The venerable Ben Balter, Esq. wrote earlier this year about how to add anchor links for headers in Jekyll. . I thought I'd follow up that post with one of my own, as I take a slightly different approach. This solution is vanilla JavaScript with a little CSS and the Font Awesome web font. Font Awesome Font Awesome is, well, awesome. It's a font of icons that comes with a handy set of CSS classes.…
GitHub Pages is a wonderful free platform GitHub has created to build and host your Jekyll sites for you. You push up any valid Jekyll site to a repo (on a special branch), and it's built and published to a predictable URL. The only downside? You can't use any custom Ruby code, which means no custom plugins. So what's the best way to host a Jekyll site that requires plugins? Maybe you're writing a…
I don’t like being tracked by Web giants when I’m not on their websites. As more sites integrate Twitter, Facebook, and Google support, I can’t help but be tracked on almost every site I visit. Luckily, the integrations for these three aforementioned companies is quite simple to subvert (at least partially). If you’re running a unix-based machine, you can add just a few lines to your /etc/hosts…
TL;DR: Don't use baseurl. It'll drive you crazy. Hey, so there's been a bit of confusion about what the Jekyll configuration option called baseurl is. Part of the beauty of open-source and of Jekyll is that there's a lot of flexibility. Unfortunately, much of this flexibility doesn't apply to baseurl . Here's a quick distillation of its intentions, and how to use it. Mimic GitHub Pages baseurl was…
Today, I'm proud to announce that I have accepted a job offer from Visual Supply Co , a small and happenin' start-up based in the Bay Area. Visual Supply Co, also known as VSCO, produces the well-loved VSCO Cam iPhone and Android apps, as well as VSCO Film , VSCO Grid , and VSCO Keys . I'll be working on all things web, including the Grid service and the API. Super stoked to begin this next…
I'm lucky enough this semester to be taking CS 5300 at Cornell, a class entitled "The Architecture of Large-Scale Information Systems." For this class, we will need to know our way around Amazon's Web Services. I learned a lot about AWS when I worked at 6Wunderkinder last year, so I was feeling up to the challenge. Little did I know that the tooling 6W had created around its ops was far superior…
I was fortunate enough to, just today, pick up a new computer. My first hardware in over 4 years, I had been holding off. Once my trusty MacBook Pro bit the dust last night and I found out the repair cost was extraordinary, I bit the bullet. So, you're probably in a similar place. You relatively recently got a shiny new Macintosh and you're so excited to start writing code and making a difference…
As many other Heroku customers, I rejoiced when Dokku was released. To have complete freedom to host as many apps with whatever databases or other plugins I wanted -- all for the cost of a small VM -- was wonderful news. I decided, for cost's sake, to boot up one of those famed $5 DigitalOcean Droplets. I didn't see that DigitalOcean provides an "app" for Dokku, so I created a vanilla box of…
Last December (2012), Tom Preston-Werner granted me push & pull access to mojombo/jekyll . I had written a letter to Tom about the future of Jekyll and after a bit of persistence on my part, he relented: After a somewhat lengthy (and amusing ) conversation via Skype, I knew what Tom's priorities were for the project and where I could help. I started off trimming down the number of open issues. At…
The following post was first written for a class at Cornell University taught by Phoebe Sengers called "Designing Technologies for Social Impact". We have a rather significant problem in the U.S. Indeed, our government seems to be malfunctioning in a rather obvious and irresponsible way. The question of today is simply: can it be fixed? If so, how? One must first examine the problem and its root…
This post was originally written as an assignment for INFO 2450: Communication & Technology taught by Professors Jeff Hancock and Drew Margolin in Fall 2013. The course focuses heavily on design of technologies. The assignment asked for an evaluation of an online application or product based on the principles outlined in Donald Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things" . It's a very basic look at…
If you're using the popular Capistrano web deployment framework, you will likely have wished you had an easy way to perform a quick task in the production rails console on one of your servers. Many thanks to @colszowka for this solution : NOTE : This is for Capistrano v2. Things are different for v3. namespace :rails do desc "Remote console" task :console , :roles => :app do run_interactively…
Dealing with distraction for those of us who live with AD(H)D is a constant struggle, and can be especially difficult for those of us who must daily solve large, complex problems. This post describes what it is like to be a programmer with ADD and some strategies I've developed to help make myself more effective. To solve complex problems by programmatic means, one needs to be able to focus. To…
Earlier today, I was watching a C-SPAN video of a U.S. Senate session on February 1, 2012. This was the first time I had ever watched a Senate session from the beginning and, to my surprise, they began with a prayer. Hold up. A prayer? In a session of one of our government's highest legislative bodies?! I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised, what with the (often crazy) Religious Right getting…
Today, I'm proud to announce the release of Jekyll 1.0. There are a million goodies and fixes to enjoy, and we're (the still-active Jekyll core team members: Tom, Matt and I) really excited to share this first major release with you. Be sure to follow @jekyllrb for updates on future releases and links to cool plugins. Some quick highlights: New subcommands: new, build, serve, and import Amazing…
I am not a religious man, yet I find myself curious about the prospect of an afterlife. Is there something beyond this life, in this dimension, in this universe? While I don't believe in the traditional conception of an afterlife (one's soul ascends to a blissful place, where it inhabits all space and time for eternity), I do like to think we live on beyond the time we take our last breath. In…
Our legacies on this Beautiful Earth are inextricably tied to the work we do, the principles we stand for and the messages we spread. The apathetic nature of many of my peers nowadays is heresy to the nth degree, and we can no longer stand idly by and watch young people refusing to talk about the hard issues. If we’re to make any progress and maintain this More Perfect Union, we had better get our…
I just started working as an intern at 6Wunderkinder a couple weeks ago. I am by no means an expert in devops (hell, I have only dabbled with a little sysadmin in the past - nothing too serious) and I don't really know what goes into keeping a huge series of server up and running. I can say, however, that I know the customer's side of things. I know what it's like to be a user of a service which…
So, I'll admit it: I absolutely adore rbenv. In light of this, I've been using it at my work at 6Wunderkinder the past couple weeks. 6W uses AWS like nobody's business, and the Ubuntu EC2 instances I've been interacting with are really bare-bones. So I wanted to write this script for you, the Ubuntu & Ruby user, in order for you to very quickly get up and running with rbenv & the latest Ruby MRI.…
I recently signed up for simyo, a German cell provider. After installing the Nano SIM into my phone, I noticed that the 3G connection to the mobile data network was failing. Got a weird error that said I was not subscribed to a mobile data network. Which was obviously false. So, I tweeted about it. Expecting a several-day delay in my support query from simyo, I totally resigned to wait on mobile…