Radixhound - Home

Transfering SQLite3 to MySQL and back

2008-06-04T23:24:00Z

The Easy Way

I previously posted my script for transferring from SQLite3 to MySQL here with involved step by step instructions. I’m going to mention it again with ultra simplified instructions to make it easier to digest and to save time for people who know what they are doing.

Here they are:

Set up a development DB using SQLite3 (presumably you already have one from working locally)
Set up a production DB using MySQL
(optionally) Make sure they work
Install the plugin in the vendor/plugins folder
Run the script with rake db:backup:to_db TARGET_DB=production

Tip If you don’t have a development DB and set up your local install as production, just change your database.yml file to say that production is development…

Tip I typically bootstrap my production DB before I migrate over. It works and all the bootstrap data gets wiped.

Tip Use this carefully and please back up your original DB before you transfer over. If you get the syntax backwards you will wipe your data.

Tip Both databases have to be the same structure before doing the transfer. So you have to migrate your extensions and make sure your source DB is using the same version of Radiant as the destination DB.

Link to Script…

Backing Up Radiant CMS using Sqlite3

2008-04-28T01:52:00Z

How to Transfer from SQLite to MySQL

I noticed something while working on a couple Radiant sites. I found that when I was building them locally, I prefer to work with SQLite3 databases. Then when I deploy them they use MySQL. Since so much of the configuration and site template lives in the database, I wanted an easy way to go from SQLite to MySQL. In the end I built it!

Wouldn’t it be Nice… to Backup from MySQL to SQLite? And vice-versa?

At the same time, I always thought it would be nice to be able to create a backup of the live database in SQLite. That way, if a client ever wanted their site ‘packaged up and portable’ as it were, it would be easy, just dump the production DB into a SQLite development DB, zip up the radiant folder and you have the whole site ready to run.

My ‘Plugin’ – Installation

I created this as a plugin for Radiant. Just download the package (at the end of this entry), uncompress into your plugins folder and you’re ready to go.

How to Use it

It’s fairly simple. Make sure you have SQLite and MySQL set up and running. Then configure your installation to use a SQLite DB for development and a MySQL DB for production.


development:
  adapter: sqlite3
  database: db/development.sqlite3
production:
  adapter: mysql
  database: myradiant_production
  username: radixhound
  password: paSSwerd
  host: localhost

Then make sure your target DB is pre-created. So if you don’t have a production DB up to this point, you can do this.


rake db:migrate
rake db:migrate:extensions

Then when you want to transfer from development to production, you can do this…


rake db:backup:to_db TARGET_DB=production

To do the reverse, you will do this…


rake production db:backup:to_db

Or Backup to another SQLite DB altogether…

You can also configure a third, fourth or fifth DB in your database.yml file and use that to back-up to, in case you don’t want to wipe out your development DB. Just add something like this to your database.yml file…


backup:
  adapter: sqlite3
  database: db/development.sqlite3

Then you can do this..


rake production db:backup:to_db TARGET_DB=backup

Download the Goods

radiant_db_backup.zip
radiant_db_backup.tar.gz

PS: I also have a version that works for Mephisto sites. you only get it in zip format ‘cause I have somewhere to be right now.

PPS: I figured this out from someone else’s script that did something similar-ish but not quite this. I don’t remember who or what though, sorry.

30Boxes Calendar

2007-09-19T23:59:00Z

Calendar after the jump.

Latest Versions for Rails at Hivelogic

2007-08-13T17:55:00Z

I just transferred over from a nice little Mac Mini to a Macbook Pro, and found that my Ruby on Rails installation is goooone. No problem! I’ll just re-install.

I’m following the instructions over at Hivelogic. The only problem with the instructions is that with the rapidly changing world of open source development, it’s bound to be out of date. So, since comments are closed on the article, I’ll just write my own entry with the latest versions as of today.

To get the latest versions, follow the instructions at Hivelogic and I’ll provide updated code to copy and paste only for the sections that have changed.

Readline

The latest version of Readline is now 5.2, so you can copy and paste this for the latest version.

curl -O ftp://ftp.cwru.edu/pub/bash/readline-5.2.tar.gz
tar xzvf readline-5.2.tar.gz
cd readline-5.2
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
cd ..

Ruby

The latest version of ruby is 1.8.6. Nothing has changed here.

Ruby Gems

The latest version of Gems is 0.9.4

curl -O http://files.rubyforge.mmmultiworks.com/rubygems/rubygems-0.9.4.tgz
tar xzvf rubygems-0.9.4.tgz
cd rubygems-0.9.4
sudo /usr/local/bin/ruby setup.rb
cd ..

Subversion

curl -O http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.4.4.tar.gz
curl -O http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-deps-1.4.4.tar.gz
tar xzvf subversion-1.4.4.tar.gz
tar xzvf subversion-deps-1.4.4.tar.gz
cd subversion-1.4.4
./configure --prefix=/usr/local --with-openssl --with-ssl --with-zlib
make
sudo make install
cd ..

MySQL

The latest version of MySQL on their site now ends in a .45, where Hivelogic links out to .41

Here’s the links for PowerPC and Intel (I just took his links and modded them to use 45)

That’s all folks!

Morning Martial Arts in Vancouver

2007-07-11T03:21:00Z

... or Burnaby

I love martial arts, and if I’m going to do something for exercise, nothing works as well to get me motivated to go and exercise. I just need to feel like I’m learning and growing and not just strengthening muscle group x and y. The thing about martial arts training is that it’s always offered in the evenings around dinner time or just after dinner. I don’t know how people with families can train at those times.

Wait. I bet they don’t.

... why not in the mornings?

I just don’t get this, really. It seems like a no-brainer that there would be some people interested in training in the morning before they start their day. Here’s what you do: you get up, go to your dojo or whatever, get the oxygen pumping, and start your day. This works for fitness classes. Why can I not find a single martial arts club in my area that has morning classes?

... are you up for it?

There can’t be that many people in the world that love their pillows so much that they are unwilling to get out of bed to start their day off with a bang. What do you think? If you had the opportunity, would you go for some early morning training?

I want to find a group of interested people and approach an instructor about starting some morning training. If you happen to be interested too and live in the Vancouver / Burnaby area… drop me a line! radixhound by way of gmail.com

CSS editing on Mac OS X just got better!

2007-07-05T21:02:00Z

For a while now, one of my indispensable tools for working with CSS has been Xyle scope

This application saves me so much time when it comes to editing CSS. I can immediately see the changes I’m making, I can tweak everything until I’m happy, and then save my changes. Often, I will try out different ideas and scrap them. I’ve been very happy using Xyle scope.

The one major gripe I’ve always had with it though, is that I could only edit CSS properties that were already there. If an element did not already have a margin property defined, then I would have to fire up my text editor and add that property before I could tweak it in Xyle scope. I lived with that because I was happy enough with the app otherwise.

I no longer have to live it! I’m thrilled with the new 1.2 version of Xyle (currently in beta). The developer has added a bunch of features that make it soooo much better. I’m loving it! Let me tell you about the new features that I’m loving. It’s kinda like a review, but not really.

Add properties and rules

Version 1.18 of Xyle scope required you to have your external text editor always open with your style sheets so that you could add properties and style rules manually and then tweak them in Xyle. This slowed everything down and often caused problems when I would tweak things in Xyle and forget to save before I went into the text editor to add something new. This caused me to have to reconcile two different versions of the style sheet I was working on.

With the new version of Xyle, I never have to worry about reconciling any more! I don’t even have to open up my style sheets in a text editor at all. What can I do now that I couldn’t do before?

I can find an HTML element with no style rules at all and create one for it in the CSS
I can delete style rules completely
I can add new properties for any style rule
I can delete any property

The only reasons left for opening up the style sheet in the text editor are to add comments and delete rules that don’t have any corresponding page elements. (you can only edit things that relate to elements on the page)

Edit a remote site and save changes locally

This is fantastic for me. Often my work flow involves developing a template for a site in XHTML + CSS then converting it to use special template codes and uploading it to a server. By the time it gets to the server it’s about 90% complete, and needs some final tweaking to get everything done.

Up until now, that last bit of tweaking generally meant Xyle scope got dropped at the wayside and I did my final tweaking manually. Not so anymore! I can now load up the external site in Xyle and link it to style sheets that live locally. I can then tweak the CSS to my hearts content and upload the sheets to the server when I’m done. Joy!

Miscellaneous bug fixes

There were also a few little annoyances with version 1.18 that are fixed in 1.20. I wish I had more time to write a thorough review because I’m so happy with Xyle scope right now.

Envy, Generosity and Canadian Idol

2007-06-06T19:56:00Z

I watched Canadian Idol last night. I hadn’t seen it since the first one in 2003 and I have to say I quite enjoyed watching it. This morning I found myself reflecting on the show and what I can learn from it.

The short version? Be grateful and generous and grab your truth strainer!

Idols Don’t Get Respect from the Music Industry

The first thing I was reflecting on was how Idols generally don’t get much respect from people in the music industry. What they say is that they don’t have a lot of credibility. I wonder how much of it has to do with envy?

I can imagine that someone who has fought their way to the top from the cheap clubs of the world up to the international stage being a bit envious of someone who has it ‘handed’ to them by some reality TV show. At the very least, it’s up to the idol to prove that they have what it takes once the show is over. Even if they do become the next Kelly Clarkson, I wonder how much resentment and envy is out there. Of course, in the case of Canadian Idol, it’s seems less likely to launch someone into stardom than American Idol would, and the idol is more likely to be left in something like superstar limbo.

On the other hand, everyone desires deep inside to be ‘discovered’. This is part of what gives the show it’s appeal. We all want someone to just say “Hey, you are a star, where have you been hiding?”. Wouldn’t it be a nice feeling to be able to do that for someone else? In a sense, that’s what the voters are doing—when you vote for someone on the show, you are participating in giving someone that. I bet there are many people who have made it to the international stage that love the Idol series because they have that attitude.

So what did I take away from this reflection? I need to be grateful for the gifts I have been given and have an attitude of generosity. It’s much better to try to give people that experience of being discovered, than to knock them down for not having fought their way up the ladder. I can do this for every kind of success I experience and I don’t need to be an international star to start.

What I Like and Don’t Like

The other thing that I can’t help but think about is how much time the show dedicates to the bad auditions. First I wonder if they planned it this way, or if they just stumbled upon it when they were producing the first show. Maybe someone in the editing room was shocked at the number of terrible auditions and so entertained that they felt they just had to include it on the show. You have to admit, it makes for some good (if somewhat negative) entertainment.

What I don’t like is that they spend so much time showing the negative auditions that it comes across as mocking. Let’s face it, there is some outright mocking that goes on from the judges. (But would the show be a hit without it?)

What I do like is the way that they are pretty gentle with the people who obviously just don’t know any better. They generally thank them for their audition and just say they didn’t make it. They do this quite a bit actually, and it makes me wonder why they pick certain people to make fun of. Let’s face it, some people just don’t get it and are so caught up in themselves they can’t tell how bad they are! This doesn’t mean they deserve to be mocked, but they can be said to bring it upon themselves. After all, it’s not a secret that the audition assumes the possibility of getting mocked.

What do I take away from thinking about this? For Idol hopefuls, they really should really put themselves through some kind of truth strainer about whether they should audition or not. This could involve recording themselves on video and watching it, performing in front of strangers, and talking to professional singers. I think that more than just idols can follow that same line of thinking. There are many areas of our lives that we can and should put ourselves through a truth strainer before we begin some undertaking. Here are some:

- Before you date someone, before you get married - Before you start a business - Before you choose a career - Before you make a big purchase

So.. grab your truth strainers and keep them handy people!

Peace! -C

Send More Toilet Paper!

2007-05-14T17:30:00Z

In working with non-technical people who are not familiar with all of the different acronyms and codes that are used in the technical world, it is a common challenge to be able to communicate on the most basic level. One example is in setting up email servers.

“In the outgoing mail server field, type in smtp.yourdomain.com.” “Type in what?” “Ess emm tee pee” “Ess emm pee tee?” “No, as in SEND MORE TOILET PAPER” “ohhh”

I’m going to propose the development of a standardized list of alternate, memorable, meanings of acronyms for the non-techie. Why should we explain to them that SMTP means “Simple Mail Transmision Protocol”? I mean, who really cares? Even half of the techie people would have to look it up.

If this development of a standardized list of alternate memorable meanings (SLAMM) takes off, then we can look forward to fewer typos when communicating techie. If you happen to stumble upon this blog entry in your travels, drop a comment and suggest a SLAMM for your most frustrating acronyms.

Here’s a start on suggestions.

DNS : Drinking Numbs the Shenshes
IMAP: I Make Armpit Poots
SMTP: Send More Toilet Paper

I guess the usefulness of SLAMM will be limited to things that people have to communicate verbally. It’ll be fun to work on though, and useful to remind techies that they don’t have to explain the meanings of these cryptic concepts to people, they just have to pass on the data in a fun and friendly way so that they make their audience feel comfortable.

Weighing in on the iPhone

2007-04-19T20:39:00Z

I think the iPhone is going to stir up a revolution. Maybe it will just start a revolution—maybe it will be the revolution.

I keep reading about what people are saying about the iPhone and in a way I just want to laugh. The funniest thing to me is how many people get stuck in their boxed-in way of thinking. So many people in todays left-brained society are just unable to grasp things that are a whole new way of thinking or attacking a problem. Of course, when the idea has been around a few years, they’ll accept it and will quickly forget their old objections.

Here’s what I see happening with the iPhone—it’s going to be the only device you’ll need to take with you when you leave the house and it will revolutionize personal organization. Really, the music player is cool, but the time- and life-management options are the ones that are going to be really exciting!

Getting Organized ala iPhone

I have seen a few different technologies that are looking like great organization tools that just need a better interface to make them accessible to everyone. One of the key items is a shared calendar. Right now Microsoft has that corner of the market somewhat cornered with exchange. Soon Apple will rectify this with their calendar server which will be available with Leopard. Imagine taking a powerful shared calendar that is linked with the calendars of all of your friends and associates with you everywhere in your pocket. Now imagine that calendar on a big wide beautiful screen. iPhone.

Consolidating the Digital Noise

One of the biggest challenges for technology to tackle is to give people the ability to manage all the sources of electronic stimulus that are coming at us. Maybe we should start by listing them.

Email
Cell Phone + Voice messages
RSS Feeds
Appointments and reminders
Faxes (lets just funnel that into our email, shall we?) Edit:
Podcasts / audiobooks
Video podcasts / vlogs

Just for the heck of it—mainly because I think the iPhone could handle it—let’s add the noise of our own mind. What do we do with all the ideas that come to mind? The iPhone offers one simple, consistent interface for handling emails, voicemail and by extension RSS feeds. As for the ideas that come to mind, voice memos and voice-to-text can solve that one handily. Then there is the big touchable calendar. iPhone!

The Missing Link

I see one major missing component to this puzzle to complete the picture of the total revolution. That is the ability to turn your inbox into tasks. There are some handy additions to Apple Mail that can help you control your inbox and manage them with an organization system. Essentially, what I’m talking about is the ability to take an email and turn it into a task that you can put on your calendar or into your task inbox (I’m thinking GTD here). If the iPhone were to have that feature, where you could take all of the digital noise that comes in from all sources and turn it into actionable items, then the iPhone would be a time management dream.

I’m not going to run out and search for info on the iPhone to see if this is one of the features it will have. I’ll wait and see, but my gut feeling is that if it isn’t included at the release then it won’t be long until there will be something to do that.

Simplicity Wins – a Right-brained person’s dream tool

Overall there is a subtle shift happening around the world. Our left-brain dominated society is turning into more of a right-brained world little by little. Microsoft is going down, Apple is rising. All up-and-comers are focusing on good design and simplicity. For me it’s all a breath of fresh air. The iPhone to me is the the right-brained person’s dream tool. We will see musicians, artists and designers snap them up when they hit the shelves, it might take the rest of the world some time to get it, but get it they will.

Mac, iPod, iPhone, it’s all part of one big movement from left-brained solutions to right-brained solutions. I welcome the move from the left-brained multiplication-of-clunky-components to a right-brained simple-synergy. Ahhh! I think the rest of the world will too—eventually.

Fast Food Websites

2007-04-19T16:40:00Z

Your website’s information should be the equivalent of fast food, but how good is that, really?

Let’s talk about food—fast food. Modern culture is in a love-hate relationship with fast food. We don’t have enough time to prepare slow and nutritious foods so we end up eating fast foods. The result is that our bodies crave the processed sugars. It gets to the point where we simply don’t consider healthy alternatives in our quest to find food.

I think it’s the same story with information. Just as hordes of people will file through a fast food restaurant for food while a select few will sit down at a restaurant serving healthy foods that involve serious chewing—hordes will visit websites with fast information and entertainment while few will visit and dwell at sites with deep and complex information.

It’s simply a fact that if you want a successful website you need to pre-process your content so it’s easy to chew and goes down easily. What I wonder about is how healthy that is for the future of our culture. I wonder if anything could be done to stop or slow that trend so that future generations dwell and deliberate more rather than flitting from idea to idea. It is something worth thinking about because a society full of soft and inactive bodies is one thing, but soft and mushy minds is another thing—a sad and frightening future.

Filters in Mephisto

2007-04-09T22:37:00Z

I just spent a bunch of time fiddling with what should have been a simple change to a filter plugin for Mephisto. It’s the Lightbox Filter. If I can save anyone else from this annoyance, this blog entry will be worth it!

Basically, all I wanted to do was to change the filter so that it generated the markup <div class="gallery"> instead of <div id="gallery">. Should be darned simple. So I went into the filter and changed one litter word. Great! I then spent far too long trying to figure out why that didn’t work. I could do nothing to coerce Mephisto to NOT generate the code the old way!!

I tried all of these things:

I cleared the cache
I manually deleted the generated pages
I stopped the webserver and started it up again
I even went so far as to toss that plugin out of Mephisto entirely.

NO DICE

Finally the answer..

It turns out that Mephisto calls the filter to generate the results when you save the article. I was assuming that it happened when a call came in from the ‘net for that page.

My assumption went something like this:

Markup is saved in database
Request comes in to web server
Mephisto translates markup into HTML and serves the page.

Really, what happens is this:

Markup AND generated content is saved in DB
Request comes in to web server
Mephisto combines pre-generated HTML into the full page and delivers it.

Mephisto stores two copies of your article in the DB. One is the one you edit, and one is generated as soon as you save the article to the disk, ready to pack up and deliver to the web server. Smart move!

So the solution to my problem was really simple. Once I edited the filter, I just had to re-save the articles from the admin console. That caused the filter to get called again to generate the markup with my precious <div class="gallery">. Ahhh! Relief. Now let’s blog about that experience.

Lesson Learned?

Yes – the trusty book “The Pragmatic Programmer” admonished that a programmer should always understand his tools and never program by coincidence. I had assumed certain things about Mephisto that were incorrect and it cost me precious time. Now I know more about Mephisto and realize that I make more assumptions that I sometimes recognize. :)

Interested in Jewish History?

2007-03-27T22:57:00Z

Are you interested in Jewish History? You are! I have news for you then—there is a new museum that just opened in Vancouver.

I’m sure you are wondering why I’m plugging Jewish history. It’s because they have a cool new website that I implemented using Mephisto. If you are not in the Vancouver area, it might be difficult to pop on over to check out the museum, but you can still check out the website. Eventually they hope to have some of their archives online, but for now they just have an awesome publishing system that is clean and easy to use.

I’m particularly proud of the typography on this site. You may not notice right away, but the second column lines up very nicely with the first column. This can be a bit tricky when you include various sizes of text like the different sizes of headers. I just had to make sure the headers restored the vertical rhythm to normal by using appropriate top and bottom margins. I also created a little image with horizontal lines spaced 15px apart. This gave me a kind of ‘lined paper’ to work with so that I could conceptualize what was going on.

So, even if you aren’t interested in Jewish history, check out the cool site: Jewish Museum

Quicksilver Funny Moment

2007-03-21T19:52:00Z

I had this moment of absolute hilarity just a few minutes ago. I was playing with Quicksilver and tossing tasks into my inbox for Actiontastic, when I discovered that if I jump the gun and execute a command before giving an action to it, it would do the default action “Large Type”. Basically it just splashes the text on the screen. After a couple of fumbles, I thought I would mock myself for a moment. Little did I realize how well I would mock myself – or how much it would make me laugh. I still chuckle every time I look at the screen shot.

I just had to blog about this funny moment. At the same time, I’m going to explain how I took this screenshot, renamed it and converted it to 200×200 pixels in a few seconds and without touching my mouse! All thanks to Quicksilver.

What is Quicksilver anyway?

Quicksilver is an application for Mac OS X (ten) that allows you to do stuff on your computer without reaching for your mouse. You type in a few commands, it shows you visually what is going on and you hit ‘enter’ to execute the command. An example is resizing an image. To do that, you can type in this sequence of characters: ctrl+space, yarad, resiz, 200x200, enter that is effectively 19 characters. If you can type 50 WPM, then you can execute a command like that in about 2 seconds – which is about how long it would take just to reach for your mouse.

Why not to reach for your mouse.

If you are a decent typist, then there is good reason not to reach for your mouse. As I explained in the last paragraph, you can execute a resize command in the same amount of time it takes to remove your fingers from the keyboard and reach for the mouse. Never-mind clicking through folders to find the image, launch a program, find the appropriate menu item, resize and then save.

When I settled into my first job as a programmer, I was faced for the first time with the idea of programming in UNIX with an command line editor. It was a fairly daunting task to initially grasp how to do that, but it really wasn’t very long before I came to LOVE being unchained from my mouse. I was using VI – I still like VI. I could move around the document and jump to key sections with a couple of keystrokes – less than a second, compared to how many seconds of scrolling and searching were I to use a mouse?

Why reach for your mouse?

What’s the right word for using your mouse? I’m going to call it mousing. Mousing is great for exploring and learning. It’s very tactile and allows us to use complicated computer programs immediately that might take days to learn if we had to memorize all the keyboard commands. In that sense it frees us from the necessity of keeping loads of info about each program in memory. Instead we remember the locations of the things we need and ignore all the functions we don’t need.

If you are really serious about being a computer professional and a master of your machine, I think you have to ditch your mouse at some point and embrace the old-school concept of mastery. The goal is to never explore to find the commands you need. Learn them and execute them with a few keystrokes. You can shave hours of wasted time from your weeks, months and years.

Edit: It occurred to me after writing this that one of the great things about Quicksilver is that you can both explore the commands, and stay at your keyboard, thereby learning mastery while you explore.

Resizing and renaming an image with Quicksilver

click for larger view

I promised that I would explain how I took this screenshot, renamed it and resized it without touching the mouse. Here’s what I did.

Pressed the OS X keyboard command to take a screenshot: command+shift+3
Invoked Quicksilver: ctrl+space
Found the file on the desktop by typing: Desk<space>picture then I used the arrow keys to pic the latest picture. When you create a screenshot, it is created as picture 1.png, then the next is create as picture 2.png and so on. In my case, it was picture 10.png I need to clean up my desktop.
Once I locked on the picture I wanted, I hit tab to choose my command then ren which searches and finds the “Rename…” action.
Then I hit tab and typed in the new name yaradork.png

Voila! File renamed. This may seem complicated by reading all of those steps, but really it isn’t. It took just a few seconds, and would be faster if I was more familiar with Quicksilver and didn’t have so many screenshots on my desktop.

*It occurs to me I could have done this faster by not first going to the desktop in step 3. I could just type picture and picked “picture 10.png”

Now to resize the picture? I did just as I said in the first paragraph. ctrl+space, yarad, resiz, 200x200, enter. This automatically creates a file yaradork 1.png with the new dimensions. I then proceeded to my blog to write up this article.

Boy this is exciting stuff. I’m already starting eye my mouse with more distain. It’s not unimaginable that I’ll move it waay across the desk so I’m less likely to reach for it and more inclined practice on a new Quicksilver skill to do the same thing in less time.

Podcast Test!

2007-03-13T23:15:00Z

I’m testing out podcasting with Mephisto. For the test, I grabbed a little sound clip of my daughter saying the Hail Mary prayer. She must have been about two and a half when I recorded this.

Boy did she ever have the cutest little voice!

Mephisto Recipe #1a - Auto Sections Revisited

2007-03-13T21:42:00Z

A few weeks back, I posted a Mephisto recipe for setting up a navbar using liquid that will automatically include all the sections in your site. It turns out that it wasn’t that good, so I’m revisiting the issue and posting a recipe that works. You can see it in action in my new section The Playground.

Read on to get the code.

The Liquid.

First create a new liquid template _navbar.liquid. Within that template, dump the following code:

 
<div id="navbar">
    <ul id="nav">
    {% for sect in site.sections %}
        <li>
            {% if site.current_section == sect %} 
                <p class="current">{{sect.name}}</p> 
            {%else%}
                <a href="{{sect.url}}">{{sect.name}}</a>
            {% endif %}
        </li>
    {% endfor %}
    </ul>
</div>

The CSS

Ok, now you have to style your list. Here’s a sample CSS style for a horizontal tab style layout that sits at the right of the page.

#navbar { width:100%; height:2em; }
#navbar ul { list-style-type:none; float:right; margin-right:15px; }
#navbar ul li { float:left; height:21px; margin:-4px 2px 0 2px; }
#navbar a, #navbar p.current {
    display:block; 
    text-decoration:none; 
    padding:.74em 10px .73em; 
    font-weight:bold
    }
#navbar a {border:2px solid transparent; }
#navbar p.current { margin-top:0px; }
/* do the colors */
#navbar a, #navbar p.current { color:#000; } 
#navbar p.current { background-color:#F55;border:2px solid #000; } 
#navbar a:hover { background-color:#55F;border:2px solid #000; }

Hook it Into Your Layout

Now you have to hook it into your layout. You’ll do this by using an include in your main layout file. It goes like so: {% include 'navbar' %}

There. That should get you much farther than the first recipe of the same name. I trimmed down the CSS I used on a particular site, so it’s not 100%. You’ll need to tweak it for IE6 as well – but that’s another issue.