July 03, 2009
Rumblestiltskin: Submit ideas for the 2009 Rails Rumble and try to win the championship belt sponsored by thoughtbot. Vote for good ideas. Find teammates.
July 02, 2009
Understand Named Scope in 60 seconds by example with this very brief overview at Mendable.com.
Giving Design Patterns a Second Chance: Ruby Edition. Learning to program in Ruby is easy, but learning to program the "Ruby Way" is a much greater challenge. Reading Design Patterns in Ruby has certainly helped solidify my understanding of Ruby's idioms and is a great book for programmers who would like to take their Ruby skills to the next level.
The Rails Testing Practices Interviews are back, brought to you by Rails Prescriptions. This time, it's Mike Gunderloy, author of the new Rails Rescue Handbook. Read the interview. You can buy Rails Rescue Handbook or Rails Test Prescriptions. Read past interviews in the series.
SitemapGenerator enables Google Sitemaps to be easily generated for a Rails site as a rake task, using a simple 'Rails Routes'-like DSL. Sounds pretty familiar right? (well except for the Routes-like DSL) But it's not... it actually works the way you would expect. Plus it allows you to take care of familiar issues like: gzip of Sitemap files, variable priority of links, paging/sorting links (e.g. my_list?page=3), SSL host links (e.g. https:), Rails apps which are installed on a sub-path (e.g. example.com/blog_app/) and hidden ajax routes. As stated in the docs, it does have one shortcoming though - it only supports a maximum of 2.5 billion urls, after which you're on your own.
If you want to use OpenID for authentication or OAuth for authorization/authentication in your Ruby web applications, there are a number of different options out there. Here are a few screencasts demonstrating some of the Rack-based solutions for anyone interested in easily integrating OpenID and/or OAuth into their web applications: Rack::OpenID, Rack::OAuth, Rack::OpenID::Proxy (useful if you need a proxy OpenID consumer)... And links to the original projects: ruby-openid, oauth, Rack::OpenID, Rack::OAuth, Rack::OpenID::Proxy
Anemone is a new fast and easy-to-use web spider framework for Ruby.
July 01, 2009
Last month, I posted my first set of five Ruby-related blogs for your delectation. Here’s five more for your RSS reader...
June 30, 2009
There's a newcomer on the block for VPS hosting called Webbynode. It's nice to see more hosting options in the middle-ground between shared hosting on Dreamhost and managed hosting on Engine Yard. I put up a short video going over Six Reasons to use Webbynode. If you're looking for a VPS, maybe check it out.
There are many ways to start sub-processes in Ruby and here we start looking at some of the options in depth.
Yet another RBP Blog Article, this time offering a potential alternative to core extensions. Please check it out and share your thoughts.
Project Spotlight: Rinda. An overview of Rinda, the built-in Ruby implementation of Tuple Spaces.
June 29, 2009
A tutorial on using Thinking Sphinx for searches that weigh both search term relevancy and distance from an anchor point.
Rails has been undergoing a *lot* of change lately, and there's even more on the way; Learn more about how the Core Team is making it happen, and how you can refactor your code.
A look at the emerging Webhooks & PubSubHubbub HTTP callback implementations and how they enable easy, distributed, web-scale PubSub.. with Ruby code samples and example of new PubSubHubbub Ruby gem.
RubyTu.be is opening its doors to the community today. The goal is to provide an accurately tagged, comment enabled, and searchable index of all Ruby related video and screencasts. Do you publish Ruby video content? Post a link back to your content and add to the 300+ videos that are already indexed.
create fixed size thumbnail using attachment_fu using Rmagick and MiniMagick.
Understand how, where and why many Rubyists today, are using Sinatra. 20+ Rubyists like Peter Cooper, Aaron Quint and many more give us some insights.
June 27, 2009
This Tutorial will show you how to display a list of Github changes inside your Application, read it on Mendable.com.
S3ify is a command line tool to make life easier when putting the assets for a HTML email onto S3. It converts any local image references in your HTML and then uploads it all onto S3 for you.
The dynamic reports gem was created to fill a HUGE hole that we felt existed in the Ruby community - the ability to QUICKLY create stylized admin reports and charts for people to use to view key metrics and data. Includes charting ability via the Google Charts API. Follow on Github or Read about on RubyForge (rdoc forthcoming) Enjoy!
June 26, 2009
Microscopy software implemented in Ruby: The RCUK Nanorobotics is finishing soon and here are some fresh demonstration videos. The software was implemented using Ruby-1.8.6, Qt4-QtRuby, HornetsEye, Distributed Ruby, and libJIT.
The CFP for the Ruby Hoedown (the FREE Southern U.S. regional Ruby conference) is closing soon, so get those proposals in. Also, don't forget to check out the Hoedown Heist; get free stuff for coming (and getting others to come) to a free conference!
June 25, 2009
Aloha on Rails, the Hawaii Ruby on Rails Conference, has just five more days of Super Early Bird Registration. Register now to take advantage of the lowest ticket price! Come join Top Speakers at the premier destination event for Ruby on Rails. Aloha on Rails is a Low Cost, High Value education, investment, and vacation. The conference, held Oct 4-6 2009, features a one day tutorial and two day conference for three days in paradise!
Read about the latest changes in The Ruby Toolbox - the catalog for Ruby libraries - including feeds and project news.
Controller tests area a necessary pain, these are some of the techniques and tools we use to make controller tests nicer to work with.
A list of Rubyists using Sinatra micro-web framework and on Twitter. Can you suggest some more?
Just visit the My Account page at RubyTrends to see what has been added since your last login. It's an easy way to keep up with the new additions. Ever accidentally vote for something? You can remove your vote now as well! Thanks for the feedback, more updates coming soon!
June 24, 2009
Rack::Utils and CGI escape and unescape performance boost URLEscape provides these two methods as a C extension, suitable for use on ruby 1.8.6-8 and 1.9.1+; tested on linux, XP, and Vista.
June 23, 2009
Designing your application to work around IO bottlenecks is tricky business. A look at measuring & optimizing for I/O performance with iostat + a refresher on disk latencies and the underlying bottlenecks.
ConceptAlbum is a zero administration Rails photo album plug-in with an attractive minimal design. Install the plug-in, point it at your photos folder and navigate to /concept_album and you have a full working photo album! Includes a flash slide-show to add to your main site layout as well. Give it a whirl, feedback appreciated.
Faye is an implementation of the Bayeux Comet protocol as Rack middleware, including a JavaScript client. I'm putting out a very early version and need help scaling the server across multiple Ruby processes so I can use it with Passenger.
Fat Free CRM: open source Ruby on Rails-based customer relationship management platform.
An excellent, quick tutorial for Ruby beginners on how to create a "Sinatra Web Service".
June 22, 2009
SimpleDB DM Adapter is worth a try next time you are creating a simple project, we would love feedback about the DM adapter, and it would be great to get some other people contributing to the project.
A quick extension to the Object class which adds an is_numeric? method to test for numericalness.
The third installment in my Getting to grips with git series. I introduce the potentially confusing concept of rebasing.
June 21, 2009
with the latest Hirb. Would you like IRB to automatically page long output? Would you like an improved RI that let's you effortlessly select multiple methods to read up on? Then read all about it.
If you use JEdit for your Ruby needs you should get improved ruby mode and get some cool color scheme.
Author Gregory Brown talks to RubyLearning about his book "Ruby Best Practices" in this brief interview.
June 20, 2009
Nginx 0.7.6 with mod_rails But, what's happen, guys, I want a latest nginx stable instead out-of-date 0.6 branch. So, I show you how I use two of version nginx (stable 0.6.3 by modrails defaults and latest 0.7.6). You can use one of them on the yours server.
there is an article which describes some mistakes you might have done on your way to create a new rails plugin.
Learn how to Set your Rails Environment Globally on a per-server basis, so you are not required to do it for each command you want to run.
Promotion of the book "Ruby Best Practices" by author Gregory Brown is scheduled from 30 June to 2 July 2009. Click here for all the details. It's free and you stand a chance to win a copy of the book.
