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!
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How to build recommendation service with Rails and Apache Mahout
In my blog post I described how we created GitFM – service for personal recommendations of Github repos.
shuffler_fm: a shuffler.fm REST API wrapper
I have launched a ruby wrapper for the shuffler.fm REST API [more inside]
7 Ways to Decompose Fat ActiveRecord Models
I just published a 2,335-word blog post about seven specific best practices (and one anti-pattern) to manage complexity in your Rails models.
A First Peek At Pogoapp
We’ve posted a short video showing how easy it is to launch a simple Sinatra web app on Pogoapp with git push deployment, a Heroku-compatible REST API, and the pogo command line client
Applying Some Strange Loops to Gamebox
How the Strange Loop conference encouraged me to use data visualization, debug drawing, and working REPL in Ruby Game development.
Ya_Acl - access control list (ACL) implementation for your Ruby application.
Ya_Acl provides a standalone object through which all checks are made. This means it is not tied to any framework. Note that this guide will show you only one possible way to use this component. [more inside]
gem-nice-install
Today, I have released gem-nice-install RubyGems plugin, which helps you to install binary gems on you favorite platform.
Getting the user's timezone
Ever needed to get the timezone of the end user’s browser in a rails app? This should be a trivial operation, but it isn’t. It is now, because I’ve wrapped all the plumbing up as a rails engine. [more inside]
What should the search gem provide?
We’re building the ‘search’ rubygem but we don’t know what it’s going to be yet. Please tell us what to build.
Getting Over My Fear of Custom Tools
I finally wrote my first code generator, and now I’m embarrassed that I didn’t do it sooner. I’d been avoiding something that was fun, surprisingly simple, and certainly valuable.
Start Using Ruby % (Percent) Notation
If you seldom use Ruby percent (%) notation in daily work, here’s a quick summary of what I picked up recently. Hopefully it can make you feel more comfortable in using it.
ExceptionNotification v3.0.0 has just been released!
Go get it while it’s still hot! It includes lots of fixes, Campfire integration, and more…link.
Expressing Ruby code in natural language
I just wrote a blog post about translating Ruby to natural language, and a tool that I wrote to do it :)
Models in Rails vs ASP.NET
Thought I would jot down some thought about the different approaches between rails and asp.net mvc models especially with respect to the declaring validations as well as actually defining fields themselves. Mostly this is an introspective post which doesn’t really aim to pit the frameworks head to head and decide which is better. Rather it presents both approaches from someone who has had to use both and finds it interesting that such similar concepts can render such different implementations.
mmm... mruby everywhere
Here are my Aloha RubyConf slides on mruby (minimalistic Ruby). If you are interested in embedding mruby, checkout this simple Rakefile showing how to compile/embed Ruby code in a C wrapper. Finally, on the mruby topic, I previously wrote 2 other posts: Getting started with mruby and mruby and mobiruby (Ruby for iOS)
Easy FAQs with I18n
I stumbled across an interesting way to use I18n recently when modifying a FAQ section on a site. FAQs by their nature tend to be a constantly tweaked part of the site. Having to constantly change copy or add and remove questions can be time consuming. Fortunately the person in charge of the site, while not a developer, is technically savvy and can be trusted to modify YAML. I structured the en.yml file as follows for my own convenience but soon realized another use for it…
redis_failover 1.0 released - distributed monitoring, failover strategies
I just launched redis_failover 1.0. It now supports distributed monitoring among the Node Managers! Previously, the Node Managers were only used as a means of redundancy in case a particular node manager crashed. Starting with version 1.0 of redis_failover, the Node Managers will all periodically report their health report/snapshots. The primary Node Manager will utilize a configurable “node strategy” to determine if a particular node is available or unavailable. [more inside]
Getting started with SASS in Rails
I just wrote Getting started with Sass in Rails. Sass’s is awesome :)
newrelic-rake 1.0 released
If you are using newrelic and you have some background jobs (like cron jobs) calling rake tasks, be sure to checkout newrelic-rake 1.0 gem, it adds the newrelic instrument to your rake tasks. and here is my post to show you some screenshots.
Ruby Tidbit: Super and Parameter Reassignment
I just posted a quick writeup of a pleasant little surprise in the behavior of Ruby’s super keyword. In over 5 years of writing Ruby code, I’d never noticed it until now, so maybe it’ll be a surprise to you, too!
Fun with Unicode Math in Ruby √
Introducing the unicode_math gem. Do math using unicode characters in Ruby!
content management application *not system*
I just launched a rails gem for feed.us. It’s a web-based content management application. We just added a rails gem a couple weeks ago. I think it’s a very easy way to add copy-editing capabilities to a site or within an app. But it can do dynamic content creation as well.
Xavier Noria: The Code Gardener
I just posted an interview with Xavier Noria on RubySource.