Friday, April 24, 2009
Radiant, CMS
The past couple of weeks I've had a change of pace and have been spending some working on content and css for the company website. I say change of pace because it involves a new technology that I haven't used before, a plugin called Radiant. Radiant is a Content Management System which means that the content which would normally be in views in a normal rails app are stored in the database. This system is convienient for sites that have a lot of content, but less going on the backend. The only hiccup that I've hit with Radiant is that since the content is the database, it becomes hard to put in source control. So, if you have made a bad change to content and want to revert it, you better remember what it was. (If anyone knows a way to remedy this, it would help) Radiant also has a lot extensions which add functionality similar to rails such as pagination and extensions that add new features like permanent redirection. Another question I've ran into while working on the site is where does the CSS files belong in this kind of structure. Does it belong in the CMS with the rest of the content or in the repository which contains the radiant plugin? I'm starting to be more convinced that maybe it belongs with latter (after working with the former). Unlike the rest of the content, the CSS files are more prone to change and tweaking than the other content files and would have more benefit being part of source control. However this does cause the developer to have two seperate environments open, the CMS for page content and a text editor or IDE for the CSS, additionality I don't know how this would work Radiant's page caching. At this point, if starting from scratch I would choose to put CSS in source control. However, if mid-flight, I don't think source control adds enough to demand the time for a switch over.....but then again I may be converted yet. I had been wondering for a while if there was a Ruby option for content-based sites and have found that Radiant is overall a good solution.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Searching for the Answer
It's remarkable how much time as a programmer I spend scouring the web for answers to problems or for some sort of example of the use of a function due to under-documentation. Which always brings to mind how to adequately search for solutions. The two stages are choosing your keywords carefully, and trying to find relevant results. This occurred to me today while I looking for uses of Cucumber involving seeing whether or not with_tag could take a regular expression as an argument.
The first part is trying to choose keywords. Obviously, I didn't want use just Cucumber otherwise I'd a hundred salad recipes but nothing to do with testing. (As it turns out a search for Cucumber wields links to the github repository at 2 and 4 with an article about it at 3) so to narrow my search I added the method I was looking for. After a few tries of various combinations of keywords (including Rspec, regex, :text, etc.), I found a set of results that I could search through for the answer I was looking for. Using the small blurbs of the websites included, I had to make sure that all my keywords were found within the same portion of text. In the end, after several searches I found that with_tag ('td', /#{regex}/) was possible and was able to go green with my tests.
This is a process that many of us go through at least a couple times each day, and most of the time we don't really think about what we are actually doing. We just go through the actions that we believe will get us to the most viable and relative answer the fastest. But underneath, there is a certain level of practice and skill needed to make sure that our time is not spent wasting away through piles of unrelated content, but rather quickly finding that nugget of knowledge needed to move forward.
The first part is trying to choose keywords. Obviously, I didn't want use just Cucumber otherwise I'd a hundred salad recipes but nothing to do with testing. (As it turns out a search for Cucumber wields links to the github repository at 2 and 4 with an article about it at 3) so to narrow my search I added the method I was looking for. After a few tries of various combinations of keywords (including Rspec, regex, :text, etc.), I found a set of results that I could search through for the answer I was looking for. Using the small blurbs of the websites included, I had to make sure that all my keywords were found within the same portion of text. In the end, after several searches I found that with_tag ('td', /#{regex}/) was possible and was able to go green with my tests.
This is a process that many of us go through at least a couple times each day, and most of the time we don't really think about what we are actually doing. We just go through the actions that we believe will get us to the most viable and relative answer the fastest. But underneath, there is a certain level of practice and skill needed to make sure that our time is not spent wasting away through piles of unrelated content, but rather quickly finding that nugget of knowledge needed to move forward.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Let me introduce myself....I'm Turner King
I'm relatively new to the blogosphere and thought I just describe my programming journey that has brought me to where I am today. My first exposure to programming was back in middle school(1999) when I was introduced to HTML through an elective that I took back then. It introduced me to some of the simple concepts of html and in turn lit a spark that would push me through high school. Even though through high school I only did some sparse html work on my own, I was convinced that I wanted to become a computer programmer. The problem I had was that I had no idea where to go from there.
I graduated from high school in 2004 and earned a full tuition scholarship to Carthage College in Kenosha, WI. After taking an introductory course that taught me a little more HTML and some Javascript. I finally was exposed to C++ that spring.
On a side note, it'd be very rare for me to choose C++ to program anything these days (but then again I may just not be experience enough), but as an introductory language it's great. Because as you move on to the Javas, Perls, Rubys, Pythons, you truly appreciated the things you get for free in newer languages.
As I moved through college, I got introduced to OOP a little in C++, but more extensively in Java. The jump from C++ to Java at the time felt like I had riding a bike, but now was given a car. I did hit some rocky points early due to a scheduling conflict that forced me to take some advanced courses before I took the intermediate courses. It's hard to implement polymorphism
when you just only got introduced to basic OO concepts. I graduated from Carthage in 2008 with a B.A. in Computer Science and Theatre with a minor in Mathematics with no job prospects in site.
With no previous internships and no experience whatsoever, I had a hard time finding a job and it turned into two and a half long months with a couple of close calls, but nothing I got truly excited about. I got interviewed by Obtiva near of July and got offered a job in a fairly unique situation where I was to be apprenticing under consultants while building my skills and credentials. It turned out to be a very good week as I also got engaged to my girlfriend of nearly two years a few days before.
This blog I intend to use to display what I've learned since arriving at Obtiva since arriving in August of 2008. It may not show any complex concepts (at least not right away), but is intended to reflect my current skills as a programmer and to help those on a similar path.
I graduated from high school in 2004 and earned a full tuition scholarship to Carthage College in Kenosha, WI. After taking an introductory course that taught me a little more HTML and some Javascript. I finally was exposed to C++ that spring.
On a side note, it'd be very rare for me to choose C++ to program anything these days (but then again I may just not be experience enough), but as an introductory language it's great. Because as you move on to the Javas, Perls, Rubys, Pythons, you truly appreciated the things you get for free in newer languages.
As I moved through college, I got introduced to OOP a little in C++, but more extensively in Java. The jump from C++ to Java at the time felt like I had riding a bike, but now was given a car. I did hit some rocky points early due to a scheduling conflict that forced me to take some advanced courses before I took the intermediate courses. It's hard to implement polymorphism
when you just only got introduced to basic OO concepts. I graduated from Carthage in 2008 with a B.A. in Computer Science and Theatre with a minor in Mathematics with no job prospects in site.
With no previous internships and no experience whatsoever, I had a hard time finding a job and it turned into two and a half long months with a couple of close calls, but nothing I got truly excited about. I got interviewed by Obtiva near of July and got offered a job in a fairly unique situation where I was to be apprenticing under consultants while building my skills and credentials. It turned out to be a very good week as I also got engaged to my girlfriend of nearly two years a few days before.
This blog I intend to use to display what I've learned since arriving at Obtiva since arriving in August of 2008. It may not show any complex concepts (at least not right away), but is intended to reflect my current skills as a programmer and to help those on a similar path.
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