’t too much broken by the move. All old posts will have the same permalink too, handled as part of the import process.
Currently I’m running without caching, but I see my partner in crime Mike has gotten caching up and running on Feather, so I’ll get that setup and running shortly too, to improve the performance of the blog still further.
As far as I can see the blog should be running ok, but any issues - let me know with a comment, or an e-mail, and I’ll get right on it!
CommentsLight as a Feather Apr 7 2008
My boy Mike is back blogging his ass off again, and this time, he’s doing it on some decent software! Last few weeks me and Mike have been working on an ultra-cool blogging platform written using the Merb framework, and it’s now in production use for Mike’s blog. This very blog will follow suit shortly as I migrate over, and within a few weeks we are hoping to have the codebase in a good enough state to be able to open up the source, and start to invite contributions from anyone that feels the need to help out. The idea behind Feather is the same as Merb - lightweight core framework, extended heavily by plugins, allowing you to choose the pieces of functionality you need, and leave out the guff that you don’t. Keep it dialed in here for further updates on Feather over the next few weeks, and keep a keen eye on Mike’s blog too for more great posts. In fact, he’s already in the thick of it with this great post on why Ruby does it for him (and why .Net doesn’t).
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