Radixhound

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!!

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.

I’m going to start posting Mephisto recipes on my blog. The idea is inspired by the Rails Recipes book, but I doubt I will be able to do it with the level of style and professionalism you can expect from the Pragmatic Programmer line of books.

In this recipe, you will see how you can use liquid to automatically generate a top-level nav bar with all the sections in your site. This way you can create new sections and pages and they will just appear! The end result will look something like this:

This is my wonderful little poem about little Mary and her little lamb. I didn’t invent it and I didn’t create the little lamb image that illustrates it rather nicely, but I did add it to my blog for you to see. Be grateful for it is glorious!

(if this seems odd to you, read more to see the context.)

I’m in the process of moving my personal blog over to Mephisto

Typo died on me without warning and I wasn’t up to troubleshooting it. Instead I just migrated it over to Mephisto in a quick and dirty kind of way. I’m much more confident that it will run quickly and without errors for a while now. Now I just have to rebuild the layout! That will come. ... eventually.