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.
Download Flash Video (flv) files from web-sites
In a fit of Flash-induced rage, I created flv-dl, which allows one to download or play Flash Video (flv) files from their web-pages, directly from the command-line. Read more
Roadmap for Rails Apps Composer 2.0
Rails Apps Composer is a gem with recipes to create Rails application templates you can use to generate Rails starter apps. I use it to create the app templates and example apps for the RailsApps project. It’s become popular (over 500 watchers on GitHub). It’s a lot like Michael Bleigh’s RailsWizard or Dr. Nic Williams’s App Scrolls. If you’ve used the gem, you can take a poll to let me know if it has been useful and suggest any improvements you’d like to see. Here’s the Roadmap for Rails Apps Composer 2.0.
Rails Deployment Audit
Checklist with some practices for Rails Deployment Audit.
UT on Rails: Week 5 Controllers
Follow along with my University of Texas class as I explain what controllers can do and show some common uses.
My experience with jQuery Mobile and Rails
I recently had to create a light mobile version of an existing Rails 2 app. Having used jQuery Mobile for that I tried to compile my different observations on the experience. You can read it on the cookies blog.
How Does Rack Parse Query Params?
Noah Gibbs recently wrote about understanding parameter parsing in How Does Rack Parse Query Params? With parse_nested_query.
Boot Up Your Own Dedicated Jenkins CI in Two Commands
One of my pet projects has been: how quickly and simply can I boot Jenkins CI on to Engine Yard Cloud? I now have it down to two command line steps! Check it out here!
Rails Asset Pipeline with Heroku
I wrote a 2 parts series on how I precompile assets locally and deploy to Heroku. Read more
Test your rabl view
If you use Rabl to generate your API output. You need test this generation. This blog post explain how I test my rabl’s view.
json_expressions - JSON matchmaking for all your API testing needs.
Your API is a contract between your service and your developers. json_expressions makes it easy to test/spec your JSON responses. This helps you to keep track of exactly what your JSON API is returning, and makes sure you don’t accidentally break the contract without updating the docs and/or bumping the API version number.
Localization early-adopter plans now available
Locale is an agile localization tool for Ruby developers. It means no more hand-coding of yaml files, no more syntax errors, and easy collaboration between developers, content owners, and translators. Hundreds of Ruby developers have been helping out with the public beta of Locale, which ends on August 8th 2012. Beta sign-up is still open and grants access to special early-adopter pricing for a limited time.
BostonRB is Live Streaming its July Monthly Meeting
Loren Segal and David Black presenting now!
Code Climate is now free for Open Source
Code Climate now provides free code quality metrics for OSS Ruby projects.
Git Basics: Cleaning up excess branches
Rails app repository getting out of hand? Learn how to clean up all that excess.
Don't Make Your Code "More Testable"
In this article I attempt to slightly redirect the focus of the community from “fast tests” to writing well designed systems by listening to the feedback coming from our isolated unit tests.
ActiveRecord inheritance and contexts
Read about how to DRY controllers and handle validation and attr_accessible contexts in the ActiveRecord inheritance and contexts article.
Single Responsibility on Rails Explained
Here’s my take on SRP in Rails mentioning TDD and good old unit testing.
Speedup Rails Asset Pipeline precompile process
Here are my three tips for speedup asset pipeline precompile process: 1. Capistrano deployment speedup 2. Use @import carefully. 3. don’t require .scss & .coffee for no reason Read more
Book Review: Exploring Everyday Things with R and Ruby
RubyLearning’s mentor Victor Goff reviews Sau Sheong Chang’s latest book “Exploring Everyday Things with R and Ruby”. A must-have book for your library.
cinch-yaml-score 1.1.0 released + more gemified plugins for cinch
I just released cinch-yaml-score 1.1.0, it is simple gemified cinch plugin for keeping track of score for users. It is first update for set of gems I have released for RVM irc bot - smfbot: cinch-yaml-keywords, cinch-url-scraper and cinch-yaml-memo.
'Cookie Law' rack-policy
I’ve released v0.4 rack-policy gem with new Rails/Sinatra/Padrino view helper that helps you manage cookie policy information in your templates.
Tracking Inventory (E-commerce Tips 1.3 (Inventory))
So many people start having issues tracking inventory when their e-commerce app starts getting a lot of traffic. I made a blog post to discuss some solutions.
Deployment Pipeline (Let's make Continuous Deployment painless)
I just saw a tool that can ease Continuous Deployment, check it out.
Drop-in replacement for Rails textilize helpers (w/o dependencies)
My colleague just released textilize, a drop-in replacement for the old textilize helpers in Rails 2.x. If you are updating an older app to Rails 3.x, it may be of use. Textilize is different from other textile gems that exist because includes the pure ruby version of RedCloth written by _why. Other gems require the new 4.x version of RedCloth that needs to be compiled. We just have a few small uses for textilize, and needed something that worked without any extra dependencies. Hope you can find it useful too.