I’ve been playing with Octopress 3 off and on for a few weeks. Finally my theme and available plugins are such that it’s close enough and I can move onto much newer versions of everything. I ended up removing a fair bit of stuff – the sidebars, all the social media plugins, etc. There’s no longer any javascript other than the disqus stuff to pull in comments.
In the process, I ended up forking the demo Octopress theme and creating a trivial plugin for doing disqus comments. I don’t really understand Octopress (or Jekyll) to be honest, but I’m slowly learning.
In other shiny technology news, I finally made a Pebble watch app! You can see the source on github. We’re big fans of the KEXP radio station and listen with a real radio (not streaming). Regularly we want to know “what song is that?” but can’t get to our computers or phones fast enough. So this app will show the current track on the watch. Shiny!
https://www.flickr.com/photos/raludwick/16227719299/player/
The technology Pebble offers to do this is excellent. I didn’t have to setup the toolchain locally on my Mac and instead used Cloud Pebble which let me do everything in a browser including (via the Pebble app on my phone) install the application. For this app, there’s a bit that runs on the watch itself (written in C) which controls layout, appearance, any timing, button interactions etc. Then there’s a piece written in Javascript that runs in a sandbox within the Pebble iOS app: this is the part that actually contacts KEXP’s servers. Their C SDK is pretty clean and easy to understand and I spent more time futzing with the Javascript than anything. Once I convert the app to use the approved playlist API, I’m going to put it in the Pebble app store.
Fancy Beans 