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bookmark_borderWordPress as CMS

Posted on by Manik Juneja

I have been using wordpress for some time now, writing small modules and themes as well.
This blog also runs on wordpress.

Recently for a client, I wanted a content management system. I studied creation of pages at wordpress codex site and found it had everything that I needed.
Page creation, individual themes for pages, page list for navigation menu, nesting of pages, everything i needed for the client, so that the ultimate control over the content and style remains with the client.

I was so impressed that i decided to setup my company site also in wordpress. And while doing so, I thought it would be good to add blog as a feature of my company site.
The site is at http://vinsol.com .
By and large the structure is there, I need to add a lot of content though.

It is a site which is very proudly powered by WP.

bookmark_borderSuzuki coffee

Posted on by Manik Juneja

I love Coffee, good Coffee that is, which sadly is not easily available in Delhi.
I tried Devans and Barista Home blend.
But my regular coffee is Lavazza which I buy from INA market or Modern Bazaar, Vasant Vihar.

I bought a new coffe, suzuki coffee from Modern Bazaar this time. I like it more than any other coffee I had for a long time. It was made from “Sumatra Mandheling” beans.

You can get more details at this site .

bookmark_borderJLPT exam

Posted on by Manik Juneja

Took my JLPT exam yesterday. Thank God, it’s over.
Now i can do more programming, without feeling guilty about it. ( I should rather be studying Japanese uhh… uhhh.. can play with ruby on rails after the exam too…)

I plan to continue studying Japanese. And now with the exam out of the way, I hope to enjoy it more, since I would study it my way. Rather than focus on passing the exam.

Sometimes I let my short term priorities override my long term priorities. Or maybe it was just my insecurity that made me do so.

bookmark_borderConfidence Cheats

Posted on by Manik Juneja

I landed at ksblog via a Ramit Sethi blog post

The confidence cheats post really got me thinking about my own confidence cheats.
Gettting back to writing some code is one.
Doing some pushups help me too. Really gets me all worked up to start again.

Sometimes, the off day feeling just refuses to leave me. I have to come up with more and better confidence cheats, can’t afford lack of confidence.. as K says … it costs.

And also this leaves me wondering how the confidence cheats have nothing to do with the things that make me loose confidence in the first place. Almost 100% of the time it is lack of financial growth. I want to make more money. I want to grow my business. I am working towards it…. I know it will take time… but still….

bookmark_borderadded geotags

Posted on by Manik Juneja

I added geotags, specifying my location in Delhi, to this blog’s header.
Then pinged geourl.org and feedmap.net, they will use the information in geotags to find other sites nearby. Already feedmap shows 40 blogs in my neighborhood.

Also, I learnt a new word “meatspace” at geourl.org.

The physical world (as opposed virtual reality)
where you might spend facetime with the "carbon community"

Well, even “carbon community” is a new word for me.

bookmark_borderCustomizing Rails validation error messages

Posted on by Manik Juneja

Rails Version information: activerecord-1.12.1, rails-0.14.1

I have a form, where the user enters a name, “johndoe”. I already have a user “johndoe”, and i want user name to be unique.
The default error message that validate_uniqueness_of returns is “Name is already taken”
But I want “Name johndoe is not available”.

Here is my user model, user.rb file, with the custom message.

Continue reading “Customizing Rails validation error messages”

bookmark_borderwebDAV

Posted on by Manik Juneja

I wonder why i had not known about webDAV, though it has been around for so long. I needed to have the capability to create a document in word and save it directly to a remote server. The solution i had in mind was to use smb/cifs [samba, in this case]. Then a new requirement cropped up, the file was to be stored in a database on the remote server and not in the file server. That meant I had to write my own smb server, which would get the file from word and save it to a database. I was about to start working on this, when i discovered webDAV.
Smb/cifs has a lot of legacy, while webDAV is nascent and promising. And since webDAV is based or rather an extension of HTTP, I decided to try it.

WebDAV made my task very easy, thanks to microsoft for implementing webFolders.
Now i am planning to move most of my documents that i access from multiple location online, and access them via webDAV.

Read more about webDAV at http://www.webdav.org

bookmark_borderRuby on Rails

Posted on by Manik Juneja

It took me ten minutes flat to get my first mini application running. A basic screen to view and edit a database table content using a browser. Much of it was done by the code generating scripts that come with RoR. I still have to explore the more involved features…. have heard a lot about RoR’s unit testing features and… will check it out soon.