Posts tagged ket lai
Talking to WordPress with ActiveRecord
Jul 24th
As mentioned in yesterday’s announcement I’m pulling some content across from this blog (running on wordpress) into the new Ket Lai site (a merb app). I’ve found myself doing similar things a few times lately, such as on Only Connect (on which more, soon) and so have built out a selection of ActiveRecord models to help me talk to a wordpress database from a ruby app.
At Matt‘s urging (he’s been using them to move data from a legacy site), I’ve finally put those models up on github. Being a single file they arguably should have been a gist, but I’m reserving the right to reorganise them in future.
They’re far from complete in that there are lots of validations I could have added in, named scopes that would probably be handy, and loads of convenience methods that some might like, but hopefully they’ll be of use to someone and evolve over time.
(on the subject of wordpress, I’m glad to see the addition of changelogs to the plugin directory – being asked to upgrade plugins without any idea what’s changed has long been a bugbear of mine, so hopefully this will resolve some of that)
Launching Ket Lai
Jul 23rd
For a while now I’ve been transitioning away from using the name jystewart.net for my web development work in favour of Ket Lai. The shift is partly born of a desire to separate out my work from other parts of my life (increasingly important now we’re a family of three), but mostly a recognition that I rarely work on projects solo these days–instead pulling in a range of collaborators–and a group identity is more honest to what we’re doing.
Today, thanks to the design help of frequent collaborator James Weiner I’m launching the Ket Lai website over at http://www.ketlai.co.uk. There are still a few bits and pieces we’re working on, but it’s great to have it out there for the world to see.
The site employs a variety of CSS3 techniques to give a little more visual feedback and spark, and is built on top of the merb framework (rails seemed like overkill, and personal-ish projects are usually a good chance to try something that not many client projects call for).
This blog will continue roughly at its present location, though jystewart.net may eventually get a little reorganisation/redesign-love. Naturally redirects will be used where necessary. Relevant posts are pulled across to the Ket Lai site, but this will remain a personal blog and hopefully suffer a little less from brand confusion.
So if you want to know more about the work my collaborators and I do or services we offer, www.ketlai.co.uk is the place to go. And now that it’s launched maybe (just maybe) I’ll be able to write here about a few other recent projects and interesting tidbits.