You are currently browsing the monthly archive for July, 2008.
New months always look so promising.
- Functional Programming and Looping - An argument for choosing the right iteration structures in Ruby.
- Firebug Lite - Get at least some of the Firebug goodness in non-FF browsers.
- Magic Thumb - $40 commercial JavaScriptto get that fancy web 2.0-ish enlarging thumbnail behavior.
- Robots.txt Syntax Checker - Spots errors and gives plain-language explanations.
Thanks for all the response, somewhat-less-faceless audience. I shall endeavor to find more content of interest to giant killer robots now.
- CSSRound - Automated generator for rounded-corner background layouts for your CSS/HTML needs.
- The Survey, 2008 - From A List Apart, trying to get a sense of the current state of the web design and development community.
- DocBox - Wikified editing for RDoc source. (via Ruby Inside)
- More Info on Vertebra - The P2P cloud computing control software coming soon from EngineYard.
Feedburner says this site has 1600+ subscribers now. I’m boggled. Who are all you people?
- CronEdit - Ruby library for editing crontab files. Given the trouble I have doing that by hand, I need to keep track of this one.
- Hampton’s Ruby Survey 2008 - An attempt to take a snapshot of the Ruby community. It’ll only take you a couple of minutes to participate.
- Hoptoad - New app for tracking Rails applicaiton errors via a web service and online reporting, rather than via email. More details here. I tried it out, and I think I’ll be using it on a variety of projects.
Without Mondays to absorb all the extra email, Tuesdays would be a disaster.
- Fetches: Bringing your ActionController its Slippers - Rails plugin to dry out the plethora of @foo = Foo.find(params[:id]) calls that litter controllers.
- Announcing Cruise - ThoughtWorks are out with a new commerical continuous integration product that appears to compete directly with CruiseControl.
- Introducing ActivePresenter: the presenter library you already know - Presenter pattern implementation for Rails that feels very much like ActionController. (via RubyFlow)
- rspec-on-rails-matchers - Potentially useful addition to RSpec, though looking at the project network it doesn’t look like stuff has been merged back to the master copy lately.
- Open Source Rails - Collection of Rails applications, with a fresh design.
- Simple Localization in Rails 2.2 - A look at the coming feature. (via RubyFlow)
This weekend I pushed out my first plugin, user_event_logger. Suggestions welcome. Votes of confidence welcome on Working With Rails, too.
- Capistrano Gotcha - Turns out cap deploy:setup doesn’t use sudo, which explains an issue I’ve been having on our servers. This mailing list post shows how to work around that for creating the initial folders.
- This Week in Rails - If you like my short pointers to stuff, there are plenty more here.
- Evoluent VerticalMouse - I suspect it might be smart to have one of these around for variety.
- Kawaii: A web-based utility like script/console - Just like the title says, with some prettyprinting skills.
I started banging together another plugin to release last night. Hopefully I’ll get it out there in the next couple of days.
- New to Git? - GitHub points to a bunch of tutorials.
- Custom 404 Action in Rails - A dynamic approach.
- Introducing Shadow, a Rails Plugin - For maintaining Facebook-style activity lists.
- Tutorial: Creating Plugins in Rails - Useful despite a few typos.
Elegance tradeoff: store a hashed confirmation code, or regenerate across all unconfirmed users when a confirmation hit comes in? Hmm…
- DNS Checker - If you’re worried about the big DNS exploit that’s vaguely rumored, you can check your own server’s vulnerability at Dan Kaminsky’s site.
- Veteran Developer Ditches Microsoft for Open Source - Eek, I’ve been profiled. Nothing you haven’t seen here before.
When was the last time you wrote a web app that didn’t depend on some service or site that’s ultimately out of your control?
- Django 1.0 Alpha Released - The folks on the other side of the fence continue to make good progress.
- RedCloth 4.0 Released - Major update to this text-processing library.
- RailsDB - Rails-based database-management tool. Version 0.3 was just released.
I have spent too much of the last few days understanding why CSS designers don’t like IE6.
- Nginx Upload Module - Faster handling for uploaded files in Rails apps using nginx.
- Mobilize Your Rails Application with Mobile Fu - Automatically detect and adjust for mobile browsers.
- Gist - Like Pasties, but backed by GitHub.
It was a working weekend for me, but apparently a writing weekend for lots of other folks:
- OpenX ad server API with Ruby - I could have used this a while ago.
- Little green friend - Thoughtbot is getting ready to introduce a web-based replacement for the ExceptionNotifier plugin, called hoptoad. Looks interesting.
- Inept Recruiter - The story of a technical recruiter who managed to spawn an entire Rails dev mailing list through poor use of the cc: field. I had my own inept recruiter yesterday - wanted to hire me to work at Microsoft. Um, no.
- If you work for Apple, we need your help… - The lockdown of the iPhone extends to blocking book authors. Bah.
- Authenticate like SSO with ActiveResource - One approach to letting one Rails app provide authentication services for another. I don’t think we’ve see the end of this discussion yet.
- Blueprint 0.7 - Looking for a CSS framework. It seemed like investigating the most widely-known one was a good starting point. And indeed, using it is pretty simple.
- Bitbucket - Free (and paid) hosting for Mercurial repos. Not that I’m looking to learn another source-code management system right now, but it’s good to know about.
- Blueprint Grid CSS Generator - Useful adjunct to Blueprint when you don’t want or need 24 columns.
- Blueprint CSS 101 - Good (though slightly dated) overview.
- EditorKicker - Rails plugin to open your text editor to the affected file when an error happens in Rails dev.
- WICE Grid - Fancy grid/table control plugin for Rails views.
So far I’m liking Passenger more than nginx + mongrels, if only for ease of setup.
- emastic - Another CSS framework. I have the nagging feeling that I should pick and use one.
- SiteScan - Utility to check out whether you have Google Analytics installed properly.
- The Complete Guide to Setting up Starling - Help with Twitter’s background processing code.
There’s some chance I may start writing a RoR column for pay. I cannot escape writing work, apparently.
- 15 Resources to Get You Started with jQuery From Scratch - A nice collection of links.
- Sexy Forms in Rails - That would be ones with automatic label tags for accessibility.
- Mack 0.6.0 and Waves 0.7.7 - New releases of two of the “other” Ruby web frameworks.
Starting a new chunk of work today that looks like it will involve the rails-multisite plugin. Always good to be learning new skills.
- Hosting git Repositories, the Easy (and Secure) Way - Good guide to setting up gitosis. I also needed to recompile git, because Debian’s version is too old for gitosis to be happy.
- Yuma - Do we really need another web scripting language? Maybe not, but there it is.
- Prototip - Nice-looking tooltip library for Prototype.
In the “better late than never” department, I’ve started contributing some code to the google_analytics plugin. Gotta start somewhere.
- Announcing a New Prototype Support Mailing List - For all your Prototype and script.aculo.us needs.
- Engine Yard takes $15mill Series B Round from NEA, Amazon and Benchmark - Hey, leave some for the rest of us! Seriously, though, that’s a great endorsement for Rails.
When I look at my resume, I’m amazed at the number of careers I’ve survived.
- BackgrounDrb 1.04 - A fairly large release with some API changes. More info here.
- ActionSequence - Code & DSL for handling multi-page Rails forms.
Time to donate platelets again, in between pushing more bits around.
- Scaling on EC2 - Real world experience from the WebMynd team.
- List of Firebug Extensions - There are a bunch here I didn’t know about. It’s becoming a platform-within-a-platform.
- acts_as_overflowable - Lets a column overflow into a second column. This helps when you want to index text quickly.
- Introducing DataFabric - Application-level sharding for ActiveRecord.
- Spree - Rails-based online commerce engine.
I’m thinking it’s about time for me to get involved with some open source Rails project. The question is, which one?
- 6 Optimization tips for Ruby MRI - Useful if you end up right down in the weeds with a perf issue.
- Command Line Basecamp - Just in case your team is on Basecamp and you don’t want to spend all day with the UI.
- Lab Test: Climb Aboard Ruby on Rails - InfoWorld does a big test of 9 different IDEs and editors.
Things are churning right along here.
- Ruby Row - Boutique advertising network for Rubyists. $600 will get your ad on 5 of the most-known Ruby blogs.
- Introducing CampTweet - Pipe Twitter, Summize, or RSS feeds into Campfire.
- Phusion Passenger - The latest PeepCode screencast covers this new alternative for Rails deployment.
- singleton_validations - Rails plugin to do validations on individual ActiveRecord instances.
- Getting Started with Merb and DataMapper - Ben Smith navigates through the currently-tricky morass of gems, source, and dependencies.
- Living on the Edge (or What’s New in Edge Rails) #3 - Not much visible right now, but still worth tracking.
- Installing Git man Pages - How to get the docs locally.
- jGrowl - jQuery plugin similar to Growl in its effects.
Happy July 4th - a day I can catch up a bit while email is quiet, I hope.
- Programmer Competency Matrix - This one has been going around. I think the basic idea that you can measure a developer’s competency by this sort of checkoff list is nonsense, though; it tells us more about the particular prejudices of the author than some Platonic ideal of a programmer.
- Unit Testing iPhone apps with Ruby: rbiphonetest - Does Dr. Nic ever sleep?
There are times that I wish our kids would learn to sleep in.
- Get Started with Django - Webmonkey has the goods.
- Pretty Blocks in Rails Views - Some ways to make your code more elegant.
- ActionWebService is Back - And updated for Rails 2.1.0.
- Cornerstone - New Subversion UI for OS X. (via TUAW)
Sick kids have been taking more time than net cruising lately.
- New Controller Examples - David Chelminsky is experimenting with the scaffolded tests that RSpec generates for RESTful controllers.
- REST Anti-Patterns - Ways in which to drift away from RESTfulness when building a web service.
