04.07.09
What I Wish I Knew When I First Started Learning Ruby on Rails
Preview
When I first started out on rails one of the first things I experimented with was connections with other services such as flickr and twitter. I also played around with a lot of javascript tools like the rich text editor plugin tinyMCE. The nice thing about Rails is that you can usually find a wrapper, gem, or plugin that encapsulates these tools and services nicely and makes it easy to implement them use ruby and rails-like syntax. If they are written well, they can save you a lot of time and keep your code looking clean and consistent. However, when you're first starting out with Rails and web development in general, overuse of these tools may prevent you from learning about how they work. Read More..
03.13.09
How to Setup a Killer Shoulda BDD Rails Testing Environment
Preview
Testing in Rails is one of those things that's easy to overlook but hard to live without once you've experienced the benefits of doing so. I like many Rails started out learning with the book "Agile Web Development with Ruby on Rails." It was a great book and eventually started me on my path to becoming a full-time freelance web developer, but I have one minor complaint: the testing section is wayyy at the end of the main tutorial - almost an afterthought. Read More..
07.30.08
Use Flickr_Fu to Bring Your Flickr Photos to Your Ruby on Rails Website
Preview
It all started when I decided it was time to make nuttersmark.com xhtml and css valid. I had played around with various flickr wrappers and gems in the past to serve up my photos but this time around I decided to use the canned badge that flickr provides users to embed their latest photos on their blog or website. This seemed to be a good temporary solution while I got the more important components of design iteration #5 ironed out until I decided to see just how far away from valid this site really was. Turns out it was 'very'. Read More..
06.06.08
Railsconf has_many :macs
Preview
Last week I attended my first Railsconf in Portland, OR. It was a great conference full of incredibly charged up and talented people and was unlike any conference I have ever attended; people actually wanted to be there. Since I am relatively ne w to the Rails and Ruby communities I had the unique perspective of looking from the outside in. There are a lot of traits, personality types, and trends I noticed about the Rails community. For one, everyone seemed to love what they do. We are talking about passion for one's work here. There were more entrepreneurs, intellectuals, creatives, and pragmatists than I could shake a stick at. Technorati Profile Read More..
01.30.08
Dragged Onto the Train Kicking and Screaming: Rails 2.0
Preview
The rails team recently released version 2.0 as many of you know, and in it are a lot of neat features and simplifications. Having been developing RESTful applications for the better part of the last year I welcome the new integration, but when 2.0 dropped I was mid-project on a few different apps and didn't want to deal with upgrading. Well, as luck would have it, after a day of banging my head against the wall I ended up having to stick with Rails 2.0 on my new mediatemple (dv) server account, forcing me to make my apps 2.0+ compliant. Read More..
