I recently ran across a rather bare post espousing some generic “optimization” techniques for Rails apps. It offered no education, no explanation, no benchmarks. So, I thought, why not put those claims to the test?
So there’s been this gossipy story making the rounds on the social news sites, that the McCain camp has unbelievably registered voteforthemilf.com and are redirecting it to their site! They’ve got traceroutes and everything! Oh! The sexism! Oh! The gall! Oh! The huge manatee!
Or, wait, no, maybe everyone running around screaming about this just doesn’t [...]
I have a friend who recently had several of his online accounts compromised. The attackers weren’t particularly clever, didn’t use any special tools, didn’t install any viruses on his computer. All they needed was to see his public Facebook profile. From that, they were able to divine his birthday and security question answer - [...]
Rails’ baked-in REST support is great. Build your app right, and you can expose a programmatic interface to your users for free.
That said, many times providing views in non-HTML formats tends to be bulky and unwieldy. You end up with either very brittle representations of your data, or extremely bulky respond_to blocks in your controllers.
Fortunately, [...]
Rails does a great job at many things, but one of the most consistent stumbling blocks I see in #rubyonrails is RJS. It complicates many things that just don’t need to be that complex, especially when using a Javascript helper library like Prototype or jQuery.
Keep things simple! One little helper, and your AJAX requests get [...]
Ever wanted to do IM from Rails? xmpp4r-simple makes it really easy to talk to Jabber clients (such as Google Talk users) from Ruby, but it’s not quite a cut-and-dried solution for your Rails apps. Fortunately, there’s Jabberish.
Jabberish is a DRb-backed Jabber client designed for use in multi-server Rails apps. Just drop in the plugin, [...]
site_config is a little plugin that addresses a problem lots of people seem to need to solve in their Rails apps: per-environment configuration variables.
It’s very simple, but makes configuration dead-easy. To install it:
script/plugin install git://github.com/cheald/site_config.git
Once you have it installed, check out config/site_config.yml - there’s your config file.
You’ll notice that it has some dummy data in [...]