Day one (September 23)

This was a lazy day. We walked around the town and the marina and took a lot of pictures. It started raining in the afternoon and it never let up, so we retreated to the hotel and grabbed some dinner in one of the few restaurants that decided to remain open. Really terrible food this time. You can’t win ‘em all.

Day two (September 24)

Our second full day in Belaggio was kind if lazy too. We took a ferry to Mennaggio, another little resort town on Lake Como, but it ended up being more of the same. We had a nice long lunch there though and there were good photo opportunities from the ferry. I had talked Nes out of a day trip to Milan and, as usual, she was probably right. We had fun anyway.

That night we returned to Belaggio and revisited the restaurant we ate at our first night. This time we had black squid ink gnocchi and sausage risotto. Good stuff.

Day three (September 25)

On our third day our itinerary took us to Genova (via Milan) so we had a quick breakfast and headed out. The train system in Italy has remained a little mysterious, so we wanted to make sure we made all of our connections. Back to the city!

Bellagio at sunset

Typical street in Bellagio–lots of stairs

Menaggio and its lakeside promenade; the IPhone’s HDR setting sometimes does strange things, but it’s often the only way to make photos work at all.

Italian Alps from Bellagio

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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