I have been putting off the upgrade to Rails 2.0.2 for a while, because I wasn't at all interested in making all of the adjustments to the new rails version. Well, Dreamhost took care of that for me today by upgrading to 2.0.2 which caused my sites to quit functioning. So the Snapper is now on Rails 2.0.2, which makes no difference to any of you out there.

I added some small search functionality. It's probably not the most robust searching engine around, but I think it will be enough if you are looking for a certain post and don't want to flip through all of the old posts. Enjoy!

I finally got around to updating the contact page so that you have to use a form mailer to send an email, instead of me just plastering it right on the page for the entire internets to see.

Not that I have even received one email yet, but safety first!

I have now made lightwindow v2.0 part of the Snapper Family. Now if you want to do some fun things with your post for images or to preview a website, you can make it a lightwindow if you want.

If you don't know how to use it, which all of you that are contributing to this site should know how, refer here for information:

http://stickmanlabs.com/lightwindow/#howtouse

So, I had a revelation this weekend after re-reading a chapter in my ROR book. I was just thinking way too hard about the whole comment thing. Now it works perfectly so that if you make a mistake, the Rails errors are properly displayed, plus it won't lose you information you typed in.

So now there is no fear of typing that 20 page comment and losing you witty comment you came up with.

I found a site that has taken the Akismet plugin that is used in the Wordpress blog application and converted it into a Rails plugin. Akismet is just another tool for checking if a comment is spam or not.

Basically you send the content to their server, they return a true or false on whether or not the think it's spam. So I have made a few test runs, and it seems to be allowing my to post a comment, but if anybody has some troubles with not being able to post a comment because it is saying it is spam, let me know.

I found a pretty sweet little way of adding captcha to the snapper. It's actually all hosted via somebody else, which I know isn't 100% reliable, but it's beats the ROR plugin that requires you to install an additional app to manage the image distortion blah blah blah.

Anyways, phase one is complete to stop the bots. Phase two will incorporate the use of Akismet plugin that is used on wordpress. Apparently some guy made it into a plugin for ROR that allows you to check your comments again their server to determine whether or not it's spam.

If you are having any troubles with the captcha, let me know. I know some of them are hard to read, so someday here soon I will add a link to change the image.

Hot on the heels of my first news post comes the second! The news RSS has been completed and added to the sidebar.

Now you can be kept in the loop with all of the new features that Snapper is implementing.