Exception Handling and Old URLs
Whenever I deploy a Rails site, I install the exception notification plugin so I get an email if a user provokes a bug I hadn’t found. It’s a piece of cake to install:1. Install the pluginruby...
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Tim Bray: Ruby is the Leading Language for Web Applications
In his keynote talk at the recent Silicon Valley Ruby Conference, Sun’s Tim Bray asserted that “PHP and Ruby are the languages of choice for new web apps.” Coming from most people, this wouldn’t be a...
View ArticleWeb 2.0 Expo Highlights and Factoids
Last week’s Web 2.0 Expo had an overwhelming amount of content. Like any large conference, the quality was uneven, but there were some great talks and a lot of good ones. Among the main-session talks,...
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Easy Text Formatting with Textile
When I’m writing content for the web, I hate dealing with HTML coding. HTML is rather verbose as a markup language, and having to include closing tags is messy and error-prone.We’re all pretty much...
View ArticleNew Crop of Rails 2.0 Books
In 2007, more than a dozen Ruby on Rails books debuted — only to be almost instantly made out-of-date by the release of Rails 2 toward the end of the year. In many respects, books written for Rails 1.2...
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The Rebuilding and Scaling of YellowPages.com
John Straw, chief software architect at YellowPages.com, gave an excellent talk at RailsConf about YellowPages’ conversion to Rails. We’ve pointed to YellowPages in the past as being one of the...
View ArticlePodcasts and Screencasts on Ruby on Rails
There’s a variety of screencasts and podcasts available for Ruby on Rails developers. Here’s a quick rundown of the major ones, and how they differ.PodcastsAudio podcasts are great for listening on the...
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Setting up Rails on Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5)
This guide walks you through setup instructions for preparing a Mac OS X 10.5 (aka Leopard) development machine to be used for general Ruby on Rails coding. This baseline setup is what we use for our...
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Setting up Rails on Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4)
This guide walks you through setup instructions for preparing a Mac OS X 10.4 (aka Tiger) development machine to be used for general Ruby on Rails coding. This baseline setup is what we use for our...
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Startup Camp and Foo Camp
I feel lucky to have been able to attend last week’s Startup Camp and Foo Camp. These are unusual, invitation-only events, with extraordinary collections of people. Getting an invitation requires some...
View ArticleLab 7. Deployment
In this final lab, we are going to focus on moving your code into a source code control system, preparing a production server for your application, and finally, conducting an actual deployment.While...
View ArticleLab 6. Testing
In this lab, we are going to look at some examples of unit and functional testing in Rails. Many of the tests that Rails generates for us automatically need some fixing up to track the changes we made...
View ArticleLab 5. Subscriptions and Credit Card Processing
In this lab, we’re going to enable visitors to our web site to subscribe and send us real money! Well, not quite real money, since this is using a test account at the credit card gateway, but all it...
View ArticleLab 4. Contact Form, Mailer, and an Anti-Spam Web Service
In this lab, we’re going to create a contact form that visitors to our web site can complete. When they submit the contact form, we’ll both store it in the database and generate an email to...
View ArticleLab 3. The Resources Page, with Ajax
In this lab, we’ll create a database-driven Resources page for our site that presents a list of links. We’ll also illustrate how you can use Ajax to allow the sorting of the list to be changed without...
View ArticleLab 2. Building a Simple CMS
In this lab, we’ll create a mini content management system to enable an administrative user to edit the site’s content without having to modify the code.To start this lab, load the lab2_start folder...
View ArticleLab 1. Set-Up and Static Pages
In this lab, you’ll create a new Rails site from scratch, building it up step by step until you have a four-page site with navigation. This creates the basis upon which all the other labs build.1....
View ArticleLab 8 (Bonus): A Page Model and Cleanup
This final RailsQuickStart lab write-up describes changes we’ve made to the sample application. Some changes are just code clean-up, while others implement some of the additional features suggested at...
View ArticleEnhancing Conditional Routing in Rails
Rails’ routing infrastructure supports the concept of conditional routes: preconditions that must be satisfied before a particular route will trigger. Rails 2.1 supports one built-in condition, HTTP...
View ArticleWeb 2.0 Expo San Francisco Spring 2009
March 31 - April 3, San FranciscoLast week's Web 2.0 Expo seemed like a successful event, with a good-sized crowd despite the economic malaise – due in part, no doubt, to unusually aggressive...
View ArticleWeb 2.0 Expo: TV and Radio with an API
National Public Radio (NPR) is changing what it means to be a news organization. While traditional news organizations want to keep their content close, NPR has taken the approach of making content...
View ArticleWeb 2.0 Expo: Web Developer Tools
Ben Galbraith and Dio Almaer of Ajaxian and the developer tools group at Mozilla gave a wide-ranging talk on web developer tools. They noted that the web often seems more like a hack than a platform —...
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Web 2.0 Expo: Social Media
The conference sessions at Web 2.0 Expo had a major emphasis on social media. I only attended a couple of these talks, about which I have brief comments below; at the end of the article, I have links...
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Selling Friends: Scaling a High-Traffic Rails Application
At the recent Silicon Valley Ruby Conference, Friends for Sale developer Alex Le outlined the approach they’ve taken to scaling up to deliver an impressive 300 million page views per month for their...
View ArticleRemote Linux Admin for Windows Users
All the cool kids in the web world these days seem to be using Macs, which have hearts of Unix so are natural complements to Linux-based servers. Others are running Linux desktops. So a lot of the...
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