everburning

If you’ve been having issues with the site the last couple of days, things like crashes or messed up formatting, I apologize.

My last post Finding the Tree in the Forest seems to have caused BlueCloth to go nuts.

For those not in the know, BlueCloth is an implementation of Markdown for Ruby.

It seems that whenever I tried to edit the post, or after it had been loaded a certain number of times the ruby process running the site would crash with an out of memory error. Specifically it was crashing in the markdown call that I was using. I took a quick look at BlueCloth and noticed that its to_html method was duplicating the string about 10 times and letting the garbage collection clean it up. Oops. This seemed to be just enough to trigger the memory limits on TextDrive.

So, I decided to switch to RedCloth which is an implementation of Textile in ruby. I spent a bit of time testing that out and it seemed to be working so I converted the problem post over and everything seemed to be going well. I got about 90% of the post converted before I ran into an issue. It seems that the parser was screwing up and marking up some stuff it wasn’t suppost to. My code was starting to lose important symbols and do strange things like add bolding and strikethrough where it wasn’t suppost too. Not good, not good at all.

Eventually, I gave up on that too and dropped both. I’m now using straight HTML code. Doing hand markup. Serves me right for being lazy I guess.

The only problem with this? Every bloody post I’ve done had to be reformatted. Have its BlueCloth formatting removed and changed into the appropriate HTML code. This only took, 2, 2.5, hours?

Oh, but it gets better. That’s just the fun from tonight.

I spent about 2 hours writting that post last night. I then spent about 2.5 hrs getting it marked up and formatted so it looked correct in BlueCloth. Ok, that’s a good chunk of time, but it looked pretty good.

I get to work this morning and get a message from Stacy. Your site is buggered in Internet Explorer. Taking a look, sure enough everything goes screwy half way down the page. Ok, more digging, more fiddling. Spend about an hour undoing formatting from the night before and everythings looking good in IE. At which point I see the random crashes starting to occur. Editing, loading, viewing RSS feed. Crashing all over the place.

So, that’s my great adventure. My journey into my self inflicted hell. So much of hoping to use the easy route of a nice markup language.

What’s the moral? Fucked if I know. Let me know if you figure it out.

I need some sleep.