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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Robut, the plugin-enabled HipChat bot
Robut is a simple bot that connects to a HipChat server using their new XMPP interface. Using simple plugins, it can listen, perform actions, and respond to what’s being said. Robut includes some sample plugins, including a hook to the TWSS gem and an Rdio client for queueing and playing music.
Vendor gems with style
Vendoring gems still apply, but in practice, it can be bothersome. However, it’s very easy, if you do it with style.
Learn how rails, selenium, & font-face can be wielded to test pixel perfect browser rendering
The latest episode of webpulp.tv features Ryan Carver from Typekit talking about how they use ruby, rails, CDN, selenium, etc. It is a great interview that includes Ryan talking about Selenium and their automated testing of browser font rendering.
RSpec 2.6.0 and RCov
Just upgraded to the newest RSpec (2.6.0) and found that RCov has stopped working completely? Check out Mario’s post: RSpec 2.6.0 and RCov.
Refactoring ActiveRecord Models (Episode 94 from the SD Ruby podcast)
It’s always important to keep your ActiveRecord models in tip-top shape. Ben Hughes explores several techniques for refactoring models and preventing them from getting out of hand. Watch episode
Use Compass Sass Framework Files With The Rails 3.1 Asset Pipeline
Another in a series of my elegant-hacks™. This one is about how simple it is to use the entire compass Sass framework with the new asset pipeline in Rails 3.1.
Data Context Integration, hands-on
Tiny introduction to the DCI paradigm. Data Context Integration, hands-on
"Double Dream Hands: So Intense!"
The tenderist of lovers, Aaron Patterson, gave a fantastic keynote at RailsConf 2011. Check it out.
Irbtools 1.0.0 has been released
Irbtools is a meta gem that installs useful irb gems and configures your irb. It’s easy to use and much more fun than a vanilla irb ;) This latest release focuses on decreasing the annoying start-up time caused by loading too much libraries, so it offers multiple loading methods, including autoload and threads.
Apotomo - Screencasts Of Glory - Episode 1
The first episode discusses the basics of Rails widget framework Apotomo: generating, rendering and event processing in widgets. Check out the 14 min. video here.
Faster Rails tests with Hydra
I (finally) posted a write-up of getting Faster Rails tests with Hydra. Hydra enables using multiple cores over (optionally) distributed machines to run tests really fast.
Split: A rack based split testing framework
Split is a new a/b testing framework that works with both Rails and Sinatra. Built at Railsconf 2011, it’s lightweight, easy to use and extensible. Check it out on Rubygems and Github.
New gem to solve SSL certificate verification issues on Ruby 1.9.x
Ruby 1.9.x will not automatically verify SSL certificates when it performs secure operations. This is great, but sometimes (like on Windows systems), Ruby does not have access to the operating system’s ca certificates. This causes certificate verification to fail. ssl_certifier solves this problem by bundling the cURL ca certs and passing them on to OpenURI. Read more
Google's CityHash in Ruby
city_hash is a native Ruby implementation of Google’s CityHash.
Java.next() - JRuby: The Rubyists Strike Back
The latest chapter of Java.next() discusses JRuby.
How to use vogue to automatically reload your css on the fly (cross-browser, cross-framework)
Vogue is a node.js-based solution to automatically reload your browser’s CSS whan a change is detected. Like livereload but with a neat idea: using socket.io along with a node.js server connected to your front-end to notify the front-end of filesystem changes ninja-style. We show how to use it in our blog post. Thanks to Andrew Davey for such a great tool.
Code Safari: Spelunking Selenium in Search of Sockets
I was getting EBADF Bad File Descriptor errors on our build server running selenium in parallel. I wrote a blog post detailing how I tracked it down.
rails-footnotes 3.7.3 has been released.
bug fixes, code cleanup, postinit setup with dotfile see rails-footnotes v3.7.3
A growing collection Railsconf 2011 presentation slides
All of the slides mentioned, so far, on Twitter for Railsconf 2011 Read more
If you are using to_json, you are doing it wrong
At Miso, we have been building out a public platform for developers around our service. This means building out many public RESTful endpoints. We have already hosted the first of many developer contests and the submissions were excellent. We ran into a number of challenges while building our public API and our latest post details our frustrations with to_json and why we would never use it to build a clean JSON API. Check out our post and we would love to hear about other people’s experiences.
Running PDFKit on Heroku
A quick guide for avoiding problems with setting up PDFKit on Heroku.
DNote 1.6: Get Some Context
Just released a new version of DNote (github). This release allows you to output context with your notes. Just select the number of contextual lines to include via the -c option. Currently only HTML, YAML and JSON output formats support context –other formats will gain support in the future. Note that the old -c option for --custom has been capitalized to -C.
Recommended Ruby books
A list of several very nice Ruby books.
DHH's RailsConf 2011 Keynote In Notes and Pictures
I just live-blogged David Heinemeier Hansson’s RailsConf 2011 where he focused on the ‘asset packaging’ and pipeline features coming in Rails 3.1 (which he also said would be available in Release Candidate form this week).