Freneticvirus

Jekyll is a fantastic static site generator with a great little community of modifications around it and I've used it for my own blog and Penderry.com. However my biggest problem with it is the lack of a way to deal with a contact form. Of course, this really isn't Jekyll's fault as it's only built to create HTML pages.

Enter Sinatra stage left.

Sinatra is a rad little web framework, well a micro framework really - in fact it's so small the Hello World app is 5 lines long! It's also perfect for creating a contact form.

To combine the two I needed both of them to display the same layout since I didn't want to have to maintain two. The contact page needed the same layout as the portfolio page, so no sidebar. The easiest way to do this is to plug your Sinatra application into Jekyll's layout mocking up any Jekyll specific objects/variables you need to (like page). I did give using a header and footer includes a go but it broke validation, pah.

Coming into Mumbai's domestic airport we got to see a fair number of shanty town looking dwellings, contrasting what I'd read about the metropolitan downtown area. We booked a prepay taxi and headed outside to the taxi rank where, to my surprise and child like joy, they had incredibly stereotypical Indian taxis that look like they are from the 50's. They are called Black and Yellows (for their paint job...), have bench seats, usually no wing mirrors and are dented to hell. We took a ride in one of the mini van type ones to our hotel in Downtown. Alas, this was an hour and a half away... Sweaty!

One of our main aims in India was to help out at a school we had vague ties to. The school had been variously described to us as an orphanage (and is indeed for children who have not had the best start in life, but also for others) and a hostel. We had assumed, before arrival, that it was a small school with 200 girls attending where we could help with teaching English. It actually turns out the 'school' is more of a community. Based on 5000 acres of land it is a charity run organisation with a large school, hostel for the children, various (large scale) cooking facilities, a water treatment plant, enough farm land to be self sufficient for 9 months of the year, a college/university, an old peoples home, a blind school, a general farm and more. Our initial figure of 200 girls is about right, however no-one thought to mention the other 2000 male students living here! Almost all staff live on-site and their are a good number of administrators and other personnel for things like building, farming, cooking, etc.

Diu is a little island off the south coast of Gujarat that was under Portuguese control until some point (I'm vague on any actual sort of date or time frame....I'm no history buff). The general architecture is a weird mix of Indian construction with the loud colours that you see in a lot of Portuguese culture, made even more obvious when you see the grey pure concrete buildings being constructed next to the ADHD coloured buildings. Connected to the mainland by a bridge the whole island is pretty tiny at 14km in length. Apparently it's a big holiday destination in the high season but this is MONSOON so it randomly rained like rain is going out of fashion and everything was a fraction of the price (our hotel was 500 rupees a night instead of 1500).

We'd pre-booked our flight from Delhi to Ahmedabad which added a nice respite from working out what to do. Delhi's domestic terminal was an experience in itself, at the doorway and right up until you pass through security there are heavily armed guards wherever you look. Since everyone stared at us wherever we went this shouldn't have been a problem in the airport but having guards with machine guns staring at me was not a pleasant experience.

One thing I've noticed about coders on the internet is how many of them rebuild their blogs almost as a matter of habit and unsurprisingly I'm no exception. I've build three blogs, I only really have three posts...says it all really doesn't it? So here is my new blog!

This one is built using the static site generator, Jekyll, modified with some useful extras by my good friend RichGuk. A full list of the extras he added can be found on his Github page. The benefit of using Jekyll, for me, is the simplicity the system provides. I can create posts in markdown, haml or even plain HTML, let Jekyll convert it into an HTML page and view it locally using the built in server Jekyll provides. Since the whole thing is tracked in Git I can push new posts to the remote web-server where a hook is setup to run the Jekyll build command, thus automating the whole thing!

Back at the beginning of the year while I was travelling around South-East Asia with friends my partner, who I'd had to leave at home, came up with the idea of visiting an orphanage in India that her family had ties to. Being quite taken with this travelling thing I thought it was a fantastic opportunity for her with the bonus of getting to teach some kids who haven't had the best luck. Later in my first trip I decided I'd like to go with her and we decided we'd make a mini trip of it and take in some more of what India has to offer. She drew up an itinerary, flights got booked, bags packed and off we trotted (with only one hiccup of almost not getting a visa in time, I probably should have thought of that one...).