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Monthly Archives: June 2011

Jun
28
2011

Tarot for easier Rails configurations

Once upon a time, I wrote a quick-and-dirty Rails plugin for site configuration. Since then, I’ve continued to use variants on this pattern, and it’s evolved to the point that it deserved a revisit. After continually slimming down the code, I realized that even though it’s tiny, it’s danged useful to be able to just [...]

By Chris Heald | Posted in Rails, Ruby | Tagged | Comments (6)
Jun
17
2011

Sexy CSS Scrollbars in Chrome

It’s like it’s 1996 all over again, except with less suck. Webkit now supports styleable scrollbars, and you get to use all the Webkit CSS3 goodies, like gradients and rounded corners and the like. If you’re using Chrome or Safari, you might notice that I have the blog theme rocking super sexy grey scrollbars now, [...]

By Chris Heald | Posted in CSS | Comments (4)
Jun
17
2011

Making HAML faster

Haml’s among my favorite of the Rails technology stack. Clean, self-correcting templates that mean less typing and more doing for me. I love it. Unfortunately, there have been a number of performance regressions introduced into Haml recently, and that sucks, because Rails spends a lot of time building views, and I’d really like those numbers [...]

By Chris Heald | Posted in Performance, Ruby | Comments (9)
Jun
17
2011

JRuby Performance: Exceptions are not flow control

I started playing with JRuby tonight, and got my application up and running on it in under 10 minutes (kudos to the JRuby team!), but when I started measuring its performance, I was seriously unimpressed. This didn’t quite line up with what I’ve read of JRuby, so I decided to do a little digging.

By Chris Heald | Posted in JRuby, Performance, Ruby | Comments (11)