The weather was perfectly clear and uncharacteristically calm and I got the chance to take some long exposures of the stars (I’ve been wanting to do that for so long!). A few actually turned out decent:

Facing south; Milky Way visible through the center of the sky

South again at a wider-angle; Jupiter is that bright spot above the cabin

Looking north over Lake Traverse; light pollution from a small town

We spent a lot of time looking through Jeff’s telescope and imagers (I’m really fighting the urge to go out an buy one!). It was so dark and clear the Alex was even able to pick out the Andromeda galaxy with his naked eye. I really hope to return soon and do some more exploring.

Photos in this post © Christian Dinger—all rights reserved.

Where I work, there is a certain enormous website that we maintain. Traditionally, content has moved from subject matter experts to the editors and then to the web team. In the spirit of simplifying processes, we’ve recently adopted put in place a system that allows subject matter experts to be in more control of their content.

Initially, as with most CMSs, we expected this to dramatically reduce the about of repetitive work imposed on the web professionals, e.g., “here’s some text; put it on the web”. While this proved to be true, we quickly discovered that non-web folks don’t always produce valid HTML. Kind of a no-brainer. This problem seems to be the classic trade off between poor content and poor HTML.

The solution

To combat this, we’ve put in place a workflow that provides our technical team a non-intrusive way of monitoring this web content. We’ve built a script that generates an ATOM feed of recently modified pages on our web sites. This feed tells us who modified which page, when, and whether or not the page passes a W3C validation. This way, we can do ‘technical editorial’ on only the pages that really need it.

We run this every 30 minutes via a cron job. The output is routed to a recently_modified.xml file in the website (this is the ATOM feed).

recently_modified.rb

Download recently_modified.rb

require 'rubygems'
require 'xmlsimple'
require 'erb'
require 'hpricot'
require 'open-uri'

@base_path = File.expand_path($0).gsub(/lib\/recently_modified.rb/, '')
@base_url = "http://example.com/"

template = %q{<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
	<title>Recently modified example.com pages</title>
 	<link href="http://example.com/lib/recently_modified.xml" rel="self"/>
 	<updated><%= Time.now %></updated>
 	<author>
  	<name>Web Team</name>
   	<email>webteam@example.com</email>
	</author>
	<id>urn:uuid:60a76c80-d1e9-01d9-b91d-0003939e0af6</id>
	<% @files.each do |file| %>
	<%
	  file.gsub!(@base_path, '')
	  info = get_modified_info(file)
	  url = @base_url + file.gsub(@base_path, '')
	%>
	<entry>
      <title>/<%= file %></title>
      <link href="http://example.com/<%= file %>"/>
      <updated><%= Time.at(info['date'].to_i) %></updated>
      <summary>Modified by <%= info['name']%> (<%= info['email'] %>)
      at <%= Time.at(info['date'].to_i) %>.  This file has <%= is_valid?(url) ? "passed" : "failed" %>
      W3C markup validation: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=<%= url %>.</summary>
   </entry>
	<% end %>
</feed>
}

def is_valid?(url)
  doc = Hpricot(open("http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=#{url}"))
  return (doc/"title").inner_html.gsub(/.*\[/mis, '').gsub(/\].*/mis, '') == "Valid"
end

def get_modified_info(file)
  if file.index('/')
    info_file = @base_path + file.gsub(/\/[^\/]*$/, '') + '/_notes/' + file.gsub(/^.*\//, '').strip + '.mno'
  else
    info_file = @base_path + '_notes/' + file.gsub(/^.*\//, '').strip + '.mno'
  end

  data = XmlSimple.xml_in(info_file)
  ret = Hash.new

  data['infoitem'].each do |info|
    ret['name'] = info['value'] if info['key'] == 'ccLastSubmitter'
    ret['email'] = info['value'] if info['key'] == 'ccLastSubmitterEmail'
    ret['date'] = info['value'] if info['key'] == 'ccLastPublishDate'
  end

  return ret
end

@files = `find #{@base_path} -mmin -60 | grep .html$`
puts ERB.new(template).result

Now I get all of my coupony goodness from the grocery store or online—not in my mailbox.  If your really miss your RedPlum coupons, you can even get them online at RedPlum’s website.

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