Goozbach's tech tips

Movable Type dynamic pages

2009-03-29T16:10:00Z

Keeping my site up to date

I was having trouble keeping my Projects and Presentation pages up to date. I was always creating new projects, and presentation materials, however I always forgot to update the corresponding pages in Movable Type. I decided to make it easier to keep those pages updated.

The system I use is based on Mod_Include, MultiMarkdown and Movable Type.

Enabling per-directory Server-Side Includes

The first step in this process is to enable server side includes. You can make it so EVERY .html page is parsed for SSI, but that can be a resource drain and cause slow page delivery times. I chose to enable SSI for all .shtml files in just two separate directories on my site.

Apache Config -- Enable SSI

The Apache configuration I use on my site is pretty simple. Here's how I enabled SSI on my /projects/ directory:

    <location /projects/>
        Options +Includes
        AddType text/html .shtml
        AddOutputFilter INCLUDES .shtml
        XBitHack Full
    </location>

Filesystem tweaks

In order to make Movable Type "create" .shtml files I cheated. I just created symlinks from the index.html file to index.shtml in each location I wanted my SSI to work.

    cd /var/www/blog/projects/
    ln -s index.html index.shtml

Apache Config -- Rewrite Fun

To make the request ALWAYS use the .shtml file I created a simple rewrite rule which invisbly proxied the requests for / and index.html to the proper index.shtml file.

    RewriteEngine On
    # rewrite rule which makes /projects/index.html SSI enabled
    RewriteRule ^/projects/index.html  /projects/index.shtml [P,L]
    RewriteRule ^/projects/$  /projects/index.shtml [P,L]

Create your include

The next step is to actually create an include file which will be what is used when the SSI directive is parsed. As I'm trying to include the contents of a completely different site (projects.friocorte.com VS blog.friocorte.com) I used wget to fetch a copy of that page locally. I did this with a cronjob so the include is always up to date.

    0 0 * * * wget -q -O /var/www/html/blog/projects/projects-include.html http://projects.friocorte.com/projects/

Movable Type page contents

The last step is to actually create an SSI directive in your Movable Type page. Here's the contents of my projects page:

    <p style="margin-top: 0px;">As an opensource advocate I use, and suggest that others use opensource projects.<br />
    Here are a few of my open source projects:
    <!--#include virtual="projects-include.html" -->

That's all there is to it. Now I have a site which keeps up with my projects, and my presentations automatically.

Cobbler Presentation and re-vamped pages.

2009-03-28T00:13:15Z

Cobbler presentation

I've finally posted the first draft of my cobbler presentation materials. I'm not done with them, as I need to finish my remote-control system to do some screencasts. You can find the materials here.

Re-vamped pages on my site

Speaking of presentations, I've re-vamped some of the pages on this site. The two I've updated are the Presentations and Projects pages. These pages were long neglected, and weren't updated as new projects or presentation materials were made available. Now these pages will no longer get out of date as I've made them automatically update as new projects or presentation materials are posted. Watch for a forthcoming blog post about how to accomplish the same thing with your own Movable Type installation.

Until next time.

-- Goozbach

Cookie lumps.

2008-10-11T23:54:29Z

A chocolate chip cookie recipe

Inspired by the likes of Joseph Hall and Alton Brown. I have spend the last few years working on a chocolate chip cookie recipe. People have been asking about how I make these cookies for a long while. To respond to all of them, I'm going to post my recipe and methods here.

While I do follow most of the guidelines of the above mentioned recipes. I'm not going to delve into what all of the terms mean. Read those links above and thereby learn how to do what I mention here.

The Stars (ingredients)

The Dry

2 1/2 to 3 cups Bread flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips

The Wet

1 stick (1 cup) butter flavour shortening
2 large whole chicken eggs
1 Tbsp Vanilla Extract
1 Tbsp honey
1 1/2 cups dark brown sugar (packed)

Getting Started

Cream together the shortening and brown sugar, scraping the mixing bowl down a couple of times. Take your time doing this.

Add the eggs, one at a time. Scraping the sides after each one. Mix well.

Add the honey and vanilla.

Set this mixture aside.

Setting up the Dry

Sift together the flour, salt, and baking soda. Do a good job here as the better it's mixed prior to being combined with the wet, the better the cookie is afterwords. I like to use a wire colander and a wire whisk.

Combining

Slowly add the dry ingredients into the wet, one half-cup at a time. Pause after each cup of flour and scrape down the sides of your bowl (seeing a pattern yet?). I add just enough flour until the mixture pulls away from the sides of the mixing bowl and starts to form up. I like a fairly dry dough. Mix in the chocolate chips.

Portioning

Prepare a half baking sheet by lining it with parchment paper. Using a # 30 disher, not a spoon, form balls approx 1.5 inches in diameter and lay them all together on the baking sheet. Freeze these cookie "lumps" solid(1 hour minimum).

Baking

Preheat your oven to 350° F. Place 6-9 frozen cookies onto a parchment lined baking sheet and bake from 10-12 minutes, until the tops of your cookies start to dry out and turn darker brown. Immediately remove the cookies from the sheet to a cooling rack upon removing them from the oven.

ENJOY!

The reasoning

If you've followed Alton Brown's show, or spent any time talking to any cookie fanatic, you'll notice that this recipe is pretty close to the Toll House one. I've made a few adjustments. Here's the reasoning behind them.

Pure brown sugar and honey

I went with 100% pure brown sugar to up the molasses content of the cookie. Molasses helps keep your cookies moist. Honey is hygroscopic as well. This was a change I made for a chewier cookie which stayed moist for as long as possible.

Bread flour

Bread flour contains the proteins needed to develop gluten. Gluten helps make a baked good chewy. By using 100% bread flour, and working the dough quite a bit(all the pausing and scraping, and mixing). You add a good deal of gluten.

Shortening vs butter

I decided to use shortening in my cookie because I like my cookies to not spread out very much. Shortening has a much higher melting point which allows the cookie to rise a bit before it finishes baking.

Freezing the partitioned dough

Freezing the dough solid also helps keep the cookie from spreading too much. If you partition the dough into balls prior to freezing it allows you to bake just the right amount of cookies. Frozen dough will keep for weeks in an airtight container in the freezer.

I hope you enjoy these cookies.

MultiMarkdown Apache handler.

2008-08-12T02:09:33Z

The "What?" and the "Why?"

I've been a fan of the MultiMarkdown for quite a while now. I keep all of my important notes in this format, which is easy to write with just a simple text editor.

I wanted to be able to copy or sync my *.mark files to my web server and have them automatically be rendered as XHTML. I looked into a couple of ways of doing this. One of which is the Text::MultiMarkdown::ApacheHandler Perl module Apache handler. The downside is that this handler doesn't work out of the box in Apache2.2.

Read on to see my solution. I've also seen a cgi based apache handler done by reppep as chronicled here. The only problem is that he's using the original Markdown. I've long been a fan of the extended syntax, and output formats I can get from MultiMarkdown. So I've build a similar script to what reppep has done.

The "How?"

Prereqs.

You'll need at least these Perl modules installed on your system.

File::Slurp
CGI
Text::MultiMarkdown

You'll also need Apache and mod_cgi installed.

The script

The CGI script I use is pretty straightforward. Here it is in it's entirety:


#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use CGI qw/:standard/;
use Text::MultiMarkdown qw/markdown/;
use File::Slurp qw/slurp/;

my $file = $ENV{PATH_TRANSLATED};
my $text = slurp($file);
my $mark;
if (param('_text')) {
  print header('text/plain');
  print $text;
} else {
  print header;
  $text .= "\n\n[See the Source](?_text=1)\n\n";
  if (param('_partial')) {
    ##TODO test for Format: complete header and warn
    my @lines = split /\n/, $text;
    if (@lines = grep (!/^([Ff][Oo][Rr][Mm][Aa][Tt]):\s*(.*)$/, @lines)) {
       print "<h4>Overriding metadata to generate partial XHTML</h4>\n";
    }
    $text = join("\n",@lines);
    $mark = markdown($text);
  } else {
    $mark = markdown($text, {
      document_format => 'complete'
      }
    );
  }
  print $mark;
}
__END__

=head1 Name

multmd.pl

=head1 DESCRIPTION

A simple cgi script which is used as an action handler for the Apache HTTP
Server.

=head1 USAGE

Place this file into your cgi-bin directory and add a stanza like this to
/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

    Action markdown /cgi-bin/multimd.pl
    AddHandler markdown .mark
    AddType text/html .mark

Now any MultiMarkdown file you serve which has the extenstion .mark will
automatically get rendered as xhtml.

This script will honor all of the metadata you place in your markdown file
with the exception of the Format: header which is always assumed to be 
complete

=head1 OVERRIDES

You can override the default actions of this script by passing some
parameters encoded into the URL.

=head2 TEXT

Pass a parameter of _text=1 to get the raw MultiMarkdown file.

    http://example.com/foo.mark?_text=1

=head2 PARTIAL

To override the default action of rendering an entire XHTML file, pass a
parameter of _partial=1 to get just the partial XHTML.

    http://example.com/foo.mark?_partial=1

This will override any Format: headers in your source MultiMarkdown file.
And the default format of the handler (which is complete).

Place this script into your cgi-bin directory and make sure it's executable by your web server's process. I named mine multimd.pl. Here's a downloadable link of multimd.pl

The config

To make your new script do exactly what you want it to (render *.mark files as XHTML to the browser), you'll need to modify your Apache config. I placed this config section into a file named /etc/httpd/conf.d/multimarkdown.conf

Action markdown /cgi-bin/multimd.pl
AddHandler markdown .mark
AddType text/html .mark

Testing

Make sure your Apache configs are proper by running the command apachectl configtest. If all checks ok, you should be good to restart your Apache server, upload a MultiMarkdown-formatted file to your web server with the extension of *.mark, and see it rendered in it's full XHTML glory.

You can see examples of how this MultiMarkdown handler works by clicking on the links below.

Presentation on presentations

After action report from my presentation

As you have probably noticed, there is a "See the source" link on each rendered page. This is part of the CGI script I created. Add the parameter _text=1 to the url and the handler passes the MultiMarkdown source file straight to the client without any rendering, like so.

I hope you enjoy the simplicity of editing decent web documents in a simple format.

Next time I'll share how I keep all of my files in sync using Bazaar-ng and bzr-push-and-update.

Great Quote -- Sir Ken Robinson

2008-03-03T16:57:20Z

I had a great idea

I've been a big fan of the TED talks for a while now and listening to them just inspired me to do something new.

Every so often I will post to this blog one of the great quotes I've stumbled across during my day.

Sir Ken Robinson on creativity

Taken from his TED Talk.

If you are not prepared to be wrong; you'll never come up with anything original

Hope you enjoy this new feature of my blog.

EDIT: 2008-03-03 14:00

Fixed my links. Sorry

Good "Hack Music"?

2008-02-27T18:29:30Z

I work in an office with four other people. This is a good thing when it comes to communicating and working together. However it can be a bit detrimental when it comes to entering into "The Zone".

To combat this, I've been listening to music through headphones... There is a bit of a problem with the solution I have noticed, not all music is conducive to entering "the zone".

Here's a list of artists whom I've decided are great for "Hack Music". Artists whose music is great for reducing ambient noise, while not distracting you too much.

Muse
Blue Man Group
Thievery Corporation
MC 900ft Jesus
Daft Punk
Basement Jaxx

What is your favorite "hack music"? Post a comment and we'll make a big list for everyone's enjoyment.