The Ruby Toolbox: Latest News

The state of the Toolbox

Tue, 24 May 2011 08:18:03 +0000

As you might have noticed, updates to the Ruby Toolbox have been relatively infrequent over the last months to say the best.

As you might have not noticed if you’re not following me on twitter, the all-new Ruby Toolbox 2 has been in beta for a while already and is about to replace the current site very soon. Actually, I was intending to release it at last week’s Railsconf, but failed to connect the last loose ends because of all the conference action going on in Baltimore.

A lot of the project addition requests that I’ve been mailed and tweeted are in fact already present on the new site, and so is a lot of great new features that will give you a lot better insight on which projects to choose.

Thanks for your patience, you can expect great stuff from the next gen Ruby Toolbox!

Viva con Agua campaign finished

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 16:19:06 +0000

The charity campaign I’ve been running is now over, and although the actual (and quite optimistic) goal has not been reached, we’ve managed to collect $170 for the Viva con Agua project.

I will soon transfer the money to VcA (converted to ~135 €), thanks to everyone who joined in!

I think I’ll repeat this next year, hopefully with more people joining in!

In other news, in recent weeks I haven’t been too quick about responding to mails and tweets because I’ve been quite busy (RailsConf in Baltimore, Hurricane music festival, world cup, actual work…), so sorry if you haven’t heard back from me yet. I hope to have my inbox back to zero by the end of this week. Thanks for your patience!

"The Ruby Toolbox for Viva con Agua" campaign

Fri, 07 May 2010 18:15:59 +0000

You might have read my call for donations so I could go to RailsConf posted earlier today – well, it looks as if our company is truly agile, and with some schedule shuffling, we (unfortunately, this is actually just “most of us”) actually ARE going to RailsConf!

Now, since I’ve promised that all donations would be redirected straight to the Hamburg-based charity Viva con Agua if it wouldn’t have been enough to cover the travel, the pledge announced earlier today has now been transformed to an uncomparably more important thing:

The official Ruby Toolbox for Viva con Agua charity campaign

There’s a lot of people who do not care what nifty, crazy awesome geeky conference is happening somewhere far away, since they have either no drinking water, or the water they actually can get is polluted to the point where drinking it leads to illnesses they can’t cope with, since there’s no doctors or even medicine available.

The Viva con Agua project is a German charity that is providing drinking water to the most poverty-struck regions on earth, drilling wells, providing filtering machines et cetera.

I’d love to see us raise $2500 by RailsConf 2010 (starting June 7th) – the pressure’s on, but I am totally convinced we can do this!

As programmers, we are really privileged to earn a decent amount of money by doing what we love to do – if you’ve found this site to be of any use to you, please consider donating a couple of bucks over at Pledgie – all the money donated will go to Viva con Agua!

I need your help so I can go to Railsconf!

Fri, 07 May 2010 12:22:03 +0000

Update, 2009-05-07:

It seems our company really is quite agile – after some schedule-shuffling, it turns out we’re actually going to RailsConf!

So, now it’s the time to move on to more serious things – I’ve launched the ‘Ruby Toolbox for Viva con Agua’ charity campaign – please consider making a donation for this good cause!

The stuff following is outdated, check this out instead

Big trouble! The company I’m working at, Capita Unternehmensberatung, had the Railsconf in Baltimore booked (as always – thanks to our generous boss I’ve been to Railsconfs 07, 08, 09), but due to some unfortunate events, some of us were no longer able to make the trip – so the trip was cancelled altogether.

You surely can imagine that this is making me super-sad. I haven’t lost my hopes altogether yet, though. Since I’m still studying at the University of Hamburg and working part-time, I am too poor to afford the trip on my own, but I have some hope in you, dear Ruby community!

The total cost for the trip estimates around $2500 (flights from Hamburg to Baltimore are currently at 750 Euro, which is something around $900, the actual conference ticket and some hotel room amount at some $1600).

Now, the idea is: If I get 500 people to pass me 5 bucks, I could do the trip. I know $2500 is a lot of money, but on the other hand, considering the ~1000 visitors Ruby Toolbox has every day, I really do believe this is possible!

What if I don’t get enough money raised?

Well, if the difference is too steep and I can’t make up for it on my own, I will pass all the money donated to a local german charity called Viva con Agua, which provides clean drinking water in poor parts of the world. If I happen to raise too much money, the money left over from booking the trip will also go to Viva con Agua.

If you’ve found Ruby Toolbox useful over the last year and maybe even saved or earned some money because it spared you of research time or pointed you at some decent Ruby project which helped you get your job done easier, or maybe even hate Ruby Toolbox, but still want to help me out, I’d be incredibly grateful if you could donate a couple of bucks over at pledgie

Ruby Toolbox now hosted by Heroku

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 16:10:09 +0000

Though things have been pretty quiet on the news page, the Ruby Toolbox has kept growing over the last months – since the last news post back in July 2009, 316 projects and 32 categories have been added.

Today I’m back with some very good news: I’m very pleased to announce that the Ruby Toolbox has moved to sponsored hosting by Heroku this week!

What does this mean for the Ruby Toolbox?

Since the launch of the site in May 2009, the Toolbox has been running on a quite small VPS, backed by Apache and a very (!) arcane caching mechanism which essentially made the site completely static because only the HTML-pages generated were public-facing, and the actual Rails app was running on a single Thin instance that was locked away from the outer world. I’m quite puzzled how this approach could ever work so well until now…

Despite the fact that this static caching approach worked, it had several obvious drawbacks: The cache was updated only twice per day, so newly added projects did not appear on the site immediately, time difference notes on the site were quite a mess, and no dynamic stuff like search or even a simple form for submitting new projects were possible.

Also, the quite terrible deployment setup led to very little and infrequent updates to the site. It was just too much of an effort to deploy the app, update the caches, make sure everything was still working etc.

Although it surely would have been possible to make the Rails app itself public-facing from the VPS as well, I’m definetely not a system administrator and did not want to have to take care of the server running smoothly and securely – after all, this is my tiny little hobby project – I want to add features when I have the time to do so and don’t want to have to cope with the specifics of running a server, so that’s why I approached Heroku and asked them whether they wanted to sponsor the hosting of Ruby Toolbox.

With Heroku and their extremely effortless deployment process and the easy accessibility of things like Memcache, I’m finally able to push out changes more frequently and easily – and I will definetely do so! Thanks to Heroku for making this possible, and in particular to Oren Teich, who has been very supportive and open about the hosting sponsorship!

What’s new?

First of all let’s go through the things that have been temporarily removed:

The category graphs are currently gone because of the read-only filesystem at Heroku – I did not have the time to set up S3 or something similar for storing the graphs yet – but they will return for sure.

The blog post listings for projects are gone as well because the updates from the Technorati stopped working quite a while ago – they’ll be back when I get to resolve the API client issues.

With that out of the way, let’s see what’s been improved.

Back in September, I’ve already added the listing of Ruby gems from Rubyforge as well as Github if they could be found by a matching Github repository name. Since then, Github has discontinued the building of Ruby gems, and Gemcutter has become the default host for Gems. Up to now, the Github gems were still listed on the project pages, which is finally gone. Also, the projects can finally be linked against Gems of different names – so if you know of a Gem that is on the Ruby Toolbox but does not have a Ruby gem listing or is linked against a wrong gem, please drop me a mail!

The most notable changes are the completely overhauled project details – they are quite more concise and the clunky appearance is gone. The gem download counter (if a gem is present) is also put up front so it’s easier to figure out which gems are more popular regardless of the Github score, and the available additional resources (sourcecode, rdoc, Github wiki, website) are linked in a slicker way. Also, you can now easily access code metrics via Caliper for Ruby projects by clicking on the “Metrics” link – check it out here

If a Rubygem is present, the Gem’s description is now being pulled from the Gemcutter API and replaces the Github description – I noticed coders talk a lot more in the Gemspec descriptions compared to the often quite short Github descriptions, so this is another chunk of information that might be useful when trying to figure out the library you want to use.

Long-requested features like search and a submit form for new projects will find their way into the Ruby Toolbox soon.

Thanks again to Heroku for making this possible!

Stay tuned for more updates in the next weeks.

Issues with RSS feeds resolved

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 17:36:05 +0000

As you might have noticed, there has been some trouble with the RSS feeds lately, with obscured URLs and other glitches.

These issues should be resolved now, all links in the RSS feed items should be properly linked up.

In the Recently Added Projects feed, now you will also see the category the project has been added to. Thanks to the people pointing out that this should be included in the feed items, sometimes one forgets about the most obvious things…

Because of these changes, feed items might reappear in your RSS reader (i.e. this happens in Google Reader) – Sorry for the inconvenience, I will think about reworking the feed generation to avoid such mess in the future.

Currently, there is some trouble with the Technorati API – all blog posts linking to the Github repositories have their dates reported as 1970/1/1, which obviously does not make much sense. So for now, the Projects in the news feed is pretty much useless, since no new items will appear. Hopefully Technorati will get things fixed and the posts will get proper dates again.

Until then the actual blog post listings for all projects in their categories’ detail view are still appearing (“39 years ago”), but at least they are there if you want to find some resources on your pick.

In other news, a couple of all-new categories have been added over the last couple of days – be sure to check out the listings for Active Record Named Scopes, irb Tools, Rails Form Builders, Rails In Place Editing, Rails Ratings and Wiki Apps

Latest changes in The Ruby Toolbox

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 13:49:15 +0000

Finally, here is the news post promised almost two weeks ago. In the last two weeks, a couple of updates have found their way to The Ruby Toolbox. Apart from various updates to the layout and other minor improvements, there are three major feature additions, which I will cover in a little more detail.

Projects and Categories listings

In the top navigation bar, you will now find links to listings for categories and projects. They also have some rather nice tooltips, so try and hover them :)

The super-ugly dropdown cateogry selector in the upper right has also been replaced by a fancier navigation which hopefully also addresses the increasing navigation issues that grew out of the old select tag with the boatload of categories that have been added since the Toolbox launched.

Project news

Thanks to the Technorati API, each project now has a listing of blog posts featuring information about it.

The search is done based upon links to the project’s Github repository, so all you people out there writing about something Ruby that is hosted on Github and featured here, please remember to link up the project repo from within your post!

Assuming your blog is being indexed by Technorati, your post should appear on the corresponding project’s category listing. Please let me know if there are issues with that!

The inclusion of project news from the blogosphere leads us straight to the next big addition:

Feeds

Plenty of people have been asking for them, and yes, they finally have arrived!

Apart from the obvious feed for this latest news blog, there are also feeds for recently added categories, recently added projects and, last but not least, a feed for the aforementioned blogosphere index, which will give you the latest blogposts about projects covered in The Ruby Toolbox.

I hope you will enjoy the new features. Please let me know what you would like to see in The Ruby Toolbox and of course you’re free to report any issues and projects currently missing!

Plenty of updates rolled out

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 02:23:39 +0000

First of all welcome to the all-new Ruby Toolbox news blog!

I used some spare time this weekend to roll out a couple of major improvements to the Ruby Toolbox, one of them being this blog.

I need to get some sleep now, finally, so help yourself and take a look around to see what’s new – a full post on the improvements will follow soon!

Minor updates

Fri, 29 May 2009 18:50:00 +0000

Minor layout issues resolved, plenty of projects added.

Launched!

Fri, 01 May 2009 21:50:00 +0000

The Ruby Toolbox has been launched!