.

Coffee Powered

code and content

Monthly Archives: February 2009

Feb
16
2009

Powerful, easy, DRY, multi-format REST APIs: Part 2

Back in September, I wrote about making your REST APIs more flexible and easier to maintain. I’ve been working with this code with great success for the past few months, and have improved and tweaked it. It’s changed enough that it’s time for another blog post about it. First off, the render method signature has [...]

By Chris Heald | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (4)
Feb
15
2009

Graceful degredation: Using Gravatar as a fallback avatar with Paperclip

Lots of people use Paperclip for stuff like letting their users upload avatars. This is great – Paperclip is easy to use, quick to integrate, and painless to maintain. However, Gravatar has a great selling point: The user gets an avatar without ever having to go set one on your site. They have an identity [...]

By Chris Heald | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (4)
Feb
07
2009

Desuckifying Experts-Exchange

If you’ve ever searched for an answer to a programming problem, chances are good that you’ve run into results from experts-exchange. Everyone hates them. The information usually isn’t that good, and even if it is, you have to scroll past sixteen pages of ads and spam to get to them. Unfortunately, there’s the occasional nugget [...]

By Chris Heald | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | Comments (32)