22 May 2013
Robin, Vicent ,and I are happy to announce the release of
Redcarpet 2.3.0. Since the last release, we’ve made a lot of bug fixes and
closed many issues on Github. Big thanks to all the
contributors for the numerous pull requests we have merged and
for issues reported.
New features
Underline support
We can now pass a new option to the Redcarpet::Markdown object: :underline.
It allows you to parse underscored emphasis as underlines. For example, the code
markdown = Redcarpet::Markdown.new(Redcarpet::Render::HTML, :underline => true)
renders the following markdown
This is *italic* and this is _underline_ when enabled
as
This is italic and this is underline when enabled
Google-code-prettify support
Passing the :prettify option to a renderer adds a prettyprint class to your
code blocks in order to make it work with google-code-prettify.
Org-table like syntax support
Redcarpet now supports + (a plus sign) as line intersections instead of
pipes. It can be a pain to translate tables from other markup (if you work with
org mode for instance):
| Foo | Bar |
|----------+----------------|
| A column | A nice content |
Disable indented code blocks
This version ships with a new options that allows you to disable indented code
blocks. You just need to pass the :disable_indented_code_blocks to a new
Redcarpet::Markdown object and there you go!
Bug fixes
We’ve made several bug fixes and cleaned up some pieces of code. The main ones are:
- Add a
redcarpet_ prefix to some functions to prevent segmentation faults with
libraries which share the same function names, such as older versions of ruby-prof.
- Mark all symbols as hidden to avoid conflicts with other gems (such as houdini)
There are other changes, of course. Please see the changelog for further information.
28 Apr 2013
On Thursday, April 25th, I was fortunate enough to be able to spend a
couple of hours pairing with Katrina Owen
on a refactoring for Tracks. Here’s a brief
retrospective on that session.
I’ve read various places online that pair programming is more draining
mentally than when you’re just working by yourself. I didn’t spend the
whole day pairing but that certainly wasn’t the case here. I cannot say
enough good things about the session. I haven’t had that much fun coding
on something in a long time and I’m so so happy with how the code that
we were working on turned out. I also left that session with a ton of
new energy for crafting software.
This was my first remote pairing session. Here are some of the things I
liked about it:
- I had the box set up before hand. Vim, shell, tmux (mostly), the code
we were going to work on, all done before the pairing session
started.
- I picked something small to work on. All we did as part of this
session was extract a single method.
The things I didn’t like:
- The box was slow. We were only running two tests out of the test
suite. They took 20 seconds to run. Normally, I spoil myself on a
Retina Macbook Pro which takes 20 seconds to run the whole test
suite. We spent a ton of time running the tests.
- I had more planned that we didn’t get to. Now, this isn’t really a
bad thing, I was just hoping that it wouldn’t take as long as it did
to extract that method.
And some stuff I learned:
- If you’re going to extract a method and want to see what will be
affected by your method extraction, raise an exception at the
beginning of the method and run your full test suite. That will catch
all the places the method is called in your tests, which you can use
for the next step
- Take the information from the previous step and create a rake task to
only run the tests that are affected by the code you’re changing.
Then set up a shortcut in your editor so you can run thoses tests as
often as you need to.
- The faster the test suite, the more fun you’ll have.
To sum it all up, the more you pair with others, the more fun you’ll
have coding, the more you’ll learn, and the better your code will be. I
simply cannot recommend it enough. Thanks to Katrina for taking some
time out of her busy schedule for a pairing session!
18 Apr 2013
When was the last time you just sat back and listened to the world that’s
going on around you? An hour? A day? A week?
I was listening to an episode of the Ruby Rogues podcast the other day while I
was driving home from work. While I was listening, I learned several things
about the different people that were on the podcast that I didn’t know before.
Then it dawned on me that I’ve been purposely doing this sort of accidental
learning for years. I had just never fully realized it until that moment.
While a lot of developers like to slap on some headphones and jam to their
favorite bands, I tend to leave my headphones off, just in case I might pick
up on something that I hadn’t learned before.
So, one day, just for a little bit, take off the headphones. Sit back, listen
to the things going on around you. You never know what you’ll pick up on that
you might have missed out on before.
02 Apr 2013
Adão Raul’s rack-jekyll gem
is a great piece of Rack middleware to serve out Jekyll sites using any
Rack compatible app server.
Sadly, rack-jekyll on RubyGems is seriously outdated. Prior to about a
week ago, the master branch on GitHub was using Jekyll 0.11, which is
few months out of date now.
Fortunately, the pull requests I’ve submitted to update rack-jekyll to
Jekyll 0.12 and to update the other gems that rack-jekyll uses have been
merged into master. I’ve also been given push access to the repo so that
I can make sure the Jekyll support stays up to date as possible.
I’ve also sent an email asking for a new release, and offering to help
push it out to RubyGems if Adão so chooses to have me do that. Hopefully
I’ll hear back soon and we can get a much needed update to rack-jekyll
done!
Update: rack-jekyll 0.4.0 is now out!
01 Feb 2013
Myron Marston recently wrote a post recommending the removal of
Bundler.require.
Go read his post. Go ahead. I’ll wait.
I didn’t find anybody on Google with my same problem, so I’m documenting
it here for posterity. (And to partly remind my future self how much of
a dumb Rails noob I was when I wrote this post).
The Problem
Removing Bundler.require from config/application.rb explicitly
disables part of Rails’ autoloading mechanism. Which means your asset
gems don’t get autoloaded, which means you get all sorts of weird errors
in your application log, like so:
ActionView::Template::Error ('twitter/bootstrap/bootstrap.less'
wasn't found. (in
/Users/matt/Code/my_test_app/app/assets/stylesheets/bootstrap_and_overrides.css.less)):
And then you pull your hair out googling, and searching on stack
overflow for the solution, because surely, in the 2 months since Myron’s
post was published, somebody has run into this, right? RIGHT? No, they
haven’t, or they’re smarter than me and figured it out on their own.
What the hell do I do now?
I spent what I thought was an exorbitant amount of time trying to figure
out why this wasn’t working, what was actually going on, and how to fix
it.
The first clue is just before the conclusion of Myron’s post:
Many gems provide rake tasks. If the gem is no longer being loaded at
environment boot time, these tasks may not be available. Ripple, for
example, provides a handful of rake tasks. To make these tasks
available in your application, you’ll need to add load
“ripple/railties/ripple.rake” to your Rakefile, which is essentially
what the rake_tasks block in Ripple’s railtie does.
The second clue came when I was looking in config/application.rb which
is where the require statements for a bunch of railties live.
The solution
The solution is actually really simple. Add
require "less/rails/railstie"
require "twitter-bootstrap-rails"
to config/application.rb and suddenly the error about not behind able
to find that bootstrap.less file I mentioned above just disappears.
But wait, there’s more!
I ended up getting a similar error with jQuery.
ActionView::Template::Error (couldn't find file 'jquery' (in
/Users/matt/Code/my_test_app/app/assets/javascripts/application.js:13)):
Ok, we’ve been here before. This is simple now. Add
to config/application.rb and now I am greeted by the empty view I put
in place for my default route.