The Ruby and Rails community linklog
Made a library? Written a blog post? Found a useful tutorial? Share it with the Ruby community here or just enjoy what everyone else has found!
Submit a post
Post Preview
Note: Only the first pargraph is shown on the front page and overly long paragraphs may be broken up.
RubyConf 2014 Presentations going up on Confreaks
If you missed RubyConf 2014, or just couldn’t take it all in while in San Diego, don’t worry. Confreaks has RubyConf presentations coming online right now.
Introducing Spyme - Browser Geolocation API + Rails without effort
I’ve just created a gem that makes easy to use the Browser Geolocation API to track the current visit location with Rails. Check out Spyme Also feel free to report any bug or suggest a feature.
Rails Fundamentals: Models and the to_s Method
This short post demonstrates the utility of overriding your Rails models’ to_s method if you find yourself repeatedly outputting a specific model attribute (or outputting a compound attribute).
Have Some (Referential) Integrity with Foreign Keys
Why is referential integrity important to your Rails apps?
The pros and cons of 4 deployment process techniques
This blog post talks about 4 different ways of doing software deployment. The text describes the pros, the cons and the quirks of each one option. Read more
Better globals with a tiny ActiveSupport module
In Rails, you might set data once during a request, but use it in every layer of your app. Which user is making the request? What permissions do they have? Using a Ruby global variable or class variable for this would be bad – multiple threads could overwrite it, and you’d end up with a huge mess. Instead, you need something that’s global, but for just that request.
Forwarding Messages With Tell, Don't Ask
I wrote about how sending a message as a command leads to flexibility in Forwarding Messages With Tell, Don’t Ask.
Video Tutorial: Setup a Rails 4.1 Development Environment on Ubuntu
Learn how to setup a Ruby on Rails 4.1 development environment on Ubuntu 14.04 in this video tutorial.
Cape Town, South Africa: Rails Workshops
Register now for a workshop on Rails Advanced Techniques or a Rails introductory class, scheduled for January in Cape Town, South Africa.
What Do You Lose By Not Using Chef (When You Deploy Your Ruby Server)?
Here’s a quick overview of what Chef does for you when you use it from the very beginning. It’s easy to think of Chef as “automation that I’ll get to when it will save me enough time.” Here are several reasons you might not want to do that.
Rails 5 development
Rails 5 development has started! Read more
sportdb Update (football.db,worldcup.db,etc.) Incl. Quick Starter Datafiles; Zip Downloads n More
I’ve uploaded a new sportdb gem update, that is, v1.9.14. What’s news? The sportdb gem that lets you load datasets (e.g. teams, leagues, matches, etc.) in plain text into your SQL database of choice now includes a new build system. Use the new Datafile - a mini language a.k.a. domain-specific language (DSL) that lets you setup your database in minutes. For example, to setup a football.db for all World Cups 1930-2014 use the worldcup.rb quick starter template. Type $ sportdb new worldcup to download the datasets (as zip archives), setup all tables, indexes, etc. and read in all fixtures. Cheers.
RubyConf 2014 - The human bits
Humanity and community was omnipresent at RubyConf 2014. Guess what? I wrote a blog post about it!
Tips to avoid RMagick memory leaks
I share some tips, I used to fight memory leaks when manipulating images with RMagick.
Challenges faced in a little larger Rails API project
I just wrote a post about the challenges when developing a little larger API-only Rails project. I think Rails is good but needs some improvements in some areas. Check it out and let me know if you agree/disagree :)
Tutorial: Sending Emails from Rails Apps
Our new tutorial on how to send emails in a Rails app. We covered topics of ActionMailer, ActionMailer Preview, Sending emails with a third party service (Gmail and Mailgun) and finally, using Active Job to send emails in the background. Read more
Medium wysiwyg clone
I just launched Dante wysiwyg. It’s just another medium.com editor clone. it has many of the medium wysiwyg features, and is in our roadmap to get 100% of the features that medium editor has. It comes with asset-pipeline (rails/sprockets) integration out of the box.
Rails middlware to remove google ads while developing.
I finally snapped and no longer wanted to see Google ads while developing my Rails app. This was my solution.
local_webserver released
I just released a spin-off of middleman-presentation. It’s a webserver which serves a local directory only without any configuration. You can find it here. Beware it’s written in Go.
3 Tricks to debug Opal code from your browser
Most of the time you’ll spend debugging applications written with Opal you’ll be fine using just these three tricks.
Using guard gem in a project with multiple modules
Ania Ślimak came up with the idea of how to deal with a large number of guards in multiple modules using “chdir” option of “guard” gem. Read about it on the Lunar Logic blog.
Minispec - a new testing library that tends to be as simple and intuitive as Ruby are
Minispec uses native Ruby methods for testing:
is(a) == b
does(a).include?(b)
is(a).empty?
More examples
Fixing Fixtures
For a long time, using Rails fixtures was considered bad form, but in recent years, a lot of developers have come back around to using them. This post provides tips and practices for simplifying your fixtures and making them easier to manage.
Introduction to Conditional HTTP Caching with Rails
Often times we don’t want an HTTP client to blindly cache content that it has been given. We may not be able to rely on setting specific expiration headers either. Instead we need a way for the client to ask the server whether or not a resource has been updated. Read more
New from RailsApps: Stripe Checkout Example and Tutorial
Ready for a holiday side project? If you’ve got Rails 4.2, you can use Rails Composer to build a Stripe Checkout starter application that combines payment processing with Devise. Here’s the Stripe Checkout Example application. There’s also a tutorial.