Quasi-Evil

Posts Tagged ‘Coding’

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At last!

This evening I have coded a layout from scratch. This is nothing new but what is new was that I did it from memory, didn’t have to visit 90 million reference sites and didn’t have to make a shit load of edits for it to work in IE6 and IE7 and Firefox and Camino and Opera…you get the picture.

I may have punched the air. A couple of times. Possibly.

It’s taken me a year of half-arsed coding to reach the stage I was at nearly three years ago. Which may sound utterly rubbish to most of you but since Scarlett stole my brains (and now uses them to play with one of those annoying dolls that cries and wets itself), it’s an achievement for me. If I can do this a few more times, I’ll move onto learning PHP properly again.

Ruby, Ruby, Ruby, Ruby

I don’t particularly like that song called Ruby and I’m completely failing to remember the name of the band but I’ve spent the last two days getting Ruby (plus Rails) up and running locally on Phoenix (my MacBook). It’s working (at last) and I now have a fresh install of Mephisto to play with. I think I might love this software, but I’m scared how long it’s going to take to get RoR running on my web server.

How I Installed Ruby on Rails and Mephisto Locally on Mac OS X

I’d already got PHP and MySQL running by following the instructions in Blog Design Solutions combined with a bit of common sense (basically, I kept hitting buttons and typing stuff until it worked, I may one day write a tutorial on this). Next, I attempted to follow Mephisto’s own installation instructions. Save yourself the hassle and don’t even bother reading them (yet – and to be fair, they probably aren’t that bad if you’ve got some semblance of a clue as to what you’re doing but for instructions that are aimed at people who’ve never run Rails before, they suck), first use these awesome instructions by Dan Benjamininstead to get RoR up and running. I’m clueless with Terminal and it still worked.

With RoR working, I downloaded Mephisto and dropped the whole folder into Sites (which is the bit of Mac OS X intended for running websites). I used these instructions to get SQLite up and running (ignoring the bit about SWIG – basically just typing sudo gem install sqlite3-ruby should do fine if you followed Dan’s method of installing RoR). Then it was time to go back to Mephisto’s crap guide and skip to the bit about configuring the database. Created the database.yml file and then, in Terminal, changed directory so that I was in the mephisto folder (cd sites/mephisto in this case). Perhaps it should have been obvious that I needed to change directory but I had to go to bed and get up again to figure it out. Once I’d done that, I continued following the instructions and found myself with Mephisto installed and working.

I then had no clue how to login and have now updated Mephisto’s crap instructions so that it gives the username and password at the bottom. Time to play.

ETA: A little later, for no apparent reason, my install of Mephisto broke. I started getting NoMethodErrors and basically it equated to the script being unable to find the theme it needed to use. It seems to be a common occurence and there are (overly complicated) ways to fix it. So just in case you’re trying this and it happens to you, you need to use Terminal and type svn export http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/mephisto/tags/rel-0.7.3/themes/default/ path/to/mephisto/themes/site-1/simpla --force. That should get things working.