If like me you prefer to use Pry over IRB you probably want your rails app to start Pry with your rails environment loaded instead of IRB when running the rails console.

Luckily it’s really easy to do. Just open up config/environments/development.rb and add the following code.

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MyApp::Application.configure do
  silence_warnings do
      begin
          require 'pry'
          IRB = Pry
      rescue LoadError
      end
  end
end

Simples!

I have just switched two blogs over to use Octopress, both dotnetguy.co.uk and also paz.am/blog.

One thing that was missing “out of the box” was the ability to include a list of categories in the sidebar with a link. Fortunately Octopress (well actually Jekyll) is written in such away that creating a plug-in to do this is very simple.

Firstly we need to write a little ruby code. Add a file to the plugins directory called category_list_tag.rb. This plug-in will take the category data from the site and generate list items for each category. On line 17 the category_list tag is then registered and made available to the liquid templating engine.

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module Jekyll
  class CategoryListTag < Liquid::Tag
    def render(context)
      html = ""
      categories = context.registers[:site].categories.keys
      categories.sort.each do |category|
        posts_in_category = context.registers[:site].categories[category].size
        category_dir = context.registers[:site].config['category_dir']
        category_url = File.join(category_dir, category.gsub(/_|\P{Word}/, '-').gsub(/-{2,}/, '-').downcase)
        html << "<li class='category'><a href='/#{category_url}/'>#{category} (#{posts_in_category})</a></li>\n"
      end
      html
    end
  end
end

Liquid::Template.register_tag('category_list', Jekyll::CategoryListTag)

Now we need to create the category list (category_list.html) template in source/_includes/asides. We now use the “category_list” tag we registered in the plug-in above.

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<section>
  <h1>Categories</h1>
  <ul id="categories">
    {% category_list %}
  </ul>
</section>

Finally we just need to add the new sidebar template to the default_asides configuration within the _config.yml.

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default_asides: [asides/category_list.html, asides/recent_posts.html, asides/twitter.html, asides/delicious.html, asides/pinboard.html, asides/googleplus.html]

And that’s all she wrote! I think Octopress / Jekyll is an excellent blog engine / static site generator, and being able to hack away and write simple plug-ins quickly makes it my number one choice… for now.