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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A little deployment snafu
Here are some notes on a confusing little Rails deployment issue I ran into.
Sextant: A gem to Help you find your Routes
Ditch running $ rake routes and start using Sextant to see your rails app’s routes in the browser.
Adding watermarks, credits, badges and text overlays to images in Ruby on Rails
This blog post describes how to easily add watermarks and textual credits to your own images by using Cloudinary’s new Image overlay feature. This same method can be used to embed custom badges and medals to your users’ profile pictures, merge arbitrary text to your website’s selected images, and much more. The post includes some Ruby on Rails code samples.
Build Starter Apps with Rails Apps Composer version 1.5.0
I’ve released version 1.5.0 of the Rails Apps Composer gem (announcement here). It’s a gem you can use to generate a Rails starter app. Makes it easy to create and maintain a starter app from recipes that integrate commonly used gems. This release includes a cool new “defaults” feature contributed by Bryan Stearns. Rails Apps Composer is not the only fork of Michael Bleigh’s RailsWizard gem; last month, Dr. Nic Williams of EngineYard forked the RailsWizard gem to create his App Scrolls gem. It seems there’s renewed interest in the idea of generating starter apps for Rails. Probably because Rails continues to get more complicated and gems like these reduce the burden of integrating popular gems into a Rails app.
Prevent links From MS Office from redirecting to your login page
When a user clicks a link from a Word document to your site, it sends a different cookie than your browser already has and will cause annoying redirects that shouldn’t occur if the user is already logged in. We fixed this by building a simple rack middleware gem.
Shared Handlebars Templates for Rails 3
I just released Shared Handlebars Templates for Rails 3. Now you can share handlebars templates between rails backend and javascript frontend (like Shared Mustache Templates)
Using Parse.com with RubyMotion
A quick walk through on using Parse.com with RubyMotion.
Released Ore 0.9.1
Released Ore 0.9.1. Contains minor stylistic improvements to the templates. You don’t have to use Bundler to create a new RubyGem: gem install ore && mine my_project
RABL 0.6.12 Released
RABL (Ruby API Builder Language) version 0.6.12 has just been released. RABL is a popular way to craft service or API responses of all types (JSON, XML, Plist, Msgpack, et al). There have been many improvements in the last few releases including performance, caching, direct renderers, Rails 3.2 support and more. For an examination of why we built RABL, check out our original blog posts and to get started be sure to check out Railscast #322.
OpenStruct 2
I just launched ostruct2 gem intended as drop in replacement for Ruby’s standard ostruct.rb library. The original OpenStruct class has some short-comings, such as name conflicts with built-in methods. OStruct2 improves upon the original by subclassing BasicObject to ensure a clean slate and adds some additional niceties such as support for Enumerable. This is v0.1.0. I’m sure it needs a little bit more work to be complete (e.g. #hash and #dup methods are probably unavoidable), but all the primary functionality is green.
Easy way to secure column in database with Rails3
I wrote a short post how to easy secure any column in database with Rails3.
Quick tip on how to get Capistrano to speak up
I just wrote a short post how i get capistrano to speak using say on OSX, (you can use espeak on linux and windows).
Frozen Rails 2012 call for proposals now open
The Frozen Rails 2012 call for proposals is now open on our new site: 2012.frozenrails.eu - Frozen Rails is a a two day, single track conference and this is the third time that it’s being organised. Currently we’ve confirmed our two keynote speakers and Early Bird tickets are currently on sale and we’re also looking for sponsors. In addition to this, we offer substantial discounts to Rails contributors and students.
E-commerce Tips 1.1 (namespacing)
I’ve been very frustrated when I see an app/controllers directory with a lack of namespaces. It’s just wrong to not have any namespaces in an app that is large. I try to give me reasoning for why it is wrong to not have namespaces in this article
A faster way of unit testing in Ruby on Rails
For a long time, Ruby on Rails developers have put a good amount of effort into testing their apps. The Ruby on Rails community was the first to show me the beauty of automated tests. Read entire article
Pragmatic Metaprogramming
I wrote another post on Pragmatic Metaprogramming.
Rails Authorization with Authority 2.0
Authority is the Rails authorization gem that’s as simple and flexible as Ruby inheritence. We recently released the 2.0 version, and it’s rock-solid: tons of passing multi-platform tests and lots of clear documentation. Come check it out on Github or Rubygems.
Rails 4.0 Sneak Peek: Expanded ActiveRecord Support for PostgreSQL Datatypes
I just blogged about my first accepted Rails pull request. I added support for PostgreSQL INET, CIDR and MACADDR type to ActiveRecord
A new gem for the Flickr API called "flickrie"
I just released the first major version of my gem for the Flickr API called “flickrie”. The major difference from other gems of this kind is that it uses an object-oriented approach. Also, it’s written in Ruby/Rails fashion (for example, an attribute that is called #dateupdated in the Flickr API will here be called #updated_at, and #ispro is called #pro?), and you get all the information parsed (like dates, for example, you’ll get Time objects, instead of strings or integers). Check out the project page on GitHub :)
Ruby On REST 6: Pagination With Roar
This brand-new post describes how to use Roar’s representers and will_paginate to generate paginated REST documents. Also, we discuss how to move reusable logic into an abstract PaginationRepresenter.
Using Thinking Sphinx and integrating it with SQL database
A presentation of Thinking Sphinx and an example of integration with SQL DB.
Released multi_markdown 0.1.0.pre1
Just pushed a pre-release of multi_markdown, feedback welcomed. multi_markdown allows projects to use a wide variety of Markdown libraries, without having to depend on a specific one. AKA multi_json for markdown. Please stop explicitly depending on rdiscount or redcarpet, try multi_markdown instead.
Going to write a book called "Composing Ruby"
Ruby is one of the most richly object oriented programming languages that has ever existed. However, nearly two decades of programmers working in Ruby as if it were a foreign language has prevented us from unlocking its true potential. [more inside]
Live Training: Rails Fundamentals Workshop
Rails is hard to learn. There are a lot of different overlapping tools, the opinionated perspective requires you to understand a number of acronym-ized concepts, and even the intro screencasts don’t answer if you ask them a question. [more inside]
My Campaign to Stop Bad Rails Code
We’ve all been there, walking into a code base which stinks to high heaven. There’s a few solutions to help prevent this, one of which I detail in My Campaign to Stop Bad Rails Code. The first step I recommend is reserving a spot for our free weekend on Code School. Maybe playing some Rails Best Practices or Rails Testing for Zombies.