So, I found this awesome library called VexTab that allows you to write down musical notations in a simple syntax and generates a HTML5/javascript rendering of the notation. I have some little snippets to allow rendering chords and tabs with/without notations. This will be specific to Jekyll generated sites on Github, you can be much cleverer on your server. It’s almost too easy but here you go. How to include music notation in your blog – you can ignore raphael.

I keep finding myself asking this question way too often I definitely read that in a paper (or, blog post, quora article) a while back, where was it? Most often it’s either in one of my moleskine notebooks (seriously, those things are incredible - I keep two), date stamped with some scribble or on Evernote. I don’t get annotations and in-place notes. I like to scribble on the side a fair bit and annotate.

So, I finally decided to port this site to Jekyll-Bootstrap along with a bunch of other projects. There are some helper functions in Jekyll Bootstrap that I find very convenient to use. Particularly since I’m using ruby/rake all the time, it’s easier to just run the rake post command to just post whatever you need to. I’ll add a few more things in the future. Right now, I’m just testing a bunch of things and didn’t exactly pay much attention to making the site look good.

So, git pre-commit hooks are executable files (yes, you have to declare them as chmod +x - for some reason I forget this every time I write hooks) that are run right before you commit. This type of stuff lets you verify that your application is working, run a few tests, etc before it gets committed. At least the current use case I have (that probably illustrates the point of this particular hook fairly well) is related to this website.

I wont try to justify PHP hacking but I was working on a project that’s based on CodeIgniter. It’s on a cycle of heavy refactoring. I was wondering if I could do something like isset("variable_name"); similar to python "variable_name" in globals() Same idea with locals() in python. Thankfully, php has the equivalent of globals() being $GLOBALS which would return you all the variables declared so far. Now you can just write your own isset_varname().

So, I’ve been thinking about this for a while and I finally decided to pull trigger on moving my site fully to github. Let’s see where this goes. Also, I want to give a little intro on how to build a site like this (very bare-bones right now, I’m not very fancy). Originally, nextdoorhacker.com was running on a Linode box that I owned since 2008 (summer of freshman year, oh the times), since I was doing a lot of PHP around then, I ran wordpress on it.