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The other day I was talking about upgrading Typo. The update itself went well, true, and the site was up and running without too much downtime, but then I started using it again… and I have noticed two things so far (both about writing posts) that I really dislike:

First, the good old editor is not there anymore: the Typo editor used to be really good, because on the left hand side you had a very reliable and easy to use textarea with Wiki syntax (you can choose which exact syntax you want), and on the right hand side you had a “live preview” of your post, automatically updated with Ajax, that showed you how the post was going to look like. Well, that’s gone. Now there are two options: some retarded WYSIWYG box, that I tried to use and failed, and some good old textarea… without the damn live preview. That sucks big time, because there is no other preview (that I have seen: please enlighten me if there is indeed one), so I just blindly write things in a Wiki format, and hope that it’s going to look OK when I press “Publish”.

Second, I was playing with the Wiki format for the articles, and I changed it to “Markdown” (I always mix “Textile” with “Markdown”, and never remember which is which; the one I prefer is Textile). After I hit “Save”, not only the next article was parsed in Markdown format by default, but every single blog post. It’s like, you select the parser the system is going to use to interpret your whole blog. How retarded is that? Once you have written posts, it doesn’t make sense to change their syntax (unless you do it manually editing the post itself). Clearly the format is a property of each blog post, not of the whole blog installation.

Not everything is bad though: it seems that now you finally have a “Draft” concept, so I can start writing a blog post and just save as a draft, instead of unticking the “Online” property and saving as a normal post. Also, the drafts are saved automatically, so I don’t have to remember to hit “Save” from time to time just in case the browser crashes or I hit something stupid and erase the contents of the post. Yay for that.

It’s funny. One month ago, I had never been to Copenhagen. I had two weeks of vacation, so I spent a couple of days there and got to know the city. A couple of weeks later, I’m back in Copenhagen for the YACP::Europe 2008.

In short, the talks were good. Not fantastic on average, but good. In particular, Damian Conway’s Keynote on Thursday morning was really funny, and had food for thought. It was about contexts and the Contextual::Return module (BTW, does anyone know which system he uses for the slides?). Wednesday’s keynote by Larry Wall was about Perl 6, a bit too much into details. It had some interesting ideas about programming language extensibility, but it was a bit too much for a Wednesday morning (without much sleep). Prophet (“a grounded, semirelational, peer to peer replicated, disconnected, versioned, property database with self-healing conflict resolution”) looks really cool, I’ll see if I can have a look soon. Also some ideas about QA and automated testing, to think about, explore, and share with other people.

Many of the lightning talks were very very funny. One of the funniest was the talk about implementing lolcode in Perl6. Really impressive when you think about it, and really funny too. Others, like the Trailer Theory from Adam Kennedy were very funny too.

All in all, we had a really good time, we learned some things, we have some things written down to investigate later, and we met some new people. Yay for the YAPC::Europe!

Hey there!

I have just upgraded Typo. It was slightly traumatic, because at first the blog broke horribly and I couldn’t see anything other than errors 500. To be fair, the change was quite big, because it included also an upgrade to Rails 2 (I was using some older Typo that used Rails 1.2.x), so everything worked better than expected.

I could login as admin, and change preferences and whatnot, and the only thing that was broken was the public view of the blog. I had a look at the logs, and it complained about not being able to find some template for the sidebars. I was very confused, and didn’t know where to starting looking for this. So, obviously, I asked “Señor Google”. He didn’t tell me that much, but someone left me the following hint: if you comment out the call to the helper `render_sidebars` (in the active theme code) solved the problem…. at the price of not having sidebars of course.

So I decided to connect a Ruby/Rails console to the production database, and have a look at the Sidebar model. The summary of what I did is this:

>> Sidebar.find(:all, :order => 'active_position ASC').
            map {|s| s.active_position}
=> [0, 0, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 4]
>> Sidebar.find(:all, :order => 'active_position ASC').
            map {|s| s.type}
=> [nil, "CategorySidebar", nil, "ArchivesSidebar", nil,
    "TagSidebar", "StaticSidebar", "XmlSidebar"]
>> Sidebar.find(:all, :order => 'active_position ASC').
            find_all {|s| s.type.nil?}.size
=> 3
>> Sidebar.find(:all, :order => 'active_position ASC').
            find_all {|s| s.type.nil?}.each {|s| s.destroy}
=> [#false, "count"=>true}, staged_position: nil, type: nil>,
    #"Links", "body"=>"..."}, staged_position: nil, type: nil>,
    #"rss20", "trackbacks"=>true, "comments"=>true, "articles"=>true}, staged_position: nil, type: nil>]
>> Sidebar.find(:all, :order => 'active_position ASC').find_all {|s| s.type.nil?}.size
=> 0

So, the problem is that there were some (severely broken) leftovers of the upgrade. I just removed them, and everything started working again. Phew!