The Daring Fireball Linked List

Friday, 29 Aug 2014

Paczkowski: Apple Wearable Won't Ship Until Next Year ★

John Paczkowski:

So that new wearable device Apple is introducing on September 9? It's going to be a while before anyone is actually wearing it. Sources in position to know tell me it won't arrive at market for a few months. "It's not shipping anytime soon," said one. So when does Apple plan to ship its eagerly anticipated wearable? That's not clear, but my understanding is that we're unlikely to see it at retail until after the holiday season—think early 2015.

If true, why? I'm guessing something similar to why they pre-announced the original iPhone—otherwise it would leak through regulatory filings with various governments around the world. Plus, they have no worries about the Osborne Effect with a new product category.

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About the Linked List

The Daring Fireball Linked List is a daily list of interesting links and brief commentary, updated frequently but not frenetically. Call it a "link log", or "linkblog", or just "a good way to dick around on the Internet for a few minutes a day".

Since I like the clarity of the linked list format, I’d been looking for ways to do this in June, but I couldn’t understand them. Moreover, as can be seen from the size of git diff octopress/linklog¹, the difference between linklog and master branches is very large. I couldn’t understand the git-diff result for source/javascripts/octopress.js. This would discourage any ordinary users from looking into the issue. Therefore, I once said that I didn’t know how to write an Octopress linklog.²

Last night, I added an unofficial linklog feature to Octopress.³ The official guide didn’t worked for me.⁴ I could see the complaints from some users who had found that this feature wasn’t working.⁵ At the same time, I could see some blogs that included this feature.⁶ The last commit of the linklog branch was in 2012.⁷ It seems that it isn’t likely that Octopress will work on this in the next few months.⁸

Yesterday, I finally understood the following posts about DIY Octopress linklogs.

1. Make a Linked List With Octopress in the Candler Blog.
2. Octopress pull request #1538
3. Creating a Linklog Post in New Learnings from Old Understandings

In the commit in item 2, only a few lines was changed, and it should be comprehensible even for one who knows basic HTML and programming only. In item 1, there’s no page.external-url in source/_includes/article.html, but it’s present in item 3. I compared those Liquid code with the relevant files in linklog branch. Item 1 also contains the changes in source/atom.xml. From this, I worked out source/_includes/custome/category_feeds.xml, though the code is far from beautiful. To work out the blog archive, I looked at Dr.Z’s one.

I was bored of this kind of writing code and didn’t want to further change the CSS properties of linklog titles. The linklog markers and permalink labels should be enough.

Lessons learnt

YAML front matter of each post

In the following sample Markdown source file for a post, there’s a variable external-url. After looking at the above code blocks, I’ve learnt how to use those variables.

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---
layout: post
title: "Title goes here"
date: 2014-08-30 14:44:16 +0800
comments: true
categories: [category 1, category 2]
external-url: http://www.example.com
---

Blog contents goes here...

• {{% if post.external-url %}} tests if the front matter of a post contains external-url variable.
• {{ post.external-url }} returns the value of external-url variable.

YAML variables in _config.yml

• I added a line myVar: value into _config.yml.
• While configurating source/_includes/article.html, if I need to access an variable in _config.yml, I have to use {{ site.myVar }}. You’ll get nothing if you miss site..