Linda's Web Technologies

So I ran into a problem that took me a ridiculously long time to figure out... In fact I didn't really figure it out myself... It took listening to my tutor read the code back to me, before the penny dropped what the problem was.   For ages I was getting the following error
SQLite3::SQLException: no such column: name: SELECT "events".* FROM "events" WHERE (name LIKE '%f%')

I checked the tutorial we'd been given, I checked all the examples I could find on the web and nothing helped I kept getting the same error.  Despite having this method in the model


def self.search(search_query)
    if search_query
      find(:all, :conditions => ['name LIKE ?', "%#{search_query}%"])
    else
      find(:all)
    end
  end


and this controller talking to it


def index
    @events = Event.search(params[:search_query])

    #respond_to do |format|
      #format.html # index.html.erb
      #format.xml  { render :xml => @events }
    #end
  end

However I really should have read the error message clearer as the clue was in the message.  It kept telling me that there was no such column name. and it was right. there was not such column name, my column was called title.  So I changed that one little word and everything is dandy again. Learnt a very valuable lesson though - Read the error messages carefully.

I ran into a problem with the embed code that vimeo gives with their videos.  And although it validates against transitional I really wanted to validated it against strict.... so I came across this great site www.designlessbetter.com which gives a really simple alternative code to use.
Instead of using this ..

<object width="400" height="302">
 <param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" />
 <param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" />
 <param name="movie" value="uri" />
 <embed src="uri" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"

allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" 

width="400" height="302"></embed>
</object>

You use this

<object width="400" height="302" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="uri">
 <param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" />
 <param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" />
 <param name="movie" value="uri" />
</object>
He gives a really good explanation of the offending tag <embed>, 
breaks it down and comes up with a strict validating alternative.  Very grateful!

For this blog project we have to comment and illicit responses - a fairly difficult task even for seasoned hacks.  So I thought I had a great workaround - the project is really about understanding Web 2.0 technologies and to my mind the same technologies are used to create forums as are blogs.  So posting some questions and getting responses on a forum would be a legitimate post : response and therefore fulfull the requirements of this assignment.  Wrong!!! A forum I am  informed is not a blog.  The differences being that a forum is made up of numerous contributors and the blog is just a single blog owner that facilitates comments from others.  But what about Blogs that have multiple authors?  Oh they still have editorial control over the content.  But what about forum that have moderators?  Do they not exercise editorial control over the forum?  Jeremiah Owyang at his blog gives a pretty good description of the differences.

 http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/01/28/understanding-the-difference-between-forums-blogs-and-social-networks/