I posted Geo-Rails part 9: The PostGIS spatial_ref_sys Table and You, the latest installment in my ongoing series on geospatial programming using Ruby and Rails. It describes how to use the standard spatial_ref_sys table provided by most spatial databases.

I posted an article on the ActiveRecord Connection API, the low-level API that I've been using more and more to interact with the database's advanced features.

I posted Geo-Rails part 8: ZCTA Lookup, A Worked Example, the latest installment in my ongoing series on geospatial programming using Ruby and Rails. Here we bring together everything covered in the series so far to build a simple service that looks up the Zip Code Tabulation Area for a location.

I just posted the rather awkwardly-named Geo-Rails part 7: Geometry vs. Geography, or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Projections, the latest installment in my ongoing series on geospatial programming using Ruby and Rails. It is an opinionated look at the use of geometry vs. geography columns in PostGIS, and in general gives some guidelines on choosing a coordinate system for your spatial database.

I just posted Geo-Rails part 6: Scaling Spatial Applications, the latest installment in my ongoing series on geospatial programming using Ruby and Rails. It covers database scaling in the presence of geospatial data.

I just posted Geo-Rails part 5: Spatial Data Formats, the latest installment in my ongoing series on geospatial programming using Ruby and Rails. It provides an overview of geometry serialization, shapefiles, GeoJSON, and related topics, along with examples using RGeo.

I just posted Geo-Rails part 4: Coordinate Systems and Projections, the fourth installment in my ongoing series on location-based and geospatial programming using Ruby and Rails.

Geo-Rails part 3: Spatial Data Types with RGeo is the third installment in a series of articles on doing location-based and geospatial programming using Ruby and Rails.

I'm starting up a series of articles on doing geospatial programming in Ruby and Rails, using RGeo and related libraries. The first two articles are now up: Geo-Rails part 1: A Call to Revolution and Geo-Rails part 2: Setting Up a Geospatial Rails App.

Announcing the release of RGeo, a geospatial data library for Ruby. Should be useful for writing location features in Rails. Read about it here, including how it is different from GeoRuby and spatial_adapter. Also see the Github repo.

I released Versionomy, a version number class that handles a wide variety of versioning schemes and syntaxes, and can be extended to handle others. Try it out and leave a comment on my blog.

Implementing DSL Blocks is a lengthy but thorough survey of various strategies, referencing some of the recent discussion on instance_eval. The posting also describes a gem called Blockenspiel that helps with DSL block implementations.