New Blog! (Really This Time)

Today, as it happens, is my birthday. I’m not telling how old I’m turning, but I will say that I hadn’t yet wrapped my mind around my last age change. Time moves to quickly for my tastes.

Anyway, as a gift to myself, I decided to finally put the finishing touches on my new blog. I wrote the last few tests, battled for a while trying to get it working on the server¹, and now here it is, all shiny and new! What do you think?

Well, I’d imagine you don’t really think all that much is different. There are some small things, though. The sign-in glyph in the upper-right-hand corner has changed². The UI for previewing comments is a little slicker. Various stylesheet improvements have been made.

You might also notice that the header looks different; I made it an image, rather than text, because the text wasn’t aligning right all the time for some reason. It also has a cool new hover effect. Exciting stuff.

This new version is mostly about the internals, though. I’ve revamped all the controllers to use make_resourceful, cutting down the sheer amount of code in them a great deal. I’ve written a full set of specs (read: unit tests) for everything but the views and helpers that just generate static content. I’m really not sure how I should test these; flat-out string comparison seems wrong and inflexible, but a whole bunch of mocking and stubbing generates a huge amount of spec code and is equally inflexible.

Whatever. The next release, to be made some time when I actually have time to work on stuff like this, will keep the code nice and clean, but also add lots of cool features. I’m thinking a searchable archive with a better browsing interface as well, comment feeds for individual posts, that sort of thing.

Anyway, enjoy the new engine, what you see of it. If you see anything awry, let me know. For now, I need to get some sleep. Happy birthday to me!

¹ It turns out Rails apps crash if they write to the console, but only when you’re running them in a certain way. I also forgot to revert my Haml installation for this site, and left some debugging code in. It was not fun trying to figure this out.

² If you see a box instead of the glyph, you’re probably missing some fonts. Go find them.