Double Shot #653

No shortage of interesting and shiny distractions today.

• Bling Bling gem management - Why yes, there is already a replacement for Bundler.
• Announcing the Currencies Gem - Multi-currency and exchange rate support for the money gem.
• htmlBurger - Paid service to convert PSD to XHTML/CSS/light JS.
• Inline Styler - Convert CSS rules to inline style attributes for use in HTML email.
• rghost - Another alternative for PDF creation from Ruby. Anyone used this one?
• Running Rails 2.3.x on IronRuby - Rob Bazinet shows how to take the first steps.
• HTML Dog - Well-recommended set of HTML and CSS tutorials.
• What really happens when you navigate to a URL - It's complicated.
• RubyGems.org move complete - GemCutter has finished its bloodless coup over ruby gem hosting. Time to upgrade your rubygems to 1.3.6.
• jQuery Simple Multi-Select, jQuery Multiselect list plugin, and jQuery MultiSelect Plugin w/ ThemeRoller Support - Three options for adding click-to-toggle functionality to HTML select controls. I ended up using the first of these on a project, and it works well.
• Use a 503 for your Rails maintenance page - One more little bit of polish and standards.
• Rails 3 Upgrade Handbook - Now out and ready to download. Looks well-worth the $12.

Double Shot #652

Remember kids, sleep is for the weak and sensible.

• Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures Using Over 1,000 Shell Companies To Hide Patent Shakedown - The only reason I call the patent system "broken" is that I can't think of a more appropriate word that's fit for polite company.
• Git v1.7.0 Release Notes - Time to upgrade again. Note that there are some minor behavior changes.
• EZ-CSS - Yes, another CSS framework - but not yetanother grid.
• Hoptoad Notifier: Rack and automatic Metal support - Another functionality bump from the Hoptoad folks.
• A Visual Git Reference - With boxes and arrows.
• query_trace - I pushed out a new version of this gem yesterday.
• Rails 3 Beautiful Code - Presentation from Greg Pollack. Personally I am skeptical of "beauty" as a code metric in the working world.
• Bundler and I are breaking up - I've seen quite a bit of Bundler hate recently. Maybe it's just that it's not stable enough yet.
• Is The Singularity Here Yet? - Check the page source.
• Complex Nested Forms with Rails and Unobtrusive jQuery - This worked fine for me after I remembered that _delete had been renamed to _destroy in Rails 2.3.5.

Double Shot #651

Deadlines are raining on me like snowflakes lately.

• VersionControlTools - Somewhat rambling evaluation from Martin Fowler. It's interesting that he chooses git, Mercurial, and svn as the only three to recommend despite plenty of experience with the more "enterprisey" tools.
• Icons Etc. - Another big pile of royalty-free icons and images.
• Rails/jQuery UI sortables with single UPDATE query - Simple tutorial from Henrik Nyh. The SQL is MySQL-specific, but it's easy enough to write a workable method if you're on a different database.
• Smooth Devoperations: Deploying Rails 3 with Moonshine - The Rails Machine guys are committed to making Moonshine work well with Rails 3 while keeping Rails 2 support. Good news all around.
• Rails 3 Upgrade Handbook - Sign up for notification when this one comes out. Jeremy McAnally has already done some great Rails 3 blog entries, so this should be super-useful.

Double Shot #649

A slow day yesterday, at least on the web for me.

• Ketchup - jQuery plugin for forms validation.
• rails_metrics - Metrics engine for Rails 3 applications.
• paperclip-on-heroku - Fully-worked example of how to do it.

Double Shot #648

Snow and deadlines. Must be Monday.

• Quicksand - Fun bit of jQuery eye candy for rearranging items on screen.
• Monitoring Delayed Job with Bluepill and Capistrano - Putting together a few more bits of infrastructure.
• JQuery Ajax - The latest from PeepCode.
• Rails 3 Testing environment - Gist showing how to set one up safely with rvm.
• TypeDNA - Some interesting font tools, including one that will identify fonts in uploaded images.
• Insourcing - Sarah Allen is experimenting with some ways to cost-effectively grow a development team without the risks of outsourcing, through carefully-managed internships.
• Visual Website Optimizer - Beta hosted service to help you do A/B testing with analysis.
• A/Bingo 1.0.0 Official Release - Alternately, you can just set up your own A/B testing infrastructure.
• Refraction - Rack middleware to replace mod_rewrite. One of the few uses of Rack middleware that actually strikes me as reasonable.