One thing I hate about JRuby is that you keep encountering broken gems. Livereload is one of those. I have guard running and installed livereload for guard and the browser. It looked like it should work because I saw the guard message that the browser had connected. As soon as I make a change, it breaks. Of course the next step is to set up a dummy MRI ruby instance and set up livereload again to see if it’s a problem with my setup. I do that and it works fine. No problems. I made sure I did the exact same steps in JRuby, even uninstalling and reinstalling gems. It still didn’t work. After an hour or so, determined that the gem is broken. I tried to see if there were other gems, perhaps a jruby version. I found one on Github, but it too was broken. I wasted a lot of time on this. This is one major drawback to using JRuby.

Another problem I had today was with CSS. Let’s say you had

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <style type="text/css" media="all">
    #whole {
      width: 100%;
      height: 100%;
      background-color: red;
    }
  </style>
<body>
  <div id="whole"></div>
</body>
</html>

You’d expect to see a flood of red on your screen. Instead you see nothing. If you take away the <!DOCTYPE html>, then it works. If you keep the doctype, you can also get it to work by setting the html and body sizes.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <style type="text/css" media="all">
    html, body {
      width: 100%;
      height: 100%;
    }
    #whole {
      width: 100%;
      height: 100%;
      background-color: red;
    }
  </style>
<body>
  <div id="whole"></div>
</body>
</html>

Seems like <!DOCTYPE html> defines the body and html to have height zero until there is content. This one issue took a while to figure out because I kept stripping my HTML down until it was basically nothing.

One good thing was I got my project going along. I incorporated Alejandra’s images and the background for the website. I accidentally deleted the files she had created for me, but I remembered that I had Time Machine and went back and fetched it. It was the first time I used Time Machine. Now it has become part of my tool set.