Ghost Gatsby Starter - Monkey see, monkey do; occasionally monkey learn.

Adding search to your [ghost] blog - part 2

Okay this is the next step in adding search functionality to my blog. The biggest let down of the original integration was that I need to remember to run the search updater every time I made a new, or just updated a, blog post, but what if I was writing the entry remotely or, more than likely, just plain forgot? At the end of the last post [https://blog.many-monkeys.com/adding-search-to-your-ghost-blog-2/] I mentioned the possibility of adding a IFTTT snippet (actually they call them applets) t

Adding search to your [ghost] blog

Recently I wanted to find something in my own blog that I had written about and though I only have a small number of posts compared to some, it still took more time than it really should have. So I decided to look at adding some search functionality; because I am originally from Yorkshire it should be free, because I am lazy it should be relatively easy. A quick google search (the meta-irony is not lost on me) and a few dead ends, I ended up trying Algolia [https://www.algolia.com]. Now this lo

It's astounding, time is fleeting, madness takes its toll, ...

Okay, starting a blog post using a title from the first lines of the lyrics to "The Time Warp" does seem a bit unusual but with what I intend to cover in this it will all make sense, probably. Time... what is it really? I am not going into some weird arty-pseudo-psycho babble of the ephemeral nature of time [http://www.mindfullyalive.com/blog/2015/6/7/massive-art-installation-on-the-ephemeral-nature-of-time] but as a software developer I usually have to deal with time, and dates, in some form

Configuring Cloudflare Page Rules

I moved to Cloudflare [https://www.cloudflare.com/] sometime ago so that I could take advantage of their tools such as free DNS, SSL, analytics, caching etc. to support my ghost [https://ghost.org/] based blog. I wanted to host my blog on https://blog.many-monkeys.com but I didn't want to host http://www.many-monkeys.com nor http://many-monkeys.com anywhere and wanted to keep my options open i.e. if I wanted to use the domain for more than just a blog. I still wanted to support https://www...

Only time will tell

Recently, I decided to review all my old articles that have been scattered across the internet over the past decade or two with the idea of either tidying them up or answering questions that I may have neglected etc. During this review I came across an old article from 2007 hosted on CodeProject [http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/18834/Create-custom-dialogs-for-use-in-your-Visual-Studi] that demonstrates a way of creating custom dialogs for Visual Studio setup projects and was not documented

Death by a thousand cuts

Every year I decide to spend some time refreshing OpenCover i.e. upgrading to the latest tools such as Visual Studio, upgrading all the packages that OpenCover depends on etc. etc. and it is never a good time for me. I don't know why I do this to myself, I know it is going to hurt and it's always the tiny things that somehow take ages to remedy. However I need to do this so that I can uninstall old versions of Visual Studio before I move on to addressing some of the latest features and issues w

Improving your source code quality

One reason I work on Open Source projects such as OpenCover [https://github.com/OpenCover/opencover] is so that I can try things out, experiment if you wish, sometimes it's TDD techniques or a new mocking framework, and sometimes it's tooling; some of these experiments were successes and some were successful failures; my experiment in using SpecFlow for unit testing was interesting but I'll never do that again; my knowledge in what I can do in SpecFlow however has greatly improved. Tools help u

A line in the sand

Just recently I read Rework [http://amzn.to/1KD6kqx] again on my kindle as this book really resonated with me at the time and I thought it was about time I read it again; the book is from the guys at 37 Signals aimed at people starting a business. When I got to the section titled "Draw a line in the sand" I realised that this book is also appropriate to anyone who is thinking of creating/managing or getting involved in an open-source project/product; I am not talking abut flinging up some source

Free stuff for Open Source .NET development

For the past few years that I've been been working on OpenCover [https://github.com/OpenCover/opencover] I've had the opportunity to use a number of tools during its development, a few of those are commercial tools that have been made available for free to developers of Open Source projects or just to the project itself because I asked nicely. Some of those tools I still use and some just carried the project through part of its journey so I thought it would be nice to give those tools a shout o

Moving blogging platform to Ghost

Welcome to my new blog. Like it? I hope you do as I know I prefer it to the the Blogger version I was originally using. Moving platforms had its ups and downs so I thought I would detail a bit of the journey. Getting started was quite easy, I decided to trial it with Ghost [https://ghost.org] where the nice guys there will do the import for you (of course they will, they want you to sign up with them). Most of the transformation went without a hitch but I have quite a few code samples and not a

Using GMock with Visual Studio CppUnitTestFramework

One of the things I have been a bit disappointed with myself during the development of OpenCover [https://github.com/OpenCover/opencover] is the lack of unit testing around the C++ code that makes up the profiler. I did toy with GTest [https://code.google.com/p/googletest/] and got some decent tests around the instrumentation engine but I was never able to actually test the profiler callbacks, also I found the lack of GTest integration with Visual Studio quite irritating; I know I have been spo

Happy Birthday OpenCover

Happy Birthday Today OpenCover [https://github.com/OpenCover/opencover] is 4 (four) years old, where has the time gone? In that time it has had over 60,000 nuget downloads [http://www.nuget.org/packages/opencover], been adopted by the SharpDevelop community as the coverage tool for their IDE, and, as I found out the other day, is also being used by the corefx team [https://github.com/dotnet/corefx] to supply coverage information [http://dotnet-ci.cloudapp.net/job/dotnet_corefx_coverage_windows/C