The first step in the journey to digital comics is to figure out what you’re going to read them on. These days, the answer is pretty much going to always be “a tablet”… but which one?
I had a quick look at the market back in late 2011 and here’s how I made up my mind. First, I focused on the main ~10 inch tablets of the market. This included, for instance, the Motorola Xoom, the Asus Transformer and the Apple iPad 2.
The holidays have not just been a time spent with the family eating unhealthy amounts of equally unhealthy food: it was also a time of great changes for PieCrust. So much, actually, that I bumped the version number up twice. This is not just because those changes are pretty significant but also because they break things a bit.
You may have noticed that, a couple months ago, I bought myself an iPad 2 as an early Christmas present. This was the result of some market research based on a few requirements I had for my next big household change: transition from paper comics to digital comics.
The incentive to start reading digital comics was pretty obvious: after moving my music, movies, TV shows and books to the digital world, it was only a matter of time before I would do the same with my comics. Sure, just like I still like to own some books in physical form, I will still buy some of my comics at my friendly local store, but, realistically speaking, more than two thirds of my collection is just enjoyable stuff I don’t care so much about — I want to read it, but the book itself is not especially beautiful, and it’s not something that would impress my guess when they spot it on the shelves.
For me, going digital is all about reclaiming space and uncluttering the house where it makes sense.
As a result, here’s my “Journey to Digital Comics”, in the tradition of Mike Vardy’s “Journey to…” series:
It’s been a busy few weeks, both on PieCrust and on a couple other projects. I pushed versions 0.2.0 through 0.2.3 and didn’t even have time to write about it until now! Here are some details about what’s new and what’s changed.
Pagination: that was the main focus for this version. On the pagination object you’ll find a whole bunch of new properties and functions, like the number of posts actually on the page, the total number of posts and pages for the current filter, or the indices for the previous and next pages. This will let you build layouts like Yahoo’s pagination patterns.
There are also a few methods you can call to change the pagination filters for the current page, like skip(), limit(), with_tag() or in_category(). This is pretty handy for special pages that need to list a specific set of articles.
Last, but not least, the complete set of categories and tags are exposed as (wait for it) categories and tags. You can iterate on them to get their name and their post count. This lets you build things like tag clouds and archive listings. This one may change a bit in the future, however, since I’m not too happy yet about how it works. Feedback is welcome!
Use the template data debugging window to inspect the pagination object and see what you can use.
Twig Filters: There’s a new Twig filter called nocache, which appends a timestamp to an URL. This is useful for preventing cache issues on resources like CSS files. You can of course combine it with pcurl: {{ pcurl('styles/default.css')|nocache }}
WordPress Import: The WordPress import was broken for a while, but it’s been rewritten completely so it’s as good as new. Also, it now not only supports importing from an XML file exported from WordPress’ dashboard, but also importing directly from WordPress’ MySQL database, which is faster in some cases, and necessary in others (like when your blog was hosted on wordpress.com.
The skip_patterns configuration setting for excluding files from a bake is now evaluated against the root-relative paths instead of the filenames. This means that if your pattern was a regular expression like ^_, it will no longer exclude any file or folder starting with an underscore — instead, it will only exclude any file or folder starting with an underscore at the root of the website. It unfortunately makes some scenarios a bit harder to do, but the point is to make brand new scenarios possible.
The chef init command, which creates a new empty website, doesn’t add files for Apache or IIS hosting anymore. You can create them by passing the --apache or --iis parameters.
Old bugs have been fixed, new bugs have been written!
The next tasks involve actually updating the documentation on the PieCrust website, and working on version 0.3.x, which will feature support for user plugins (effectively making it easier to add formatters, template engines and bake processors).
As usual, grab the latest version of PieCrust from the BitBucket or GitHub repositories.
There’s a new experimental feature (meaning: only in the new default branch) that makes the debug window more useful. The debug window is a little known PieCrust feature that used to only show you some caching and performance information on the bottom right corner of your website. But now you’ll notice a second line about “template engine data”:
If you click on it, you will see all the template variables exposed for the page you’re currently viewing.
Not only is it useful for troubleshooting things, but it’s also a great learning tool. Tell me what you think!