Just a quick little git and Wheels tip. Most of the time, you might only want to track your plugins .zip file in your repo and ignore the plugin’s unpacked directory since it’s pretty much redundant to track both. In order to do this, create a .gitignore file where your .git directory lives. In it add the following:

plugins/**/*

What that does is essentially tells git to ignore any subdirectories off the main plugin directory.

If there was one thing that always bugged me about github is the lack of support of CFML syntax highlighting. It seems that CFML never gets any love, but that is about to change! The Pygments project is an open source generic syntax highlighter written in python that has support for a ton of different languages. Now it seems the Pygments is working on CFML syntax highlighting for their next release!

What does this all have to do with Wheels you might ask? Well it seems that the CFML code they are using as a test bed for the highlighting is none other then the Wheels repo!

http://code.google.com/p/cfwheels/source/detail?r=3243

Ever since I started this blog I’ve received a ton of correspondence from people asking me to help them out with whatever problem they might have. However since I did a post containing the support information for MajicJack, a lot people are leaving comments to that post containing their personal information for me to get in touch with them.

Please everyone, I beg of you, DO NOT leave any personal information in comments on my blog or any blog for that matter. There are a lot of nutcases and scammers out there and I don’t want anyone inadvertently putting themselves in a dangerous situation.

I think the main reason people did this was I didn’t have any way on this blog for you to send me a personal message. Well starting today I learned (I’m always learning) that you can have a contact form through WordPress. With that I created a Contact Me page that you can use to get in touch with me for whatever reason.

Get in Contact with me!

Has this ever happened to you? You’re programming a website and within your source control manager (SCM) you have several branches. One branch could be the current version of the website (trunk or master depending on your SCM) and other branches could contain some new features or bugs fixes that you’re working on.

Now you want to test out or show the new features or bugfixes to your team or employer that are contained within these other branches and this is where the problem lies, how do you deploy these branches? Well its pretty easy right? You setup and configure an entirely new website to have the people hit that branch. So if your current version is residing on www.example.com, you might setup and configure a new website at www1.example.com for the branch you want people to have a look at.

To me this is a HUGE waste of time. For every branch you need to demo or test, you need to create a new website. Wouldn’t it be great if there was something out there that could allow the webserver to talk to your SCM directly and pull back the branch that you want simply be addressing it in the url?

For instance. Let’s say in my SCM I have a master branch containing the current version of the website and a branch called bug27 that contains some fixes for a bug I’m working on. Now if I wanted people to access both of these branches from the internet, I would have to configure two websites on my webserver. www.example.com would point to a directory containing the master branch files and bug27.example.com would point a different directory containing the bug27 branch files.

Imagine if all I had to do was to configure one website with two host headers, one for master at www.example.com and one for bug27 at bug27.example.com. Then just point the website to my SCM repo. Now depending on which host the people come to the website with, the webserver would be smart enough to pull back that branch from my SCM. This totally eliminates the need to configure a new website for every branch that you have.

That said, is there anything out there like this for Apache or IIS?

It’s been the buzz around our community lately that Wheels 1.0 will hopefully be hitting the streets in November 2009. Out of all the open and closed source projects I’ve been involved with over my career, I have to say that Wheels hold a special place in my heart. The entire team (and especially Per) is doing an outstanding job getting the final code base up to par.

Keep up the great work everyone!

Your wish is my command. Just remember that you only get three and this was your second one.

Today’s quote comes directly from my brother:

Today I became a man… a manly man. Clogged the toilet using no toilet paper. Thats how big my shit was. Bow to me fucker.

Needless to say, he needs help.

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9cm5j/am_i_the_only_one_who_doesnt_give_a_shit_about_a/c0c9lqv

I take it that not everyone loved _why’s (poignant) Guide to Ruby.

Don’t know who wrote this or where it came from. My brother emailed me a link to it and I was completely immersed in it. Kudos to the author. If you know the author or any other works by this person, please leave me links in the comments, I would love to read more from this person.

For more crazy stuff, visit my brother’s blog!