More relative than relative

Having attempted to use plated under https://git-for-windows.github.io/ which is currently my goto way of dealing with linuxy stuff on windows. I hit a little problem.

It seems mingw, the thing that runs bash that makes git for windows viable gets a little bit carried away when you pass paths starting with / into a command. Or set an environment variable, yeah tried that one.

http://www.mingw.org/wiki/Posix_path_conversion

It tends to replace / with wherever msys was installed to, probably a horrible path on yout c:\ drive somewhere.

This is a bit of a problem if you are passing in a url to a static website builder. The current setup ended up replacing all the urls with links to my C: drive which is a tad inconvenient.

So I over solved it, a bit of messing around and it is now setup where if you do not provide a root for the site then we work it out as a relative path. So for instance if you are a couple of directories down then it would set the _root to ../../ which gets you there from the current page. This allows us to include js files or css files from the root using a relative path.

This works both for site that are built to the root of a domain and github style sites that get placed inside a sub directory. This can still be replaced with a --root=/whatever/ on the commandline but that wont work too well on the windows, but then again, what does?

Fixing whilst using

Let's just call this a very mild alpha version of the plated^ system. I've been using it for under an hour, trying to break things (which it did within the first 10 minutes) but things are moving along and we're already seeing places to fix and move around.

So far, this is rather a lot different from the previous iterations, ie. Pagecake and Bootstrapp, but the changes are improvements suited to fit the needs of all those years of use and this can only be a good thing.

Happy new year!

This is the first blog post to test that the blogging system for plated is setup and functioning. It was written on the morning of the first day of 2017.

So far we have cascading chunk system setup and working along with a simple plugin management which contains a blog plugin for doing blog type things. Organising a bunch of posts by time and displaying multiple posts on index pages.

I'm not bothering to break the blog system down even further into a list system, I figure that should just be a separate thing and should be built to deal with needs rather than trying to be ultra generic.

As it is I think we have enough bits working now that this can replace the static site generation in d-portal, which is where this JavaScript code came from originally. Will have to do some tests and see how it all goes.

Right now we are also available on NPM but probably a good idea to wait a little while for things to settle down as everything is still in a state of flux design wise as I try and take the design lessons from the old code and attempt to unify it into something simple.