html5

I was playing around on the weekend screen-scraping and analyzing word-frequencies for various sites (don’t ask), and was getting some slow responses (and accidentally got my IP blocked from one site when I hit them a few too many times). Eventually I hit upon the idea of hitting Google Cache for each URL (the pages I was scraping had sequential ?id=xxx URLs so it was easy to automate), with the aim of speeding things up a bit and taking some load off the target sites. With this in mind, I spent a few hours Saturday and Sunday developing fromthecache.com - it’s built on rails, and designed to provide transparent access to the Google cache, while fetching the original page as a fallback if necessary. ...

2013-03-28 Update : This project is very dated, and I don’t recommend it’s use. It’s now hosted on GitHub. I’m happy to announce the release of Rails Kitchen Sink a rails-project-starter, which I’ll be building all future Rails apps off of. ...

In building the new site, I decided to take the opportunity to try out something new. I’ve been using WordPress to power my blog for about 5 years, and while it has served me well, I wanted to try out something different. The main criteria for choosing a new blogging platform were : It should serve true static pages, with no need for server-side processing. It should be easy to store the entire site in Git. It should support the concept of layouts - I wanted to have a single ’template’ file that blog posts could easily inherit from. It should support MarkDown or Textile for formatting posts, since I want to keep away from posting raw HTML as much as possible. It should support comments. I should be able to deploy updates to the site with a single command. By patching together a few different open-source technologies, I’ve been able to achieve the above and more. ...