Coderkitty - Home

Picking up the breadcrumbs

2010-05-18T14:24:00Z

Its always easy to skip going through the details of what your stacked up knowledge and just go for trying out new stuff. This time, I take it one step back and skim through pages of books I have always ignored and pick some sections that are worth looking into and post them here.

I've been trying to cut down on paper materials at home. Mostly, trying to read all those books and photocopied materials and just jot down notes from them. I decided to post them instead. See some string, number, time/date extensions.

From a photocopy of a ruby/rails book (no title gathered):

Some string extensions:

string = "Now is the time"
puts string.at(2)  #=> "w"
puts string.from(8)  #=> "he time"
puts string.to(8)  #=> "Now is th"
puts string.first  #=> "N"
puts string.first(3)  #=> "Now"
puts string.last  #=> "e"
puts string.last(4)  #=> "time"

puts string.starts_with?("No")  #=> true
puts string.ends_with?("ME")  #=> false

count = Hash.new(0)
string.each_char { |ch | count[ch] += 1 }  
#=> {" " => 3, "w" => 1, "N" => 1, "o" => 1, "e" => 2, "h" => 1, "s" => 1, "t" => 2, "i" => 2 }

Customizing inflections:

Inflector.inflections do |inflect|
  inflect.plural(/-in-law$/, "s-in-law")
  inflect.singular(/s-in-law$/, "-in-law")
  inflect.uncountable("air", "information", "water")  #no singular form, no plural form
end

Extensions to numbers:

puts 3.ordinalize  #=> "3rd"
puts 321.ordinalize  #=> "321st"

puts 20.byes  #=> 20
puts 20.kilobytes  #=> 20480
puts 20.megabytes  #=> 20971520
puts 20.gigabytes  #=> 21474836480
puts 20.terabytes  #=> 21990232555520
puts 20.petabytes  #=> 22517998136852480
puts 1.exabyte  #=> 1152921504606846976

puts 20.seconds  #=> 20
puts 20.minutes  #=> 1200
puts 20.hours  #=> 72000
puts 20.days  #=> 1728000
puts 20.weeks  #=> 12096000
puts 20.fortnights  #=> 24192000
puts 20.months  #=> 51840000
puts 20.years  #=> 630720000

puts Time.now  #=> Tue May 18 22:03:21 +0800 2010
puts 20.minutes.ago  #=> Tue May 18 21:43:53 +0800 2010
puts 20.hours.from_now  #=> Wed May 19 18:04:11 +0800 2010
puts 20.weeks.from_now  #=> Tue Oct 05 22:04:22 +0800 2010
puts 20.months.ago  #=> Thu Sep 18 22:04:34 +0800 2008
puts 20.minutes.until("2010-12-26 12:00:00".to_time)  #=> Sun Dec 26 11:40:00 UTC 2010
puts 20.minutes.since("2006-11-08 01:15:00".to_time)  #=> Wed Nov 08 01:35:00 UTC 2006

Time and Date Extensions:

now = Time.now  
puts now  #=>  Tue May 18 22:09:17 0800 2010
puts now.to_date  #=> 2010-05-18
puts now.to_s  #=> Tue May 18 22:09:17 +0800 2010

puts now.to_s(:short)  #=> 18 May 22:09
puts now.to_s(:long)  #=> May 18, 2010 22:09
puts now.to_s(:db)  #=> 2010-05-18 22:09:17
puts now.to_s(:rfc822)  #=> Tue, 18 May 2010 22:09:17 +0900
puts now.ago(3600)  #=> Tue May 18 21:09:17 +0800 2010
puts now.at_beginning_of_day  #=> Tue May 18 00:00:00 +0800 2010

puts now.at_beginning_of_month  #=> Sat May 01 00:00:00 +0800 2010
puts now.at_beginning_of_week  #=> Mon May 17 00:00:00 +0800 2010
puts now.beginning_of_quarter  #=> Thu Apr 01 00:00:00 +0800 2010
puts now.at_beginning_of_year  #=> Fri Jan 01 00:00:00 +0800 2010
puts now.at_midnight  #=> Tue May 18 00:00:00 +0800 2010

puts now.change(:hour => 13)  #=> Tue May 18 13:00:00 +0800 2010
puts now.last_month  #=> Sun Apr 18 22:09:17 +0800 2010
puts now.last_year  #=> Mon May 18 22:09:17 +0800 2009
puts now.midnight  #=> Tue May 18 00:00:00 +0800 2010
puts now.monday  #=> Mon May 17 00:00:00 +0800 2010

puts now.months_ago(2)  #=> Thu Mar 18 22:09:17 +0800 2010
puts now.months_since(2)  #=> Sun Jul 18 22:09:17 +0800 2010
puts now.next_week  #=> Mon May 24 00:00:00 +0800 2010
puts now.next_year  #=> Wed May 18 22:09:17 +0800 2011
puts now.seconds_since_midnight  #=> 79757.033881

puts now.since(7200)  #=> Wed May 19 00:09:17 +0800 2010
puts now.tomorrow  #=> Wed May 19 22:09:17 +0800 2010
puts now.years_ago(2)  #=> Sun May 18 22:09:17 +0800 2008
puts now.years_since(2)  #=> Fri May 18 22:09:17 +0800 2012
puts now.yesterday  #=> Mon May 17 22:09:17 +0800 2010

puts now.advance(:days => 30)  #=> Thu Jun 17 22:09:17 +0800 2010
puts Time.days_in_month(2)  #=> 28
puts Time.days_in_month(2, 2000)  #=> 29

Extension to Ruby Symbols:

groups = posts.group_by { |post| post.author_id }

or

groups = post.group_by(&:author_id)

Acknowledging the unknown as part of the process

2010-02-25T06:05:00Z

I think this is by far the best, though vague and ambiguous poetry I've ever seen and I loved it!

Makes me want to keep in mind that knowledge in programming is quite volatile as it comes to real world problems to be solved, and that no accurate solution is definite across a period of time. The unknown is really a part of the process.

I think this is by far the best, though vague and ambiguous poetry I've ever seen and I loved it!

It puts the technical context of programming in a development cycle into lay context. :) I stumbled upon this lovely piece of work, through CodingHorror's article entitled: Version 1 Sucks, But Ship It Anyway

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

The power of toggle

2010-02-18T15:10:00Z

I don't know if we've been missing out on deliberate API lovin' or that we're becoming dumber every minute because of too much work, or its just the love month? :P ...but we've been missing the power of "toggle".

Toggle is [defined][1] as:

any instruction that works first one way and then the other; it turns something on the first time it is used and then turns it off the next time

Needless to say, toggle is very efficient for use with boolean values (defined by either true or false). Of course you might think its easy to implement, but this is an explicit example to illustrate on saving database reads and writes. Aside from that, you'll write a more elegant code. ;)

Toggle is defined as:

any instruction that works first one way and then the other; it turns something on the first time it is used and then turns it off the next time

Needless to say, toggle is very efficient for use with boolean values (defined by either true or false). Let's take a specific scenario:

  create_table "profiles", :force => true do |t|
    t.string   "salutation",            :limit => 8, :default => ""
    t.string   "name",                  :limit => 200, :default => ""
    t.datetime "created_at"
    t.datetime "updated_at"
  end

  create_table "themes", :force => true do |t|
    t.integer "profile_id",
    t.string   "name",            :limit => 100, :default => ""
    t.boolean "primary",        :default => false
  end

So, there are multiple themes per profile. You should get at least that part. Your boolean column should always be set to false by default. Either you replace the name of your column to suit that requirement, or write dirtier code. (I.e., instead of have a "public" column all set to true, use "private" column all set to false by default). Now, of course, your associations should be setup properly similar to:

class Profile < ActiveRecord::Base

  # filter_chain methods here...
  # validations here...

  # associations start...
  has_many :themes do 
    def primary
      find(:first, :conditions => ["primary = ?", true])
    end
  end
  # associations end...

end

class Theme < ActiveRecord::Base

  # filter_chain methods here...
  # validations here...

  # associations start...
  belongs_to :profile
  # associations end...

  named_scope :current_theme_of, lambda { |profile|
    { :conditions => [ "profile_id = ? and primary = ?", profile.id, true ] }
  }

end

Of course, there would be several records for the Theme table that will belong to a profile. You will offer a checkbox on every create and update of the themes of a particular profile, but how do you ensure that there will only be one primary theme set for each profile record?

This is dirty: (KIDS, DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME)

class Theme < ActiveRecord::Base

  # filter_chain methods here...
  after_save :verify_unique_primary_theme
  # validations here...

  # associations start...
  belongs_to :profile
  # associations end...

  named_scope :current_theme_of, lambda { |profile|
    { :conditions => [ "profile_id = ? and primary = ?", profile.id, true ] }
  }

  def verify_unique_primary_theme
    # get all themes by this profile 
    # set all their primary value to false
    # set this new one's primary value to true
  end
end

Man, I wouldn't bet on a quick update on a profile whose set of themes would be more than hundreds, or even thousands! This, of course, is always worth a try:

class Theme < ActiveRecord::Base

  # filter_chain methods here...
  # validations here...

  # associations start...
  belongs_to :profile
  # associations end...

  named_scope :current_theme_of, lambda { |profile|
    { :conditions => [ "profile_id = ? and primary = ?", profile.id, true ] }
  }

  def primary?
    primary
  end

  def validate
    #ensure that primary true is for one record only
    if primary? and !profile.themes.primary.nil?
      #toggle the old primary theme of this said profile
      profile.themes.primary.toggle!(:primary)
    end
  end

end

Simple, yet it works! Each time another theme gets toggled to be the primary theme, you only need to make two writes to your database:

Save your new item
Flip the old primary to false

PS: I did write messy code on purpose to illustrate what I meant for this post.

I hope this toggle magic works for you too the next time you think about boolean switches! :)

DIY Ruby SFTP to S3

2010-02-14T11:48:00Z

I was faced by a challenge of transferring some files from an FTP server to S3. At first, the nature of the problem seemed simple. I just had to get the files to my local machine and then upload them to S3. Piece of cake! But lo and behold, when I saw that there were over 32K files and each step took me almost 2 minutes each! Oooh lala!

I knew this was a job for fanfare sound here the almighty ruby! :)

And so, I set my priorities straight.. I had to work elegantly and save time altogether. I'm feeling quite exhausted and would really love to get some sleep soon, so here I am, depending on my great yet simple ruby skills and the power of ruby itself to help me achieve this task!

As I write this article, my script is silently running in the background as a very obedient and competent slave. :P But to help you out, here is a brief guide on how to sit back, relax and let the task be accomplished in no time! You should really be sending me gifts.. or better yet, donate to me via Paypal! I'll love it, I promise.. I might even give you a page of exposure! :)

I knew this was a job for fanfare sound here the almighty ruby! :)

So, here's the deal. You have a set of files to download via FTP and a particular folder structure where you want it to go.

STEP 1:

Gather your FTP credentials as follows:

1234	host: my.server.comusername: my_usernamepassword: my_passwordport: 12345

STEP 2:

We will need some gems here. Now, if you don't have them yet, now is a good time to install them:

12	sudo gem install net-sftpsudo gem install fastercsv

Net-Sftp is needed for the communication to your FTP server. You can use this even if your access is just set to anonymous. You might want to use another CSV parser if you want, or if you already have something else in mind. You can just tweak the code for that section.

STEP 3:

Now, pull out your beloved spreadsheet editor (mine is OpenOffice) and aggregate your data.

Full remote path to the files	Full local path to save into
/your/ultra/deep-stack/of/remote/folders/path/to/filename.doc	/Users/coderkitty/attachments/not-so-deep-stack/filename.doc
/your/ultra/deep-stack/of/remote/folders/path/to/filename2.doc	/Users/coderkitty/attachments/not-so-deep-stack/filename2.doc
/your/ultra/deep-stack/of/remote/folders/path/to/A super special filename here.doc	/Users/coderkitty/attachments/not-so-deep-stack/itsnolongerspecial.doc

STEP 4:

With this, you should export your file to CSV format and remove the Text Delimiter setting.

STEP 5:

Open your CSV file using your favorite text editor (mine is TextWrangler, you might want to try it. Its opensource and free). Make sure that all spaces in your filenames are escaped properly, so that you have something like this:

/your/deep-stack/of/remote/folders/A super special filename here.doc

changed into:

/your/deep-stack/of/remote/folders/A\ super\ special\ filename\ here.doc

then don't forget to save your csv file.

STEP 6:

Now, this is a fork. You have two (2) choices you can take. Either one works fine. Just pick your desired approach.

Save the remote path and the local path in two separate csv files for loading (version 1), or
Use one big csv file of remote, local path (version 2)

STEP 7:

The rest is quite straightforward from this point onwards. Just fill in your constants in the ruby script and then make sure that your files are in the right directories. All set? Execute away!

ruby sftp_to_local.rb

You might also find that the generated errors.txt file could help you reiterate on some parts of downloading/uploading your file. Sometimes your path could be wrong, or that you forgot to specify the correct local directory.

STEP 8:

Now, your files should be created in your machine. Now what? For this, you will need the handy-dandy S3Fox. Get it here: http://www.s3fox.net/ Launch the tool from your browser. Now, you can simply sync your folders from your machine to your S3 buckets. Its as easy as that!

STEP ???:

Grab your favorite coffee and wait for the script to complete. Try to sleep for awhile, watch a movie, maybe give me a tip?

PROFIT!!!!

Check your buckets after some time and enjoy the presence of your easily uploaded files. :)

Forcing urls to use https

2010-02-05T03:34:00Z

If you have the need to force certain pages of your site to use ssl, but its becoming extremely cumbersome to find out the links that point to that page, this is a better approach, which seems to be more adhering to SPOT or (single point of truth).

Just add one method to your application controller and call before_filters to your specific controllers. That's it!

I found this extremely useful:

123	def redirect_to_ssl redirect_to url_for params.merge({:protocol => 'https://'}) unless request.ssl?end

Put this in your application controller and call

before_filter :redirect_to_ssl

on every controller that would require ssl. You can pick which actions would only require this by extending your before_filter declaration as such:

before_filter :redirect_to_ssl, :only => [:new, :purchase]

or even by exclusion, whichever is more convenient for your case:

before_filter :redirect_to_ssl, :except => [:show]

PS: There are other resources too, such as this one (that could be of help): http://fuadcse.blogspot.com/2009/01/redirecting-http-request-to-https-in.html

Wordpress 2.8.4 release, a joke?

2009-08-14T13:09:00Z

I have been maintaining several Wordpress blogs (all currently running 2.8.3 as of the time of writing). I logged in earlier today, and found that there was a new release. Of course, I wanted to have them all updated at the soonest possible time.

By practice, I download the zipped file to apply them manually onto our source code repositories for update. Usually, I find this useful because I get to see what the changes really were for the new release. I was surprised to see that the new version I downloaded was a complete joke.

I got Wordpress 2.8.4 here. I downloaded the file also inside the server, for a quick copy of the latest version, in case it will be needed. Applying it to local copy of the repository, I found some big joke. Amusing, but also confusing.

Now tell me.. Is this real? Could I be wrong? Could this be a mistake perhaps? Where is the security release? I'm not moving a muscle.

Free mini store search app in PHP and AJAX - for dummies

2009-08-02T11:39:00Z

This is a very crude and very simple application which was for a demo purpose as requested by the client. I haven't been using PHP and (moreso) AJAX in over a year and a half already. This task was really more of a fun challenge that I cannot resist. I just wanted to see how long I can work on this and deliver what the client's requests were. Funny that this simple task was quoted to take 14 days of dev work, while it took me less than 5hours (since I was able to work on a CMS from scratch along with this all in 5hours of work time).

If you find yourself in need of a jumpstart, consider this the best freebie for you. Enjoy, and next time, give the client the correct estimates. It might save you both from hating each other and ruining possible future projects. ;)

My last PHP project was almost a year and a half ago. I started working in PHP eversince college. Moved on to Java, Python and now, Ruby. I must say, PHP was the longest scripting language I used in my entire professional programming career. Maybe because it was the easiest language to learn (and abuse).

So many resources on the Web have fluttered around for so long, even after frameworks were born. There came CakePHP, Zend, Prado, Symfony, etc. There were other tools too to help in making PHP a truly object orientd scripting language. Some of my few favorites were: Smarty and AdoDB.

I've quit on PHP, but I do not abhor it. I still understand the old businesses still running their cash-cow apps in PHP and is not yet looking forward to trusting Ruby on Rails or even other alternatives. The business is always driven by finances and resources. Sometimes, the best technological decisions elude the managers' table during meetings.. hence, the prevalence of a lot of legacy PHP applications. With this understanding, I still believe that these businesses would very much benefit upgrading their systems and even the skill sets of their own developers. Even if they wanted to remain with PHP, there are a lot of options out there that do not involve complete development of applications from the ground up. Some would even prefer built systems that allow plugins for upgrade--like Drupal, Joomla, and even Wordpress.

There are cons of using such built systems (dependency on plugin upgrades, general hacking, and a becoming a prey to overly customizing them), and so, I myself would not recommend using them if you won't be able to protect your site from these downside.

Though its been quite a while since I last worked on PHP, it became a challenge for me to just do this mini store application just for fun of measuring how long I could work on such a request given that I have been out of touch from the PHP world, and that the requirement could also involve AJAX.. and it would be from the ground up!

This would be a very simple application though needing a database and javascript support for AJAX. Let me now guide you to how it was done.

First, create the database with the following schema:

CREATE TABLE areas (
  id int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
  country_id int(11) NOT NULL,
  `name` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (id),
  KEY country_id_index (country_id)
) ENGINE=MyISAM  DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

CREATE TABLE countries (
  id int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
  `name` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (id)
) ENGINE=MyISAM  DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

CREATE TABLE stores (
  id int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
  `name` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  contact_person varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  contact_info varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  address varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  email varchar(40) NOT NULL,
  website varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  area_id int(11) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (id),
  KEY name_index (`name`),
  KEY area_id_index (area_id)
) ENGINE=MyISAM  DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

Next, let's prepare the main file. We are going to need a stores.php, getareas.php, getstores.php, search.php, ajax.js and include files for connecting to the database and query functions.

Stores.php

The most important parts of this file are the section handlers. We'll need handles for: (1) search results, (2) areas list, (3) stores list. These should have distinct ids that you'll have to note.

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
  <head>
    <title>Mini store app</title>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="js/ajax.js"></script>
    <script src="js/prototype.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
    <script src="js/scriptaculous.js" type="text/javascript"></script>    
  </head>
  
  <body>

    <form id="searchForm">
      <input type="text" name="search">
      <input type="submit" onclick="showSearchResults(Form.findFirstElement(document.forms[0]).value);$('searchBox').setStyle('display: block');new Effect.SlideDown($('searchBox'));return false;" value="Search for stores">
    </form>
        
    <div id="searchBox" style="display: none;"></div>
    
    <div style="float: left;clear: both;">
      <?php
        $results = Site::getCountries();
      
        echo "<ul class='item' style='overflow:auto;height: 500px;'>";  
        foreach($results as $country){
            echo "<li>";
            echo "<a href='' onclick=\"javascript:showAreas('" . $country['id'] . "');$('areaHint').setStyle('display: none;');$('areaHint').undoPositioned();new Effect.Move($('areaHint'), { x: 0, y: 0, mode: 'absolute' });$('areaHint').setStyle('display: block;');new Effect.Move($('areaHint'), { x: 60, y: 0 });return false;\">" . $country['name'] . "</a>";
            echo "</li>";
        }
        echo "</ul>";
      ?>
    </div>
    
    <div id='storeHint' style="border: 0px solid blue; margin-top: 15px; overflow: auto; float: right; width: 300px; height: 500px; display: block;">
    </div>
    <div id='areaHint' style="border: 0px solid red; margin-top: 30px; overflow: auto; width: 300px; height: 500px; display: block;"></div>
  </body>
</html>

Getareas.php

<?php
  $results = Site::getAreasOfCountry($_GET["q"]);

  if($results){
    echo "<ul class='item'>";  
    foreach($results as $area){
        echo "<li>";
        echo "<a href='' onclick=\"javascript:showStores('" . $area['id'] . "');$('storeHint').setStyle('display: none;');$('storeHint').setStyle('display: block;');$('storeHint').undoPositioned();new Effect.Move($('storeHint'), { x: 0, y: 0, mode: 'absolute' });$('storeHint').setStyle('display: block;');new Effect.Move($('storeHint'), { x: -60, y: 0 });return false;\">" . $area['name'] . "</a>";
        echo "</li>";
    }
    echo "</ul>";   
  }else{
    echo "<p style='text-align: center;'>Whoops, no areas found.</p>";
  }
?>

Getstores.php

<?php
  $results = Site::getStoresOfArea($_GET["q"]);

  if($results){
    echo "<ul class='item'>";  
    foreach($results as $row){
      echo "<li>";
      echo "<a href='' onclick=\"javascript:showStoreDetails('" . $row['id'] . "');return false;\">" . $row['name'] . "</a>";
      echo "<div id='storeDetail" . $row['id'] . "' style='display: none;'>";
        echo "<table>";
        echo "<tr><td>Contact Person</td><td>" . $row['contact_person'] . "</td></tr>";
        echo "<tr><td>Contact Info</td><td>" . $row['contact_info'] . "</td></tr>";
        echo "<tr><td>Address</td><td>" . $row['address'] . "</td></tr>";
        echo "<tr><td>Email</td><td>" . $row['email'] . "</td></tr>";
        echo "<tr><td>Website</td><td>" . $row['website'] . "</td></tr>";
        echo "</table>";
      echo "</div>";
      echo "</li>";
    }
    echo "</ul>";   
  }else{
    echo "<p style='text-align: center;'>Whoops, no stores found.</p>";
  }
?>

Search.php

<?php
  $results = Site::getSearch($_GET["search"]);

  if($results){
?>

    <a href="#" style="float: right;padding-right: 15px;" onclick="$('searchBox').setStyle('display: none;');">CLOSE</a>
    
<?php    
    echo "<table border='1' style='margin: 10px; background-color: rgb(83, 131, 219); width: 90%;'>";
    echo "<tr><th>Name</th><th>Contact Person</th><th>Contact Info</th><th>Address</th><th>Email</th><th>Website</th><th>Country</th><th>Area</th></tr>";
    
    foreach($results as $row){
      echo "<tr>";
      echo "<td>" . $row['name'] . "</td><td>" . $row['contact_person'] . "</td><td>" . $row['contact_info'] . "</td><td>" . $row['address'] . "</td><td>" . $row['email'] . "</td><td>" . $row['website'] . "</td><td>";
      echo "<a href='' onclick=\"javascript:showAreas('" . $row['country_id'] . "');$('searchBox').setStyle('display: none;');$('areaHint').setStyle('display: none;');$('areaHint').undoPositioned();new Effect.Move($('areaHint'), { x: 0, y: 0, mode: 'absolute' });$('areaHint').setStyle('display: block;');new Effect.Move($('areaHint'), { x: 60, y: 0 }); return false;\">" . $row['country_name'] . "</a>";
      echo "</td><td>";
      echo "<a href='' onclick=\"javascript:showStores('" . $row['area_id'] . "');$('searchBox').setStyle('display: none;');$('storeHint').setStyle('display: none;');$('storeHint').undoPositioned();$('storeHint').setStyle('display: block;');new Effect.BlindDown('storeHint'); return false;\">" . $row['area_name'] . "</a>";
      echo "</td>";
      echo "</tr>";
    }
    echo "</table>";
  }else{
    echo "Whooops! No store matched your search criteria.";
  }
?>

Ajax.js

var xmlhttp;
var areaHandle;
var storeHandle;

function showSearchResults(str)
{
xmlhttp=GetXmlHttpObject();
if (xmlhttp==null){  
  alert ("Browser does not support HTTP Request");  
  return;
}

var url="search.php";
url=url+"?search="+str;
url=url+"&sid="+Math.random();
xmlhttp.onreadystatechange=stateChangedSearch;
xmlhttp.open("GET",url,true);
xmlhttp.send(null);
}

function showAreas(str)
{
xmlhttp=GetXmlHttpObject();
if (xmlhttp==null){  
  alert ("Browser does not support HTTP Request");  
  return;
}

areaHandle = str;
var url="getareas.php";
url=url+"?q="+str;
url=url+"&sid="+Math.random();
xmlhttp.onreadystatechange=stateChangedAreas;
xmlhttp.open("GET",url,true);
xmlhttp.send(null);
}

function showStores(str)
{
xmlhttp=GetXmlHttpObject();
if (xmlhttp==null){  
  alert ("Browser does not support HTTP Request");  
  return;
}
  
storeHandle = str;  
var url="getstores.php";
url=url+"?q="+str;
url=url+"&sid="+Math.random();
xmlhttp.onreadystatechange=stateChangedStores;
xmlhttp.open("GET",url,true);
xmlhttp.send(null);
}

function stateChangedSearch()
{
  switch(xmlhttp.readyState){
    case 4:
      document.getElementById('searchBox').innerHTML=xmlhttp.responseText;
      break;
      
    case 1:
      document.getElementById("searchBox").innerHTML="Loading...&nbsp;<img src='ajax-loader.gif' alt='loading...' />";
      break;
  }  
}

function stateChangedAreas()
{
  switch(xmlhttp.readyState){
    case 4:
      handleId = "areaHint";
      document.getElementById(handleId).innerHTML=xmlhttp.responseText;
      break;
      
    case 1:
      document.getElementById("areaHint").innerHTML="Loading...&nbsp;<img src='ajax-loader.gif' alt='loading...' />";
      break;
  }  
}

function stateChangedStores()
{
  switch(xmlhttp.readyState){
    case 4:
      handleId = "storeHint";
      document.getElementById(handleId).innerHTML=xmlhttp.responseText;
      break;
      
    case 1:
      document.getElementById("storeHint").innerHTML="Loading...&nbsp;<img src='ajax-loader.gif' alt='loading...' />";
      break;
  } 
}

function showStoreDetails(storeId){
  storeHandle = "storeDetail" + storeId;

  if(document.getElementById(storeHandle).style.display=='block'){
    document.getElementById(storeHandle).style.display = 'none';
  }else{
    document.getElementById(storeHandle).style.display = 'block';
  }
}

function GetXmlHttpObject()
{
if (window.XMLHttpRequest)
  {
  // code for IE7+, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari
  return new XMLHttpRequest();
  }
if (window.ActiveXObject)
  {
  // code for IE6, IE5
  return new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
  }
return null;
}

Of course, it will be totally up to you how you will implement your query functions and other includes for this, but here is what I have:

includes/site.inc.php

  function getCountries(){
    $db = $GLOBALS['db'];
    $sql = "select * from countries order by name asc";
    $a = $db->CacheGetAll(3600,$sql);
    return $a;
  }

  function getSearch($key){
    $db = $GLOBALS['db'];
    $sql = "select stores.name, stores.contact_person, stores.contact_info, stores.address, countries.name as country_name, countries.id as country_id, areas.name as area_name, areas.id as area_id from stores, countries, areas where (stores.name like '%{$key}%' or stores.address like '%{$key}%' or stores.contact_person like '%{$key}%' or stores.contact_info like '%{$key}%' or stores.email like '%{$key}%' or stores.website like '%{$key}%') and stores.area_id = areas.id and areas.country_id = countries.id order by stores.name, stores.address asc";
    $a = $db->GetAll($sql);
    return $a;
  }
  
  function getAreasOfCountry($countryId){
    $db = $GLOBALS['db'];
    $sql = "select areas.*, countries.name as country_name from areas, countries where areas.country_id = countries.id and areas.country_id = $countryId order by areas.name asc";
    $a = $db->CacheGetAll(3600,$sql);
    return $a;
  }
  
  function getStoresOfArea($areaId){
    $db = $GLOBALS['db'];
    $sql = "select * from stores where area_id=$areaId order by name asc";
    $a = $db->CacheGetAll(3600,$sql);
    return $a;
  }

To briefly explain, the stores.php page displays a search form at the top and lists all available countries at the left side. For better display, the list of countries, areas and stores are clipped and set overflow to automatic only. Each country is displayed a link which then triggers and ajax call to get the areas for this specific country. This link points to a javascript method that invokes AJAX and returns the results of the invoked file to the handle specified in our stores.php page.

The list of areas are displayed in the next pane. The AJAX method displays a loading message while waiting for the results. Added effects were used from the use of prototype and scriptaculous for eye candy only. If you don't want to implement prototype/scriptaculous, you can remove the following files from being loaded in the head section of your stores.php:

12	<script src="js/prototype.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="js/scriptaculous.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

and, use these lines to display the names of the country/area:

in stores.php:

echo "<a href='' onclick=\"javascript:showAreas('" . $country['id'] . "');return false;\">" . $country['name'] . "</a>";

in getareas.php:

echo "<a href='' onclick=\"javascript:showStores('" . $area['id'] . "');return false;\">" . $area['name'] . "</a>";

You're officially good to go. There are other tips you can use too. If you're interested with personalizing your ajax-loader.gif, you can visit this site and create your own. And if however, you have a huge amount of information to be stored, make sure you have the correct indices for your database.

123	ALTER TABLE `areas` ADD INDEX `country_id_index` ( `country_id` );ALTER TABLE `stores` ADD INDEX `store_name_index` ( `name` );ALTER TABLE `stores` ADD INDEX `store_area_id_index` ( `area_id` );

This mini store app plus a CMS to maintain it (both from scratch) took me a whole deal of 5hours' work. I must admit, it was a bit hard for me to go back to working in PHP when I was so overjoyed with Ruby. I knew I could have done this all in Ruby on Rails in a little less than 5hours' work and with much lesser code. I still think that for an application to be neat, less cluttered and specifically working in DRY, it would take so much effort not like in Rails. And that's the reason why I don't want to go back to PHP again.

But do help yourself, I saved an archive of this code for your consumption. Download here or here. I'm pretty sure you'll put better evolution to this short but sweet app. Its very crude, and most styles where just hard coded for the benefit of fulfilling a demo for the client's request. You may want to visit the store playground here.

Thanks and Enjoy!

Premium should be quality

2009-07-05T06:38:00Z

Aside from daily tinkering of Ruby on Rails application, both for work and play, I have to serve requests that involve other scripting languages such as PHP and Python. PHP is the least of my favorites, but since its still the most widely used scripting language, in which more and more non CS grads have been so boastful of knowing, then I still go ways to cater to such applications. Love of Python is another thing. Its as beautiful as Ruby is for me, and as strict as how I tend to live my life.

As of the moment, I have a project running in PHP which was built using Smarty, though is not yet deployed on client's public server. Aside from this, I am also happily supporting several Wordpress powered blogs. I don't choose the themes, but I do have an input on whether its a good choice or not. We have completed customization of two of these blogs and was working on the last one yesterday. The chosen theme was IndoMagz2. Of course, I immediately uploaded the theme for use. After that was the anticipation of other stuff to be removed or added.

I couldn't have reacted negatively if I didn't have to go through the codes themselves to make some tweeks. At first glance, it looked just like any other magazine type wordpress theme. Blocks of elements are organized in the left and right columns of the layout. Although, I quite believe that three columned layouts are far better in information exposure, I don't have anything against using two columned layouts. I even thought that the layout was neat looking and the default banner would have really suited the new blog we were fixing. It was called "Ugaling Pinoy" which translates to "Filipino Attitudes" or even "Filipino Characteristics".

After a series of tickets have been filed to me for resolution, I needed to open up the codes of the theme and make the actual tweaking. I started out with the homepage. Several requests were to totally remove the functionality that the theme offered. Well, of course, nothing is impossible. Only time is the variable for every request. The quality and standard must always be fixed. This is where the real misery started.

I suddenly felt like I wouldn't really be tweaking the theme, but throwing it away altogether! But this was not the request! I only have to change some parts to get it going the way it was supposed to.. but this was not my case. I was dismayed to see its code was nowhere close to premium value!

I took the liberty of defining "premium" via Google search. Among the varied definitions of premium were:

the amount that something in scarce supply is valued above its nominal value; "they paid a premium for access to water"

having or reflecting superior quality or value; "premium gasoline at a premium price" - wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

The amount by which a bond or stick sells above its par value. - www.deltaindex.com/learningcentre/JargonBuster

Oh, and the quality was nowhere close to what I have expected! And here, I have to make my own test to prove to myself that I have not misjudged the quality of this product. Wordpress has already formed a group effort of identifying which themes deserve the limelight. Not only to put a few above the rest, but to create models for a good quality theme. At Themes Preview, they quantify the good qualities of each theme into three groups: gold, silver and bronze with a distinct list of criteria used for judging. Let's try to do the same for this case.

I run the validator and I get errors
I run the validator and css passed
guess, what? no support.
IE6? Good thing, yes.
Firefox compatible? Good thing, yes.
Gravatar supported
Auto adjustment within the sidebar is also a failure
I adjusted the default post image to something larger than the post area and it passes
Floating content within post area is okay, but the style is not good. Photo is not padded.
Proper image alignment doesn't work. I tried to force alignment values to no avail.
Proper sidebar heirarchy fail

There are others more that exemplify that this premium is nothing better than any other free. Despite the guide that was downloadable from the site, there were items that drew more negative comments.

The theme was not tested on the latest version. It only supported up to 2.6.x.
The only way to make changes to this theme was to directly edit the code. Which was kind of hard for the normal, average blogger.
The code for the home.php alone was about ~185 lines. This is quite huge considering that Wordpress and PHP is already modular.
Though the styles passed the validation, it wasn't semantic enough. The naming of the styles were not intuitive enough nor is it reusable anywhere outside the name context.
Not all posts may have a photo. The theme doesn't support this complexity. Instead, it forces you to put a photo there unless you'd rather see the default "missing photo thumbnail".
The code was not properly indented. Not readable.
The link for support on the themes management page did not go to the correct page. Instead, they have a forum for the support where as of the moment had only three (3) posts. I wonder how else I can get support for this?

I really can't say its simple. Nor can I say its clean (for it should be clean inside and out). Its customizeable alright, but only if you can survive reading the jungle-like code. I definitely wouldn't recommend using this.

Watch out for what becomes of Ugaling Pinoy soon. We won't be using Indomagz2 theme anymore, rest assured.

Be wrong to be correct

2009-07-01T13:52:00Z

Making GTD work for you using Hiveminder, Google Calendar, iCal, iSync and your mobile

2009-06-20T18:02:00Z

I'm a fairly new member of Hiveminder. I remember, I saw it first from a Lifehacker article discussing about the best GTD tool. I wanted something unobstrusive and could be used in a variety of ways.

I found Hiveminder and I gave it a spin. I immediately liked its simple layout which is quite refreshing and neat. I don't have to think much about how to use it. I immediately began using the "braindump" for all the tasks I had to work on. Though I'm a fan of handy notebooks, I would very much love to have technology remind me of things I need to work on too. Sometimes, I get too lazy to read my notebook or scribble down my thoughts for most of the time, I think faster than I could write!

I'm a fairly new member of Hiveminder. I remember, I saw it first from a Lifehacker article discussing about the best GTD tool. I wanted something unobstrusive and could be used in a variety of ways.

At first, I just put everything in the braindump. Later on, I got to study the integration of the tools available to Hiveminder. Its really wonderful that several services could be made available through the use of already institutionalized basic services such as IMs and Emails. Right now, Twitter is becoming another one of those basic services, along with Facebook, of course.

Although they haven't integrated their IM service to Yahoo yet, its already available to those using AIM and Gmail/jabber IM accounts. They have a very comprehensive list of commands available for IM use and a short but sweet guide to using the IM service. The email tool seems very helpful too! I figured if you can't do IM in your office but would really love to be able to collate your tasks in Hiveminder, you're gonna love this. Well, whilst the other may be using their IMs or Emails for this, Twitter buffs won't be ostracized too! They have an account at Twitter which they hooked up for us when if we want to jot down tasks via Twitter. Its a direct message, so nobody will see it at all.

Over the couple of months that I've been using Hiveminder, what I find lacking in it is a good security setup (though they reserve it for their Pro users--I'm only using the basic free one). And another, would be a good roundtrip syncing of items with their available tools.

Apart from jotting down your tasks, of course you'd want to be reminded of them. I use GeekTool to display my Hiveminder items on my desktop via an export of my tasks in text format. Another more useful tool for me is the export to iCal. And this marks where I make a more holistic approach to my GTD life.

Google Calendar, the center of the agenda

I don't know how it is that others get to do their GTDs via a sole tool or process alone, but I do use several tools at different times. I'm a sort of a Google buff/Google whore (or whatever you might want to call a person who spends most of their time within Google services). I use mostly Google powered tools to power my lifestyle. I email, I read, I surf, I check my sites, etc. using Google related services. Its not surprising, I'd find Google calendar better than any other online calendars out there.

Our office shares calendars via Google calendar and also in Apptix (which I hate by the way). I like the fact that I could subscribe/unsubscribe from several calendars using only one account. With this, I keep the personal events from the public events in separate entities, while I'm able to access/view them using only one account. Routinely, I would backup my calendar via an export to iCal format.

Exporting to iCal format seems to work best for me whenever I'm offline (which I so often hate to be). I can quickly breeze through my appointments and reminders via iCal. Note that, even if Google Calendar has an option for sync already, I haven't been able to get it to sync with my W960, that's why I'm opting to do it this way.

iCal, one step closer to me offline

iCal is very flexible tool that I have not yet maximized. You can jot notes on your events, create alarms, sync with other calendars, etc. Although I have not yet used it to its full potential, I'm already happy with making use of it with what I have and for my needs. It makes my life easier when I'm in offline mode.

Right now, I have my Google calendar imported into iCal (which I manually do from time to time). As part of the whole integration, I also export my Hiveminder tasks to iCal. I also have another calendar for TastyPlanner which I have included in my iCal setup.

I just set my Hiveminder and TastyPlanner subscription to auto refresh every now and then to receive updates. I do the manual import of my Google Calendar since I want the items there to be grouped into one subscription.

iSync, the bridge to mobility

Finally, there's the missing link. None of these tools could have been any more useful than they are alone without syncing them all to my mobile. Of course, when internet and laptop are both missing, I still have to survive. Good thing iSync is there to give my life a fuller shape.

For a long while back, I wasn't able to find a plugin that could help me link iSync with my W960i phone. I have searched long and hard to find it since it wasn't automatically detected by iSync's native setup alone.

I have found this and gave it a try. It worked for me! Now, my calendars and todos can be synced to my mobile and I don't have to miss anything!

Maximizing this setup

Now, there are tricky items in this setup. Hiveminder doesn't really show up in your iCal after the export/import has been put in place. The key factor is to always put due dates in your tasks if you want them to be visible in your synced calendar.

Another thing would be if you keep on missing your appointments/reminders just because you failed to look at your calendar. But this can be fixed! What I do for this, is to setup Google to send me SMS reminders from Google Calendar. You can do this too by going to your Google Calendar >> Settings >> Mobile Setup.

So there, if this doesn't work for you, you can still explore other ways of making your life's tasks easier and faster to accomplish. Maybe sometime soon, I can come up with something better for me too. Who knows? :)

Playing it safe with Google's web tools

2009-06-04T04:57:00Z

Just for the sake of 'doing-it-right', I enrolled all my sites into Google's Analytics and subjected them to Google Webmaster's tools. I'd check them from time to time to set some updates and fix reported errors.

Google Webmaster's tools is quite a handy measure for beginners who don't know where to start with their site monitoring or how to improve their pages the way Google sees it. You can optimize your page titles, see how to do it..

Just for the heck of 'doing-it-right', I enrolled all my sites into Google's Analytics and subjected them to Google Webmaster's tools. I'd check them from time to time to set some updates and fix reported errors.

Google Webmaster's tools is quite a handy measure for beginners who don't know where to start with their site monitoring or how to improve their pages the way Google sees it.

What has been confusing was that, Google reports multiple instances of the same title tag for some of my pages. This doesn't happen with Wordpress though. Since I just ported a Wordpress theme look to mephisto, I wondered if it was just my fault and if ever, how could I fix it. I looked into the default mephisto theme, and found this in the layout:

<title>{{ site.title }} {% if article %} {{ article.title }} {% else %} {{ site.subtitle }} {% endif %}</title>

This sets the title to the title of the article when an article is present, but to the site subtitle for pages such as article archive, tag archive, page or even section archive. Some mephisto themes (like skittlish) support the change in the page title (for its archives, dunno for the tag archives). I haven't tried skittlish myself, but here's my take on how you can make your mephisto pages have unique titles:

In your themes directory (or whichever path you have your theme in), create a new file called titleheader.liquid (or whatever you'd have it called) inside the templates directory.
Put the following code in it:

{% if article %}
  <meta name="description" content="Put your site description here.  Put an intro to article here '{{ article.title }}'."/>  
  <meta name="keywords" content="put, your, default, keywords, here, separated, by, commas, {{ article.title }}"/>
{% endif %}
{% if section %} 
  {% if section.name == 'Home' and archive_date %}
    <meta name="description" content="Put your site description here.  Put an intro to the archive date {{ archive_date | format_date: 'my'}} articles."/>    
    <meta name="keywords" content="put, your default, keywords, here, separated, by, commas, {{ archive_date | format_date: 'my'}}"/>
  {% else %}
    <meta name="description" content="Put your site description here.  Put an intro to the section archive {{ section.name }} articles."/>
    <meta name="keywords" content="put, your default, keywords, here, separated, by, commas, {{ section.name }}"/>
  {% endif %}
{% endif %}

In your layout.liquid, find the meta tag with the content-type and put the following code:

12	<meta content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="content-type"/> {% include 'title_header' %}

And, that's it! Save your templates, and give it a restart. You should be able to get rid of the Google webmaster errors in its diagnostics section. If you're interested to find out more about the archiving, you can start here or explore the codes of skittlish theme.

Feel free to leave me a message if you enjoyed this post. ;)

Migrate to your Wordpress blog using Ruby and Atom

2009-05-31T11:36:00Z

Recently, I have encountered a dilemma regarding my personal blog. I have it hosted by a local blog host provider. It was great staying there and blogging there when there was still this very tight-knit community of bloggers. From time to time, we'd all meet up and just express our thoughts in person. The providers were really great with hearing out their users' thoughts, wishes including rants and raves. They were really good with what they were doing (up to some point in time).

...

Now, being the Ruby lover that I am, I decided to write a Ruby script that would scrape my content and push it onto my new Wordpress blog. There are a couple of assumptions/caveats for this script:

You can scrape off content from only YOUR OWN BLOG. Please don't use this to steal other people's content. I am not liable for any online content theft from the use of this script.
You must be able to understand the structure of the blog you are scraping. You should know where the "excerpt", "main body", "post date", "post author", etc. info are located from the markup/source of the blog you are scraping.
You must have the credentials of the blog where you want to push the scraped content.
If in case you need something else, or some more tweaking to this script, you must know Ruby, or maybe you can drop me a line and I'll see how I can help you.
This script uses Atom tools, although there are other gems available, this is what I chose to use.
Turn on Atom publishing in your Wordpress blog.

...

Here are a couple of my raves about their service and the community:

Most of the members were real people. Not just an avenue for spammers and anonymous bloggers
People of that community were intelligent people. Its nice to have some good conversations with them.
There's always a superhero in the forum who always tries to help (though he's not connected with the providers themselves)
Even their higher management mingle with the people of their community
Customer support is quick to reply

And some of my rants too:

Sometimes, they forget about threads/issues
Their customer support is very poor in their knowledge of how the system works
Their customer support cannot provide tech support
No integration to offline blogging software (though Wordpress supports this)
I found out, (while writing this script), that they had a lot of substandard tweaks (especially in the markup)

And yes, it might be too obvious for some, I have experienced all of my rants in the past few weeks that have passed. I was under the intent of making an offline backup of my blog (hosted with them). And with this, I got in touch with their customer support. I have been courteous enough, patient and understanding that my request might come in weird, or exceptional to that case. The I.ph platform is really made of Wordpress engine, and that they tweaked this engine to conform to some of their requirements in providing their own bloghost. I knew for a fact that a backup could easily have been given only to special requests like mine. But this was not my case.

It seemed to me that they were reluctant, if not totally disagreeing with the fact that they'd release a backup of my blog.. for what reason, I don't know why. Maybe because their tweaks have made Wordpress engine's support for one click backup unusable?? I tried to reason out by giving them clarification of what I needed from them, but they made me wait in vain. Alas, my patience broke out when I received an email from their customer support saying..

Of course I know my own RSS feed, don't I? But that was not what was asked for! At rage, I decided to take matters into my own fiery hands. I couldn't say well enough that that email only made me furious.. well, it also made me excited and happy! Happy that I could once again write my own code to reach my own goal! Since I was bent on getting my own backup in an easy way, I looked up some reference online on whether somebody else could have done or wrote something similar to what I had in mind. I found this, but it seems to be dead as of the time of writing.

Now, being the Ruby lover that I am, I decided to write a Ruby script that would scrape my content and push it onto my new Wordpress blog. There are a couple of assumptions/caveats for this script:

You can scrape off content from only YOUR OWN BLOG. Please don't use this to steal other people's content. I am not liable for any online content theft from the use of this script.
You must be able to understand the structure of the blog you are scraping. You should know where the "excerpt", "main body", "post date", "post author", etc. info are located from the markup/source of the blog you are scraping.
You must have the credentials of the blog where you want to push the scraped content.
If in case you need something else, or some more tweaking to this script, you must know Ruby, or maybe you can drop me a line and I'll see how I can help you.
This script uses Atom tools, although there are other gems available, this is what I chose to use.
Turn on Atom publishing in your Wordpress blog.

Ready?

First, of course, have a working Ruby setup.
Next, make sure you have the following gems: (1) Hpricot and (2) Atom

12	sudo gem install hpricotsudo gem install atom-tools

Test the following requires in your irb. If it doesn't raise an error, then you're good to go. :)

require 'rubygems'
require 'open-uri'
require 'net/http'
require 'hpricot'
require 'atom/entry'
require 'atom/collection'

Secure all the variables you'll need:

wp_blog_host = "livinglife.sweetperceptions.com"  #the wordpress blog you want to post to
wp_blog_uri = "http://#{wp_blog_host}"  #making it browseable
wp_base = "http://#{wp_blog_host}/wp-app.php"  #appending the base for publishing posts
wp_blog_username = "myusername"  #username to the wordpress blog you want to post to
wp_blog_password = "mypassword"  #password to the wordpress blog you want to post to
your_blog_source = "http://sweetperceptions.i.ph"  #the page you want to scrape content from
which_pages = 1..19  #put the pages here, if the content source will need this, see how I used it

You must have registered categories on your recipient wordpress blog to be able to automatically categorize your posts. If your blog source already have categories, then you can use these exact names for the migration. If you only have tags, I can still help you out (as this was my trouble too). You'll need to declare your registered categories as such (these are my own categories):

registered_categories = ["About me", "Artistry", "Cool Finds", "Dreams", "Events", "Health and Beauty", "Horoscope", "Living Life", "Meme", "Movies", "Music", "Notes", "Pet Love", "Quotes", "Random thoughts", "Stories to share", "Techie", "Travel"]

If these new registered categories do not match those that you currently have in your blog source, then explicitly setting "synonym categories" would help. For those who did not categorize their posts, and solely rely on their tags, this could be your best avenue for categorizing your posts automatically. Try to categorize which tags (and old categories) would fall into your new categories.

synonym_categories = {
  "About me" => ["me"], 
  "Artistry" => ["poem"],
  "Cool Finds" => ["cool"],
  "Dreams" => ["dream","dreams"],
  "Events" => ["event", "bday", "birthday", "Christmas", "New year", "new-year", "celebration"],
  "Health and Beauty" => ["health", "sickness", "headache", "fever", "cancer"],
  "Horoscope" => ["cookie", "fortune", "horoscope", "astrology", "psych"],
  "Living Life" => ["life", "kalokohan"],
  "Meme" => ["meme"],
  "Movies" => ["hollywood", "movie", "movies", "movie-lines", "happy-feet"],
  "Music" => ["song", "songs", "singer", "music", "ost"],
  "Notes" => ["notes"],
  "Pet Love" => ["pet", "cat", "dog", "animal", "animals", "pets"],
  "Quotes" => ["quote", "quotes"],
  "Random thoughts" => ["thought", "thoughts", "think", "logic"],
  "Stories to share" => ["story", "stories", "adventure"],
  "Techie" => ["tech", "techie", "work", "web2.0", "development", "software", "online", "skype", "pc"],
  "Travel" => ["philippines", "travel", "province"],
}

When everything here is set, you'll need to understand that if you don't have your own sitemap of posts' links, you'll need to extract them manually by visiting all pages of your blog_source to get their urls. This might take some time. Its better if you have a list of your own posts' urls via a sitemap. If not, then you'll have to set your blog source pages like this (mine had the format http://sweetperceptions.i.ph/page/N):

1234	which_pages.each do \|page\| from = Hpricot(open(your_blog_source + "/page/#{page.to_s}/")) urls << (from/"h3[@class='entrytitle']/a").collect{\|x\| x['href']}end

Or, use your links from a sitemap. I only used text format for my own use. To do this,

urls = File.readlines(urls_to_import).map { |line| line.chomp }

Now, let's take a deep breath. The next steps would be more about Hpricot, and parsing your own document to extract the necessary information. I'll walk you through how I got mine, but then you'll have to construct your own for each section necessary. ;) I'll show you the snippet of the section involved, followed by the Hpricot code to get it. I used Firebug to help me with this, by the way.

This is an example of one post in my blog source:

Get the title of your post. Each blog entry in my blog source is enclosed in a div which contains an h3 tag with class 'entrytitle'. The actual title is enclosed in a link. You always call the inner_html of the element node you're looking at to get the text.

  title = (CGI::unescapeHTML((doc/"div/h3[@class='entrytitle']/a").inner_html.strip)).gsub(/\r\n/, '')

I explicitly set the author to my name. Next, we get the time stamp. Some would have the timestamp displayed, while the others won't. If you want to capture the exact timestamp of the post, better to have this in the script. Mine was displayed at the bottom of the blog entry inside a div with class 'meta-post'. Since this entire thing contains other information too, I used regular expression to match the format of my timestamp. NOTE: Others would have a different timestamp format. Please adjust as necessary.

  timestr = (doc/"div[@class='meta-post']").inner_html[/\d+:\d\d:\d\d/]

The date is still out there. The date stamp of my post is found inside a div with a span whose class is called 'date'.

  datestr = ((doc/"div/span[@class='date']").inner_html.strip).gsub(/\r\n/, '')

After we have the time and the date stamp, we concatenate them to form a string that would be accepted as a valid date via Atom publishing. NOTE: You may need to adjust your timezone calculations for this. Mine resolves to be -0500.

12	datestr = datestr + " " + timestr datestr = DateTime.parse(datestr).strftime('%a, %-d %b %Y %T -0500')

Next comes the tricky part: Categorizing your post! If you were able to correctly assemble your registered categories and synonym categories, this would be a breeze. Well, at any rate, you can keep on emptying your blog for the posts and redoing them again as frequent as you have/want to. Find where your tags are enclosed. Mine is found inside a div with class 'tag-list'. If your tags match the exact name of a category, then its automatically added to your filtered tags. Next, your synonym categories would be parsed to see if your tags can be used to classify to your new registered category.

  filtered_tags = []
  tags = (doc/"div[@class='tag-list']/a").collect{|x| x.inner_html}
  
  #rule 1 -> exact match
  filtered_tags << tags.collect{|x| x if registered_categories.include?(x)}.compact
  
  #rule 2 -> synonyms
  synonym_categories.keys.each do |syn|
    filtered_tags << tags.collect{|x| syn if (synonym_categories[syn]).include?(x)}.compact
  end

  tags = filtered_tags.flatten.compact.uniq.join(',')

Now to get your entire post. Yipee! You need to find a distinguishable id attached to every post. There really should be one unique id for each post. They usually look like 'post-id' or any flavors of that. Mine was enclosed in a div with id called 'postentry-{id}'. You'll need to get the this id!

  # Get your contents by finding all paras in the entry post
  entry_id = "postentry-#{doc.at("div[@class='blog']")['id'].split('-').last}"
  
  # Get the main body content
  contents = (doc/"##{entry_id}")

We are almost done. With this, there could be some parts of the body that you'd want to remove. You can do this by getting to the element via Hpricot and remove each of them.

  # Remove unneeded elements  
  (doc/"##{entry_id}/h3").remove  
  (doc/"##{entry_id}/span[@class='date']").remove  
  (doc/"##{entry_id}/div[@class='tag-list']").remove
  (doc/"##{entry_id}/div[@class='meta-post']").remove

Lastly, assemble your element and post away!

  # Atom Author element
  author = Atom::Author.new
  author.name = author
  author.uri = wp_blog_uri
  
  # Atom Entry element  
  entry = Atom::Entry.new
  entry.title = title
  entry.summary = hExcerpt
  entry.content = content
  entry.content.type = "html"
  entry.published = datestr
  entry.updated = datestr
  entry.tag_with(tags, ',')
  entry.authors << author

  req = Atom::HTTP.new
  req.user = wp_blog_username
  req.pass = wp_blog_password
  req.always_auth = :basic
 
  # Atom Collection
  c = Atom::Collection.new(wp_base + "/posts", req)
  
  res = c.post! entry

Did you enjoy this? I knew I did the first time! It feels great not having to manually copy and paste my content from the old blog source to the new one. Best of it all, I was able to keep my categories. I'm still looking at how to transfer all of my tags into the new one along with the comments, but I'm not yet successful with doing it as of the moment. If you'd like a full copy of this script, you can find it here.

Goodluck to your migration! I hope this helped.

Code revisiting and housekeeping

2009-04-11T07:27:00Z

Its a great success for every programmer once a project or an assignment has been completed. But give it a day, a week or even a month and the good old code in place is now stale.

Its every programmer's duty to revisit their codes once in awhile and reassess if the old codes are still pretty much the best codes to be inplace or if there's something new that could do something better, faster and easier with much less effort than before.

Its a great success for every programmer once a project or an assignment has been completed. But give it a day, a week or even a month and the good old code in place is now stale.

This old code could really say a lot:

  def languages_s
    tmp_array = self.languages
    txt_array = Array.new

    for tmp in tmp_array
      txt_array << tmp.name.delete(" ")
    end

    if txt_array
      tmp_arr = txt_array.sort

      if tmp_arr
        return tmp_arr.join(" ")
      else
        return ''
      end
    else
      return ''
    end
  end

Could really be waiting to become something like this: (if only programmers weren't as lazy as they are)

123	def languages (self.languages.blank?) ? '' : self.languages.collect{\|x\| x.name}.sort.join(" ") end

Personally, everytime I have a free time to spare, I take a breeze through old codes, and try to keep them in tougher shape. I do believe your code says a lot about yourself. So everytime you improve your skills, go improve on all possible evidence too! :)

Easy CSS rounded corners

2009-04-05T11:53:00Z

Rounded corners are easily achievable. Either via CSS or Javascript. See this sample using CSS, or the resource in Javascript.

I tried working on different approaches for rounded corners using CSS. I really didn't want to resort to using the old fashioned tabled layout.

What I wanted was really simple:

It should be cross browser compatible
it should look undistorted
it should be easily configured

I got all that I wanted here:

Add the following CSS code to your stylesheet:

.upperleft{
width : 100%;
margin-left : auto;
margin-right : auto;

background-color : #fff;
background-image : url('/images/upperleft.gif');
background-repeat : no-repeat;
background-position : top left;
}

.upperright{
background-image : url('/images/upperright.gif');
background-repeat : no-repeat;
background-position : top right;
}

.lowerleft{
background-image : url('/images/lowerleft.gif');
background-repeat : no-repeat;
background-position : bottom left;
}

.lowerright{
background-image : url('/images/lowerright.gif');
background-repeat : no-repeat;
background-position : bottom right;
padding : 3% 3% 3% 3%;
}

Enclose your desired content like this:


    <div class="upperleft">
        <div class="upperright">
            <div class="lowerleft">
                 <div class="lowerright">
                            YOUR DESIRED CONTENT HERE
                </div>
            </div>
        </div>
    </div>

SAMPLE HERE

This solution is only good if you want to have it done via CSS. Using Javascript is another thing, but here's a very good resource to get you going in that direction: [http://www.html.it/articoli/niftycube/index.html][1] [1]: http://www.html.it/articoli/niftycube/index.html

Removing "out of sync" error in acts_as_solr

2009-03-27T13:48:00Z

It could've been pretty straightforward removing this concerned item from the solr index and then everything would be well.. but its a lot harder than that if you're looking at over a thousand indexed elements vs their 'existing' counterparts in the database! Finding the exact data to remove was really the hardest part! I never knew this until I took the liberty of helping out our kind Infra Team to resolve the problem. I decided to tweak the solr parser method returning the "out of sync" error. I thought that it would actually be brilliant to just display the concerned element's id so that they could delete it from the index itself. And so, I had something like this: (in acts_as_solr/lib/parser_methods.rb)

Solr is an open source enterprise search server based on the Lucene Java search library, with XML/HTTP and JSON APIs, hit highlighting, faceted search, caching, replication, a web administration interface and many more features. It runs in a Java servlet container such as Tomcat. -Apache Solr

Solr can be used in different containers and different wrappers. Our application runs on Ruby on Rails, and we used acts_as_solr. Though solr is a powerful, already stable and yet flexible third party solution that we could rely on, we were still not able to maximize its full capacity. We used the bare minimum features of solr for our search modules.

As of now, we've used a couple of acts_as_solr enhancments and add ons, some of which we learned from different online resources. We were able to use db_free_solr and explored on the highlighting and faceting capabilities of solr. Its been pretty helpful, but of course nothing is almost always seamless. We encounter few problems with syncing records from the database and onto solr. For sure, you've come across this trouble before, if you've been using solr:

Out of sync! Found N items in index, but only n were found in database!

It sure was putting down every page wherein there was this glitch in the count of the records retrieved. It therefore gave the negative impression that our site was frequently unstable. Removing a certain indexed element from the solr index is easy as:

12	ActsAsSolr:: Post.execute(Solr::Request:: Delete.new(:query => %{type_s:Model AND id:"Model:110809"}))ActsAsSolr:: Post.execute(Solr::Request::Commit.new)

raise "Out of sync! Found #{ids.size} items in index, but only #{things.size} were found in database! Remove #{(ids - (things.collect{|x| x.id})).to_sentence}." unless things.size == ids.size

And yes, viola! I can now see the faulty ids that were causing the "out of sync" problem. I presented this not-so-brilliant solution to our Infra Team, and they came up with a better idea. My colleague thought that it would be nicer if I could just do away with the "out of sync" error altogether. Since I can already pinpoint the cause of the trouble, then why not remove it for good? I came up with half the solution. It was the quicker one to implement and didn't require much from their end either.

Distinguishing the faulty id from the list of objects from solr vs those that were from the db, it paved the way for me to simply remove these ids from the checking. It was half the solution because (hint, hint.. I may be doing this next time when I have time) I could actually delete the certain indexed element from solr instead of simply removing it from solr's items on hand. This "full" solution could actually bring forth other complications since you'd have to deal with what models were concerned and what fields will solr need to look at, etc.

And so.. the half solution that I did was to clean up the elements on hand for solr. This snippet is found in acts_as_solr/lib/parser_methods.rb.

  def reorder(things, ids)
    ordered_things = Array.new(things.size)

    unless things.size == ids.size
      (ids - (things.collect{|x| x.id})).collect{|missing| ids[ids.index(missing)] = nil}
      ids = ids.compact
    end

    raise "Out of sync! Found #{ids.size} items in index, but only #{things.size} were found in database! Remove #{(ids - (things.collect{|x| x.id})).to_sentence}." unless things.size == ids.size

    things.each do |thing|
      position = ids.index(thing.id)
      ordered_things[position] = thing
    end

    ordered_things
  end

The first four lines above the "out of sync" message is what is critical. It will attempt to remove the missing object from the items that solr will return. If all else fails, then it will be displaying the "out of sync" error, but would still be displaying the ids that were causing the problem.

Its quick, but not dirty. It works, but will not really guarantee that your problem will go away permanently. I suggest you do a complete reindex of your whole data. Or better yet, whatever was causing it, just make sure that there are no direct database deletion of any data so that solr will always remain in sync with your database.

Hope this helps.