TDD is so much fun. The tests I made allowed me to redo the whole plugin system and understand what I should do instead. I am pleased with with how the direction is being set and I can’t wait to put this up for you guys.

In the video you’ll see I’m having trouble with requesting a good post after a request done wrong. Everytime a request is a bad one, all the following ones are bad as well, I’m not being able to control it. I appreciate the help you can give, thanks a bunch!

Wish me luck, or even better: help me build something that I hope you might use too.

Shameless self-promotion: Rubynorte

Rubynorte is the Portuguese Ruby conference a couple of friends and I are putting up. If you’re portuguese, come and join us. Submit a talk if you wish to speak to the community.

The million dollar question

Today I went to #git in Freenode, asking for how should I learn git in order to use it as a filesystem and access it remotely via some server using Grit. The somehow arrogant yet most likely right answer I got was: don’t. Well, what should I use then? The same guy didn’t answer me (well, he did: “I don’t know”.) but another guy did.

Why not use Dropbox or Amazon S3?

Actually that is a great idea. Again, my principle is: keep it minimal and lightweight and still easy for geeks to use. Dropbox is definitely easy to use and maintain. You can also version the content with Git; it just won’t be part of my engine.

The million dollar answer

I will use Dropbox as the content database. Git will have to wait. It shall come, but not just yet. This gives me opportunity to create modular adapters later on so I feel confortable with it.

• PHP is not it anymore.
• WordPress or Drupal are top notch. I don’t need top notch; I want to publish content easier and faster.
• I want to learn Ruby the hard way. I want to learn how to test, I want to learn how to build a gem, how to use Rack, all of it. Only then I’ll be more confident enjoying the full power of Ruby.
• I don’t want to depend on a database to publish my content. I never saw that much sense in storing articles inside a relational database column. I love Git and it seems it is capable of storing the content I want.
• I’m sick of 10+ spam comments a day.

My next dare: a git + ruby based blog. So, I’ll be posting several articles on how I’m doing. If possible, I’ll post videos too. I’ll make sure to use Vimeo since it accepts OGG (it seems lighter).

Thanks to the people at the Ruby meetup in March 19th who have motivated me (even without knowing).

Third draft for a blog post. Not coming soon. I’m just too honest.

I can’t speak much because I don’t have money. But I subscribe David Heinemeier Hansson‘s brilliant post about Facebook. Right off the bat he says:

Anyone who can get 500 million people to connect, share photos, and click on little cows in Farmville deserves major kudos.

Along his speech he doesn’t give a crap about what he says will affect others. He just says it. Period.

I like his honesty. I like his guts. I like that he can say this kind of stuff. The fact is, he can say whatever he wants; he’s successful and no one can say anything about it.

David, you sir, are an example. I wish you and your company the best of luck. I wish that for myself. I will get there, I promise.

Se conhecerem alguém interessado, contactem-me. Obrigado.

Hoje vem um tópico muito rápido mas igualmente importante: layouts.

Layouts são nada mais e nada menos do que templates de HTML. A sua função é criar um esqueleto básico de como a aplicação pode ficar de modo geral.

De forma muito simples mostro como:

• Indicar o layout a usar nos controladores e nas suas várias acções.
• Modificar o layout de forma a permitirmos alocação de conteúdo mais eficiente.
• Criarmos o conteúdo a alocar através da função content_for.

O screencast comprou restaurante!

O screencast vai ter casa própria, com ementa e tudo! Visitem http://rails.amodadoporto.com. O próximo episódio já estará lá, bem como a feed para subscreverem, tanto por RSS como por email.

So what’s new anyway?

New theme series

As you may recall, the previous series of theming were named after the purple gem, Amethyst. This time I baptize this series with a different gem color, namely Amber. I chose browns and yellows to resemble a different level of distinction and so I traded the mysterious nature of the purple for a more determined and sleeker brown & yellow mix. Personally I enjoyed the soft grunge touch to it, it really pushes it up a notch.

I also tried to emphasize the content in a way that’s readable, simple and efficient. At least when I read a post, it makes me feel comfortable.

Back to WordPress

Yes, you heard me: I ditched Drupal in favor of WordPress. But then you ask:

Are you of your freaking mind? First you use WordPress, then Drupal and now WordPress back again??

1. Drupal was giving me a lotta headaches just for building a blog and a portfolio. If it were something bigger, then perhaps I’d consider Drupal instead.
2. I must admit: WordPress’ editor is the best one I’ve ever seen. The media section is built right in and the whole admin area is just so much more inviting.
3. WordPress also includes import/export features, which Drupal doesn’t yet. Well, at least not this good, all I did was import the XML file, plain paste of the wp-content folder, configure the plugins and that’s it.

Well, anything else?

• I’m considering the hypothesis of inviting people to guest post along.
• A screencast series would be an interesting idea, most likely on Rails or application engineering, and in Portuguese — there are plenty of them in English already.

That’s it for today. I hope that this installation stays put for a long long time. Give your feedback if you are so kind.

Today starts my 2009 and with it certain acknowledgments and decisions I’ve made. Today I want to share some these with you.

New website theme

I’ve been struggling over the very presentation of my website. After some months I guess I can settle with the 6th iteration of the Amethyst series.

Amethyst — 6th iteration

Posts in Portuguese

For the first time I am going to add some posts in portuguese to allow other audiences to visit my website. Each portuguese post will be categorized and identified as such properly.

No IE direct support

Realizing Stop Design‘s wonderful approach to approach IE users, I am going to drop support for IE6 and maybe even IE7, providing a proper stylesheet complies with them. Now that IE8 is almost coming, we can —and should already do this a long time ago and— start discouraging users from using low level browsers. Besides, last time I checked, my IE audience is between 1 and 5%. Not worth the investment.

Personal bookmarking system

I don’t use delicious that much and yet I should because I have some pretty good links I wanted me and others to reach more often. That’s why I am also going to manage them bookmarks from my Drupal website. This will be implemented soon enough.

Conclusion

2009 will be a serious and decisive year in my life because it will be the year I will learn a lot on my skills and also get a lot of work to apply them skills and earn what I need to boost my life up a notch or two.

Let’s hope for the best!

What better way to know what to do than taking a look at good blogs out there! I’ll take some of the best that I know, if you know others please spill ‘em out!.

• A catchy title should already make your brain spark inside, pretty much like this one I guess. If you have your own blog it should be a subject of your interest, or if you don’t but would like to start one blog, now it’s a good chance to start off pretty well!
• A simple shorthand like Bryan Veloso‘s is a killer, I just love to know what the post is all about with a simple touch of uniqueness. Like a newspaper, every article always has a shorthand to let the reader know if the article is of his interest or not without reading it all.
• I don’t need to say that grammar should be checked before publishing a post, but more important than that is actually providing a story line that enhances its reading in the way that readers enjoy a story more than loose thoughts. This way you even create more reasonable means to actually understand the post’s content and it sticks in people’s mind.
• Images / videos support an idea like nothing else does. I guess I don’t need to say anything else.
• There’s also another thing that I found lately and I find of the upmost importance: the text to read should be visually appealing.
  • I used to have a dark purple background under white text and it was not the best idea I came up with because it was freaking hard to read.
  • Not just the colors, whitespace should be taken into consideration.

  These really play a big role for me. Dave Shea‘s blog is a great example on this matter.

How about yourself? Do you have any other details you take into consideration? Should you have a certain blog you find readable, leave your contribution!

Most people don’t know how to process text and that’s a fact. Everyone has this major problem and it affects any organization’s productivity. I want to share some thoughts on this subject, namely three tips:

No extra RETURN’s

We are all used to grant whitespace to each paragraph by pressing RETURN, even if a single time. Well, don’t. Use the space-before/after-paragraph feature. It may sound strange when you have your text altogether at first glance but when you apply this feature, the results will be shiny and it will save you a lot of time!

Default styling

You should be using this all the time for two major reasons:

• You get an instant look and feel of what your document will look like. In my modest opinion, the default styles on any word processor look just fine.
• You might now know this but when you apply the default styles available, you automatically build a semantic structure of your document. This means you can create a table of contents or a document outline with zero effort! This is extremely useful when exporting to PDF because it promotes accessibility and usability.

You can obviously change the style the way you want but you should change the style and not the paragraph using that style. If you change the style you ensuring that every single paragraph is affected and the document looks consistent.

Templates

It’s amazing how powerful this tool can be. Just define the styles in a blank document – you can even put some text with the various styles to be used – and save it as a template. Both Microsoft Word and Apple Pages have this feature. This tool is absolutely power-saving when more than one person writes the same document.

Should you use these suggestions I presented and you will have your time saved for sure.