19 Sep 2011
For the past few years, there has been a revolution in the blogging scene. People have moved towards better hosting providers, better blogging tools, with automated, and delayed blogging becoming the norm. Posts are written months in advance, and proof-read dozens of times, before making it to the general public. Wordpress, Blogspot, Tumblr, Posterous, Texpaterrn are pretty much everything that most of the bloggers use. However, there have been some silent niche entries in this market. Static Site Generators.
Static Site Generators
Static Site Generators are tools which you use to generate a static version of your site. Instead of using a dynamic scripting language (such as php), your tool takes in your markup & combines it with your blog posts to generate an html only version of your site. This version is then uploaded(for eg, via ftp) and is then visible as your blog. Most such tools are written in languages such as ruby, python, node.js, and erlang. The most commonly known are Jekyll, Hyde, nanoc, and webby. An excellent list is available here.
Benifits of using Static Site Generators
Markup
For me, the most important part of using Jekyll is that it allows me to use markdown as my writing syntax. Markdown is a markup language that is compiled to HTML. It is supposed to be a highly readable version of html. For instance it uses backticks(`) to write code.
`this` becomes this
Also, you can use * to emphasize text(strong or emphasis). Link creation is not the horrible <a href=> that you remember, but the sleek looking [Link text](Link URL). Similarly it offers lots of other features. You can even specify alternative markup languages, such as textile in jekyll configuration.
Ease Of Blogging
You can write blog entries very easily. I’ve added markdown syntax bindings to vim, my favorite editor, and geany has a markdown plugin as well. I am of the opinion that you should write text entries in a text-editor, not a textarea in a browser window. I used Windows Live Writer for quite some time and still believe that it is far ahead of anything else in the market. But the wpost format that it uses is propertiery, and as such stopped me from importing blog posts anywhere.
Revision Control
Revision Control, such as git, works best with text-files. Since your blog entries are now just plain text files, you can easily store them under version control, easily reverting blotched commits, making branches, and merging errors. And in case you do not know it yet, git is awesome!
Jekyll allows you to define your layout using Liquid Templating. {{content}} translates to the variable content. Similarly you can iterate over blog posts, by using Liquid tags for foreach. The best part is that this is all done before publishing your website, meaning that the final result is always just pure html. You can easily create static portions of your site (such as headers, footers, sidebars).
Getting Started With Jekyll
I’ll start with jekyll, since it is the most used one out there, and runs on github. It even powers this very blog. First, you must install jekyll. On an Ubuntu machine, sudo apt-get install ruby rubygems && gem install jekyll should work. If you are working on development using Ruby, I’d recommend you to rvm, instead of plain vanilla distro ruby installs. For windows folks, install Ruby, and the Devkit using RubyInstaller.org. After that run gem install jekyll.
Instead of preparing a site from scratch, we will instead be forking an existing site running on jekyll, and using it to model our own. This is partly to shield this tutorial from html/css/js which is irrelevant in this case. In this particular case, I will be using my very own website. Download the source code for my website from github and extract it somewhere. Next, you will have to delete all the content inside the _posts, projects, _drafts, contact, & data directories as I do not give permission to you do use those in your site.
Next, create a file called _posts/2011-month-date.md with the following format :
---
title: Title Of Post
layout: post
---
The blog entry follows here in markdown. You can use *italic*, **bold**, [Link](http://google.com), #header1, ##header2 etc.
For more markdown details, visit its official page at http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#autolink
Now, open up the _layouts/ and edit default.html. You’d need basic html skills to replace my photo with your own, and change links to various places. After you are done, just cd into the root directory of the site, and run jekyll. Some output should confirm that the server ran successfully. Open up http://localhost:4000 in your browser, and you will see your web-site running.
Now for the hosting part. All of your current site is hosted in _site folder, so you can upload it anytime you want. Or, if you want, you can use github as your hosting provider. Just follow the instructions on pages.github.com and you should be be up and running in no time.
13 Sep 2011
I installed Ubuntu as my primary OS back sometime in February. Not that I’d not tried it earlier. In fact, I’d used a copy of Ubuntu 3 back in day. But this time around, Windows (from my dual boot) just gave up and died. The partition with Windows got heavily corrupted, lost lots of data, and ultimately I had to format it. And Ubuntu dragged through all that. And here I’m today, a veteran of 3 Ubuntu versions, starting with 10.10, and right now on the 11.10 beta.
What have I learned ? That its better than Windows, for one. But several other things as well. I’m writing this post from the general linux-distro scene, and not just Ubuntu in specific. For the period before Feb, I’d been using Linux Mint as my primary OS for quite some time. But Ubuntu Natty Alpha brought all that Unity love (which I doted on once), and I had to move to 11.04
Reasons to switch to Linux
- Its free!
- Its free! No more paying up for Windows. People who had Windows ship with their computers would be delighted to know that there is something called a Windows Refund, which allows you to be compensated by the cost of Windows, if you decide not to use it.
- Better file system. If you’ve ever lost yourself in the mirth of files in “Program Files”, “AppData”, “Application Data”, “sytem32” and the like, you’d be delighted to know that there is a very well balanced binary management system in Linux. All binaries are in PATH, unlike Windows, where some softwares do that, and most don’t. So you can actually run
php, git, ruby from any damn place that you want. People who have tried to compile Java programs using javac on Windows might remembring updating PATH in Windows. No more of that in Linux.
- Free softwares! The majority of good software on Windows is paid (and even more with Mac). But in the Linux world, (almost) everything is free. What is paid for then? Some games, high level commercial softwares and the like. But most of the stuff is free.
- Package Management Apparently Windows 8 will have some sort of app-store with it. Which is a long time coming in Windows. But guess what, almost all Linux distros have some flavor of package manager built in. Debian (and Ubuntu) has
apt-get, Arch has pacman, Fedora has yum. And installing softwares is as easy as it could be. Need mysql? Just type sudo apt-get install mysql. Done. Boom. Just like that.
- Customization Level Even though I don’t like the messing up of Gnome by Ubuntu, there are tons of alternatives available. I’m right now using Gnome-Shell, and have plans to move to
xmonad, which is another Window Manager. Almost every feature on the Linux desktop can be customized.
- Terminal I’d always had planned several
learn bash scripting kind of to-dos but never got to it until I started using Linux. Even if you don’t script, the actual power of your machine is opened by the terminal. Hacking away in vim, and browsing sites using elinks, and ordering Pizzas in Command Line is as geeky as it gets. Gnome is designed in such a way to allow a normal user to use his computer fully without touching the terminal, but if you use it, it gets better & better.
- Applications There was a time I used to be a Windows fanatic, using WMP, Zune, Everything and what not. But now, I’ve got a bigger arsenal of softwares. Ever used Audacious? That’s my default music player, and its awesome.
- Software Development You use Windows to develop stuff for Windows. I’m nowhere near to writing applications in C#. I’ll probably be hacking away scripts in ruby, node, python, bash, and building stuff using xul, gtk, webgtk, and qt. All my web applications are ultimately deployed on Linux machines, so it makes sense to write them on Linux. And only Linux has the ease of language package managers, like rubygems, npm, and pip.
- Open Source I haven’t yet checked out the Linux Kernel source code, but I’m thinking of getting my hands dirty real soon. Ever since I’ve joined github, I’ve been introduced to several awesome coders, projects, and organizations. And guess what? Its all open source! Meaning I actually spend less time writing parsers for xml, and more time working on applications.
What I’ve Learned
- Be utterly fearless Back when I was in Windows, a simple partition deletion used to scare me to death. Now? I’m ready for anything. If you, like me, go play with the alpha of all your favorite stuff, then things will break. And it will be fun to solve all that stuff. You will learn a thousand new things in the process, gain lots of rep on askubuntu, and become a Ubuntu Jedi Master. OK, maybe not the last bit, but you shall become utterly fearless of all danger. I had to use my computer without network accesibility for three days. And it didn’t even give me a GUI. So I just drudged along for 3 days straight on the console. :)
- Community Sometimes, I feel people do not get my helpful comments, and offerings of help on Facebook. Its not their fault. They’ve never been introduced to a proper online, helpful community before. The Linux community is helpful, worldwide, readily available, and has probably handled the problem that you are facing now.
- Server Administration I’m still lacking on the cloud front, as I don’t have servers powerful enough to host virtual machines. But otherwise, I’ve handled lots of stuff.
ssh is my thing, and I use git to deploy applications like a pro. I’ve moved on from apache to nginx to cherokee and what not.
- Take Backups Remember all those “Take Backups before installing Windows/Ubuntu” things that popup while installing your OS. I never paid attention to them, until recently. Now, I’ve got backups scheduled on
Dropbox, SpiderOak, and a custom SparkleShare server. I make sure to host my code on github, or my personal git repositories and backup images to Picasa. Everyone knows hard discs are unreliable, so why not make your data redundant and take backups.
The only counter argument would be that Windows has much more stream-lined view of things, with almost everything offering a GUI based application to amange stuff. That’s just not the Linux way. Still, I’m not one of those crazy fanatics who go around preaching Linux (maybe I am!). I feel that if you are using your computer to just open Chrome, Firefox, VLC, and Word, then anything would do. You could probably install android on your computer and do everything you are doing right now. If you are a heavy gamer, then better stay with Windows. And if you are a programmer, switch to Linux.
Windows 8
I installed a developer preview copy of Windows 8 recently, and although I was really awed by its designs concepts, I feel that it is still lacking in certain fronts. For instance, it seems to me that Microsoft is trying to get 8 to the tablets much more readily than on the desktops. Why? Because, there is nothing that can undermine Windows superior market share in Desktops for the near future. However Android & iOS have a very strong presence. Ergo, Windows 8 goes to tables.
I installed all my favorite programs on Windows 8, but had to switch back after a few days. As a developer, it just does not offer me the same freedom, and easy workflow that I am accustomed to. For instance :
- Installing Ruby with build support for gems took a lot of time and patience.
- Cygwin does not compare anywhere near to a bash shell. Its like this tiny humble brother of shell who turns away when you say PATH. You have to type all those monstrous
C:/\ kind of paths.
- No App Store. Windows 8 dev preview does not have an app store yet, which was one of the reasons I had tried Win8. I’m used to frequently browsing the Ubuntu Software Center just to find something that fits.
- I found that my productivity reduced to half when I was on Windows. I spent too much time looking for stuff which could be done by a single line bash on Linux
Tags: operating systems, linux, ubuntu, windows 8, weblog ifest 2011
12 Sep 2011
After my attempts at python, Ruby on Rails, this was the time for node.js. You ask me what is node.js ? Remember when Google Chrome came out and went blazing past the rest of the browsers in Javascript benchmarks. That was because of its internal Javascript Engine, called V8.
Soon, V8 was developed as a backend to an evented IO library, that is now known as node.js. Initially, it was named just node, but to prevent confusion, and explain its javascript inheritance, it was renamed node.js. This is the water-cooler moment of the language. If you know node, you’re the cool guy on the block. So what is so special in node ?
Evented IO
Basically node allows you bring home the same good anonymous functions from JQuery on your server. In advanced terms, node allows evented input/output, meaning all the IO calls are non-blocking and evented, or scheduled in parallel.
Traditional I/O:
data = file.read("/foo/bar");
// wait...
doSomething(data);
Evented I/O:
file.read("/foo/bar", function(data) {
// called after data is read
doSomething(data);
});
otherThing(); // execute immediately;
How To Install
The official installation guide is present at https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Installation. I’d present a slightly different version, using nvm, i.e Node Version Manager.
Unix/Linux
Dependencies
There are some dependencies on installing node.
sudo apt-get install git-core build-essentials libssl-dev
Run the corresponding command for your distro (yum etc).
Installing nvm
- Clone nvm:
git clone https://github.com/creationix/nvm.git ~/.nvm
- Include nvm:
. ~/.nvm/nvm.sh //The dot is important
- Source it to your bash file. Basically copy the above command(2) inside your ~/.bashrc.
Fetching node
Node is under heavy development at the moment. Development of node is carried across a stable & a testing branch. The stable branch is the one that you should prefer. As of now, stable is v0.4.11 and testing has reached v0.5.6.
Now run the following commands:
nvm install v0.4.11 to install v0.4.11
nvm use v0.4.11
nvm alias default v.04.11 to make it default
You can type which node to see the actual node binaries being used.
Package Methods
I would strongly advice against using your distro versions of node, unless you are on a rolling release distro, such as Arch. Please do not run sudo apt-get install node to install node. This would only cause much anguish and pain later on.
As of now, even the beta of Ubuntu 11.10 holds v0.4.9 and is likely to do so for the next 6 months.
Windows
As I’ve stopped using Windows for quite some time, here are instructions from the official node installation guide.
Windows Build (Node v0.5.5): http://nodejs.org/dist/v0.5.5/node.exe
I would again recommend to install http://nodejs.org/dist/v0.4.11/node.exe for stability reasons.
Self-contained binaries are available at http://node-js.prcn.co.cc
Node Package Manager
All cool programming languages come with their own package managers. Ruby has rubygems, Python has pip, PHP has PECL, perl has CPAN, and node has npm.
npm holds a large collection of packages that are the extra batteries that don’t come included in node. If you need to parse documents, or do some other fancy stuff in node, don’t look farther than npm. If you need it, chances are, it already has a package in npm. See list of packages on the npm site.
Unix
A simple one line install is available for npm
curl http://npmjs.org/install.sh | sh
After that, you can install any package by npm install package. For instance, install jade by npm install jade
Windows folks can clone the npm repository and run the included nmp.bat file, and hope that it works.
Simple Servers in Node
node.js comes with “batteries included”, and part of that battery is node’s ability to instantly create web servers. Yes, right inside your program, you can easily create web servers, which will hold full compliance to HTTP.
This is a very simple HTTP server, written using the http module(included) in node :
var http=require('http');
http.createServer(function(request, response) {
var headers = { "Content-Type": "text/plain" };
response.sendHeader(200, headers);
response.sendBody("Hello, World!\n");
response.finish();
}).listen(8000);
As you can see, the createServer function takes a callback function as its argument. The callback function is called for each of the requests. All events are handled easily and instead of a server handling threads, memory etc, node just handles requests. In essence, a request generates an event, which is then handled by the callback function provided.
This is quite similar to the way we program event loops in javascript on the browser.
The good stuff
There are loads of interesting projects using node. Visit the modules section on the node wiki for a list of interesting node modules available. These include node clients for various libraries such as Databases(mysql, postgre, sqlite, Cassandra etc), Microframeworks (lik Sinatra), Frameworks, wikis, CMS, parsers and what not.
I’d recommend starting out with Connect which is a middleware for node, and allows you to wrap your application easily around it. For databases, you can either go with the standard Relational ones(like mysql) or be brave, and take a spin with the noSQL ones like CouchDB, Cassandra, or MongoDB. All of them have native bindings available for node.js.
References
Blogs & Other resources
