Rotate Images and Stuff with CSS only
“Did you know you can rotate images (and all other html elements) by using nothing but CSS?” Quoting Johnny Carson, “I did not know that. That’s wild, wacky stuff”
Collecting Feedback on Your Web App
Good info from the Prefinery folks about what worked and what didn’t as they’ve tried to collect info from beta testers about their service.
freemium
Subscription management and processing Rails plugin for SaaS / recurring billing. Looks like it only supports a couple of gateways at the moment.
A Closer Look: The Font Sizing Choice
Bottom line – if you still need to support IE6 (and you can actually figure out the crazy math), use em. Otherwise, it should be safe these days to use px.
I’ve long had a bash alias for starting up script/server for a rails process that looked something like:
alias ss="./script/server"
This has worked all well and good, but I’ve been wanting more. I often find myself switching between projects and the time and effort it takes is just exhausting. I mean, think of all those keystrokes!
Inspired by @MikeG1′s tweet pining for a script/server to kill any other process running on same port, and a desire to make the switching process easier for myself, I came up with the following function that I added to my bash profile.
Now switching between rails apps is effortless. I can start the rails app from anywhere with no worries about conflicting processes (bye bye, you’ve been terminated) or even changing to the proper directory. Ahhh, my hands feel lighter already.
Enjoy!
function ss {
if [ "$1" ]; then
# cd to the rails app directory.
cd ~/proj/repos; # (update the repository root location to suit your needs)
if [ "$1" ]; then
cd `ls|grep $1|sort|tail -1`
fi
echo $(pwd)
fi
# kill any existing rails server processes.
ps -a|grep "ruby ./script/server"|grep -v "grep"|cut -d " " -f1|xargs -n 1 kill -TERM
# start the server.
ruby ./script/server
}
stories
Not new, but new to me. Stories auto-generates Cucumber-style human readable acceptance test output, without all the extra Cucumber hassle. Since I don’t have customers that read my acceptance tests, I’ve never gotten down with Cucumber, but this might make it into my workflow.
Practicing product minimalism On my first day of work at Microsoft as a PM six years ago, I sat down with my first manager for our first one-on-one and at the end she asked, Are there any questions? I said yes — one last one: “When do we decide to remove features?”
RubyTrends
A good place to find popular Ruby projects and/or resources. Particularly helpful for those starting out and looking for good Ruby or Rails books.
A Git Workflow for Agile Teams
I’m always intrigued by the development workflows that others use. Not to mention, posts like this were invaluable to me when I was learning Git.
Wondering if my intro comments on these posts are starting to sound like garfield minus garfield.
In-Field Labels: A Better Way + jQuery Plugin
A nice jQuery plugin for implementing in-field labels that don’t completely disappear when the field receives focus (which is, um, helpful if you need to autofocus a particular field and you still want the user to know what the field is for)
The Rails State Machine
Rails edge recently added built-in state machine functionality. Here’s a few examples of how you might take advantage of this feature.
Why you don’t want to shard
More of a “don’t” than a “why”, which basically comes down to the fact that it makes both development and continuing operations very complicated, mmkay.
Observational: Better Observers for ActiveRecord
Shift the responsibility of common callback functionality (like sending a welcome email to a user) out of the model where it doesn’t make sense.
Rails in the Enterprise
Some anecdotal success stories and stats from the less everything guys (and other folks in the comments) doing Rails work in the enterprise trenches.
Dear User of My Open Source Project
A rant against the entitlement mindset of some open source software users. As usual, interesting dialogue in the comments.
memcached gem release
Now bundles in libmemcached, making it much easier to install and get going.
Ruby I don’t like #2 – catch(:wtf) { throw :wtf }
I don’t like the example used in this case (I don’t think it’s a typical usage of throw/catch), and I don’t think throw/catch is inherently bad. But I guess that’s why it’s not titled “Ruby that Robin doesn’t like.” Everybody has their own opinions.
Deployment Script Spring Cleaning
How GitHub deploy went from 15m to 14s. Picked up some good capistrano/deployment insights here that I may apply to some of my own deployment scripts.
Toddler’s brain decides that 4:30am is a good time to get up for the day. My brain, in retrospect, does not concur.
Ruby I don’t like #1 – Explicit ‘return’
Interesting discussion going on in the comments section. Personally, I don’t like unnecessary explicit returns scattered throughout a method, but I do like to use guard clauses over multi-conditionals.
Bowline – A Ruby GUI framework
Cross-platform desktop development framework that sits on top of Titanium/Webkit. Early stage, but interesting.
Worst case scenario
Adam Milligan goes on the offensive to lobby for his Rails patch to fix a problem with functional tests possibly masking problems with incorrect parameter types.
Had to increase my default console font-size this weekend. Pretty sure this is an early sign of programmer old-age.
wycats’s textmate
A new release of this command-line package manager for TextMate.
Rails Freelancing Handbook
A new ebook from Mike Gunderloy. Will be buying this one as well as his Rails Rescue Handbook. Mike’s work is always top notch.
Advanced Command Line
A new peepcode screencast released over the weekend. Full of great info to get the most out of your bash (or zsh) shell – especially helpful for this relatively newbie *nix guy.
compass-colors
Color tools and Theme support for Compass & SASS. You provide base color and you can get themes like Monochromatic, Complementary, Triadic, etc.
