Nirenjan's Space

Switching to Middleman

Stardate 57054.3 (Sat Jan 31, 2015 10:08 am) in Middleman, Bootstrap

After fiddling around a bit with Octopress, I figured it was time to give other static site generators a try. This time, I figured I’d try using Middleman and port the content over from Octopress.

magicJack and Blocked Numbers

Stardate 56989.3 (Thu Nov 27, 2014 11:42 am) in Rants

So I got the magicJack service for $30 a year, which is way cheaper than any other service, and serves my purpose for the most part. There’s just one hiccup. I can’t call my office conference call number without making additional payments to magicJack, i.e., I need to get magicJack calling credits to make conference calls.

I did call out magicJack on this, but unfortunately, the terms of service state clearly that they may charge for calls to conference calls and other numbers. Can’t really blame them from a business standpoint and their service is still cheap enough. And anyway, I can call from my mobile without any issues, and since I have unlimited minutes, I can’t really complain.

Random text plugin for Octopress

Stardate 56788.2 (Sat May 10, 2014 9:57 am) in Code Code, Ruby, Octopress

Why a random text plugin? Just because I can. It’s easy enough to implement and with just a little knowledge of Ruby and knowing how to search the internet for some JavaScript, it’s a piece of cake.

Handling 404 errors with Octopress

Stardate 56782.2 (Sun May 4, 2014 10:03 am) in Code Code, Ruby, Octopress

Building a blog with Octopress can be a bit of a hassle at times. Having converted from Wordpress, I miss the “Page not found” error that Wordpress provides when you get a request for an invalid URL. Thankfully, with Apache, htaccess and a touch of code, you can create your own 404 page.

Semantic Versioning

Stardate 56473.2 (Sat Jun 29, 2013 10:54 am) in Code Code, Ruby

Version numbering is a field on which you could talk for hours on end and still not make any sense out of it. Take package managers for instance; you have a package foo, that depends on package bar - now if it was as simple as that, we’d have no problems. It’s more likely that you’d wind up with version x of foo depending on version y of bar, which in turn depends on version z of baz. So far, so good. Now, let’s update baz to version z1 - OOPS! There are some changes to version z1 that break version y of bar, which means we need to revert to version z.