A blog about web tech - page 4 of 6

Jekyll: How to generate new Tags on the fly

May 13, 2018

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My site has many snippets of different languages, and I wanted to tag them for CSS purposes among other possible useful things marking them might make possible. One problem with that is I am still searching out the "correct" labelling, so using mutable tags would be easier to remember as well as change later.... Read more

Jekyll: How to write an Include function

May 12, 2018

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Getting Jekyll running was a little bit of a kerfuffle since I needed to update Ruby, but then Jekyll couldn't find the right version. Eventually this was resolved and I got Jekyll's out of the box test site up and running. The fact that Jekyll has a test server that runs on your development machine is very convenient, even if it doesn't run server side includes and the like. Read more

Jekyll: How to write a Filter

May 12, 2018

jekyll filter ruby liquid plugins

Officially, filters and tags are plugins so they go into the jekyll-root/_plugins directory. Once again, no _config.yml modifications necessary (in the version of Jekyll (3.7.3) that I was using) to enable things. Read more

Out with Drupal, in with Jekyll

May 10, 2018

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So, after getting my second Drupal critical attack warning in 5 years (or so), I thought: enough’s enough. This CMS stuff is too big a hacker target and too fragile. Time to replace Drupal with something like Blosxom or something else lightweight and small. A little bit of research showed that the new thing was static site generators, where a suite of tools help you generate your site (and help manage the blogginess) on your development platform (aka. home computer) then push the changes out to the web server, all as static pages. The fact that all the points on this devil’s advocate list of why not use a static site generator all sounded good to me meant I was on the right track.

Drupal Comment Notification Automation

Aug 31, 2012

drupal comments moderation automation

So, I read this post on the OS Training website showing how to set up an automatic notification of comments on Drupal blogs which was pretty close to exactly what I wanted. I’m constantly getting blog comments but 99.9999% are spam. I long ago turned off unmoderated commenting. I can almost turn off commenting altogether, but that’s not what I want. Sadly, even CAPTCHA does not eliminate the dedicated spammers. So, I ignore my blog comments moderation queue for months at at time because it’s an obnoxious chore to dig through it for the possibility of a real comment.