I had a quick look at the market back in late 2011 and here’s how I made up my mind. First, I focused on the main ~10 inch tablets of the market. This included, for instance, the Motorola Xoom, the Asus Transformer and the Apple iPad 2.

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The incentive to start reading digital comics was pretty obvious: after moving my music, movies, TV shows and books to the digital world, it was only a matter of time before I would do the same with my comics. Sure, just like I still like to own some books in physical form, I will still buy some of my comics at my friendly local store, but, realistically speaking, more than two thirds of my collection is just enjoyable stuff I don’t care so much about — I want to read it, but the book itself is not especially beautiful, and it’s not something that would impress my guess when they spot it on the shelves.

For me, going digital is all about reclaiming space and uncluttering the house where it makes sense.

As a result, here’s my “Journey to Digital Comics”, in the tradition of Mike Vardy’s “Journey to…” series:

1. The Journey to Digital Comics: Reading Device
2. The Journey to Digital Comics: Apps and Publishers
3. The Journey to Digital Comics: On Ownership and Stuff
4. The Journey to Digital Comics: Conclusion

New Stuff

• Pagination: that was the main focus for this version. On the pagination object you’ll find a whole bunch of new properties and functions, like the number of posts actually on the page, the total number of posts and pages for the current filter, or the indices for the previous and next pages. This will let you build layouts like Yahoo’s pagination patterns.

  There are also a few methods you can call to change the pagination filters for the current page, like skip(), limit(), with_tag() or in_category(). This is pretty handy for special pages that need to list a specific set of articles.

  Last, but not least, the complete set of categories and tags are exposed as (wait for it) categories and tags. You can iterate on them to get their name and their post count. This lets you build things like tag clouds and archive listings. This one may change a bit in the future, however, since I’m not too happy yet about how it works. Feedback is welcome!

  Use the template data debugging window to inspect the pagination object and see what you can use.

• Twig Filters: There’s a new Twig filter called nocache, which appends a timestamp to an URL. This is useful for preventing cache issues on resources like CSS files. You can of course combine it with pcurl: {{ pcurl('styles/default.css')|nocache }}

• WordPress Import: The WordPress import was broken for a while, but it’s been rewritten completely so it’s as good as new. Also, it now not only supports importing from an XML file exported from WordPress’ dashboard, but also importing directly from WordPress’ MySQL database, which is faster in some cases, and necessary in others (like when your blog was hosted on wordpress.com.

Changed Stuff

• The skip_patterns configuration setting for excluding files from a bake is now evaluated against the root-relative paths instead of the filenames. This means that if your pattern was a regular expression like ^_, it will no longer exclude any file or folder starting with an underscore — instead, it will only exclude any file or folder starting with an underscore at the root of the website. It unfortunately makes some scenarios a bit harder to do, but the point is to make brand new scenarios possible.

• The chef init command, which creates a new empty website, doesn’t add files for Apache or IIS hosting anymore. You can create them by passing the --apache or --iis parameters.

• Old bugs have been fixed, new bugs have been written!

Next Up

The next tasks involve actually updating the documentation on the PieCrust website, and working on version 0.3.x, which will feature support for user plugins (effectively making it easier to add formatters, template engines and bake processors).

As usual, grab the latest version of PieCrust from the BitBucket or GitHub repositories.

If you click on it, you will see all the template variables exposed for the page you’re currently viewing.

Not only is it useful for troubleshooting things, but it’s also a great learning tool. Tell me what you think!

You won’t care much about the first one (the refactoring) although you may have to expect a whole bunch of new bugs, which will hopefully be easy to test and fix since the whole point of this refactoring is to make testing easier. The other changes are important, however:

• There’s a new stable branch which will, well, be kept as stable as possible. This means that new features introduced in the default branch will stay there for a little while until they’re merged into stable. This branching policy is simple yet quite common, as explained by Steve Losh.

• The “PieCrust Sample” repository now contains the partial history of the main repository. Yeah, I’ve decided to read the Mercurial documentation and found that the hg convert command is pretty useful in this case.

• The new “PieCrust App” repository contains only the PieCrust app’s code in the root directory. This is useful if you want to include it as a sub-repository of your website’s repository — e.g. in a _piecrust directory. This way, you don’t need mix the PieCrust files with your own, and you can easily update by pulling the sub-repo. This one is also mirrored on GitHub in case you don’t want a Mercurial sub-repo for some reason.

To be fair, IronCow is pretty stable already — most of the latest changes were configuration management stuff and upgrades to Visual Studio 2010 — so it’s still usable. I’ll be available for bug fixes, of course, but if the guys at Remember The Milk add new features, I would probably not know about it and it wouldn’t be ported to IronCow unless somebody forks the project and submits a patch.

Milkify, however, won’t see any improvements unless somebody picks it up. It’s just not worth it to work on a tool I’m not using myself.

This means I get more time to focus on my new home projects like PieCrust and a couple of other bigger ones in progress.

I loved the simplicity of it, and how quickly you can take it off and put it back on again… However, I quickly realized that I probably had more dust on the screen while using that thing than if I didn’t have any cover at all. Among the problems I had the infamous “dust lines” — those three lines you get on the screen at exactly the same spot as the cover’s folds.

The problem was pretty obvious: the natural way to fold the cover, and the way Apple advertises it, is as follows:

But this results in the following situation:

The iPad rests on the folded cover as expected, but the outer faces of that triangular stand are the faces that go against the screen when the cover is closed! They would therefore pick up dust and other particle directly from the table and all around, and put them back onto your screen as soon as you walk away… I don’t know where Steve Jobs used to go with his iPad, but my house is not always spotless clean, and neither are any restaurant tables or office desks that I want to put my iPad on.

An easy workaround for this problem is to fold the cover the other way:

This way, the faces that go against the screen are actually inside the triangular stand, where they’re very unlikely to pick up any dust. This way of folding is a lot less intuitive, but once you get the hang of it, you can actually close and open it as fast as before. I haven’t had much dust on my screen ever since I started using this technique.

There’s just one big caveat to this workaround: it doesn’t work with the “stand up” mode.

If you look closely at the picture above, you’ll notice what’s wrong: gravity alone can unfold the cover and make your iPad fall down on the table. In my case, the magnetic strength of the cover is barely enough to counteract the iPad’s weight and make it stand on its own, but the slightest touch can make it crumble down like a house of a couple of very expensive cards. However, I don’t care because I’ve never felt the need to use that position so far.

All you have to do is add the following to your blog’s home page’s configuration header:

posts_filters:
    not:
        has_tags: draft

This will skip any post that has the draft tag.

You will probably need to add some similar filtering to other pages such as the _tag or _category pages.

Yep, the version was bumped from 0.0.4 to 0.1.2. The main reason is that I very heavily refactored the code to make it a lot more readable and maintanable. This also means a whole new batch of bugs are lurking in the dark!

The main change for users is that there’s no _chef directory anymore. It’s all a lot cleaner, with everything living in _piecrust. Just be sure to delete your old directories before getting the new ones, so you don’t have old junk lying around. This also means that you need to (slightly) change your bootstraping code for running PieCrust. If you didn’t customize anything, you can just grab the new index.php from the sample website and overwrite your own. If not, you may want to check out the updated documentation on PieCrust bootstraping.

Among the new features, you’ll find:

• A chef init command, which creates an empty skeleton for a new website.
• Configuration variants when baking your website.
• A not filtering clause.

If you want to see what’s planned in the future, there’s also a brand new public Trello project board.

Finally, check out the slightly redesigned and reorganized PieCrust website!