RicRoberts :

DailyJS: a new Javascript blog

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 12:50:00 +0000

Alex Young and I (with a bit of help from Justin (Gus) Knowlden – of Riot fame), have started up a new Javascript blog called DailyJS.

Although still chiefly a Ruby developer, I’ve had much more to do with Javascript recently, but I’ve had trouble finding a technically-focused blog (i.e. along the lines of RubyInside, but for Javascript). Blogs like Ajaxian are cool, but they’re quite general, and focus on high-level topics.

So, DailyJS.com was born. Check it out for regular Javascript-related code, tips and news. It might not turn out to actually be updated daily, but we’ll try to keep posts coming fairly frequently …it will certainly be available daily, anyway! :)

If you want to get involved with contributing to, or sponsoring, DailyJS please get in touch.

Using a different Couch DB for each web-request with CouchRest

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 19:45:00 +0000

If data for each different account in your web application is stored in a separate CouchDB database, you need a way to tell your web app which database to use for that request.

Here’s solution using CouchRest and Ruby, based on a discussion from the CouchRest Google Group.

class RequestSpecificDocument < CouchRest::ExtendedDocument
  def self.database
    Thread.current[:request_db]
  end
end

All models which need to use the request-specific database should derive from this:

class Article < RequestSpecificDocument
  # normal stuff for your CouchRest document here.
end

So in your application controller (if you’re using Rails), you might add a before_filter which does something like this:

def set_database
  # determine the database_name from the host, url or whatever. 
  svr = CouchRest::Server.new("http://127.0.0.1:5984")
  couch_db = CouchRest::Database.new(svr, database_name)        
  Thread.current[:request_db] = couch_db
end

Stardotstar blog article: Relax, Stop worrying about the structure of your data

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 11:25:00 +0000

I’ve been working as a Ruby developer with Manchester digital agency, Stardotstar, for a few months now. Last week, I wrote my first post on the new Stardotstar blog:

When thinking about web application design, it doesn’t take long before the realisation hits you: to achieve any kind of efficiency you need to ignore or abuse key principles of relational database design, employing strategies such as sharding your information across multiple databases, abandoning the use of transactions, and the wholesale denormalisation of data…

Read the full article: Relax: Stop worrying about the structure of your data

Blink #3 - 24th October 2009

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 11:38:00 +0100

It’s been a while since my last link-blog entry, so this will be quite a big list!

Ruby

Mustache – for logic-free views in your Ruby web apps
Watchr – a replacement for autotest
New Thoughtbot-designed Gemcutter site launched
Getting ImageMagick and Passenger to play nicely together on OS X
MacRuby approaching a Milestone – Blog post by Matt Aimonetti.
Loofah – HTML sanitizer based on Nokogiri.
Old, but still neat and useful: Subdomain routing in rails
Tilt – a generic interface to various Ruby templating engines.
Riot – A fast unit test framework for Ruby
Ruby code-beautifier TextMate Bundle

General Web/Software

Google ChromeFrame for sabotaging IE (this feels like old news now!)
We are colorblind. About 8% of the male population has some sort of color blindness (like me). The patterns and examples on this site help you create websites that we color blind can use without problems
Pimpin’ (Software Projects) Ain’t Easy – Great marketing-software-for-non-marketers presentation by Amy Hoy
There’s only Metadata and URLS – Interesting blog post by Tom Scott.

Git

Github moves to rackspace and ditches gem building
Tips from @Cauis on .gitignore

CouchDB

Why CouchDB is the filesystem for the Web
CouchDB goes beta!
Mozilla Raindrop – a messaging system built on CouchDB
Some CouchDB performance tips from Till Klampaeckel

Swirrl linked data consultancy

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 19:39:00 +0100

From the Swirrl Blog ...

Alongside developing our online database application, we spend time talking to our users and potential users about how they can manage their data. As well as being useful to them (we hope!) this helps us understand the range of problems people are facing and gets us thinking about the kinds of solution that are needed, helping us set the future direction of our software tools. Because this seems to be a useful activity all round, we’re now putting a bit more emphasis on it and making it more widely known that this is a service we offer. So we’ve put up a new services page on our website to give some more details.

Read the full article here.

Blink #2 - 21st September 2009

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 20:34:00 +0100

My second installment of “interesting” links.

HTML 5 redefines ‘footer’ element
Couch DBX – A quick way to get CouchDB running on your Mac.
iStat Menus 2.0 – A Snow Leopard compatible verison of iStat Menus
User-editable Liquid templates in the database
Hosting a blog on Jekyll and Github
VirtualBox on a Mac for IE testing
Ruby Version Manager Easy installation and switching between available Ruby versions, without messing up your current Ruby install
Coulda – shoulda and cucumber’s love child
The Ultimate IE6 Cheatsheet – How To Fix 25+ Internet Explorer 6 Bugs
FriendlyId is the “Swiss Army bulldozer” of slugging and permalink plugins for Ruby on Rails.
Cutting out the middle-man with Sammy.js – Javascript MVC with CouchDB

5 Ruby-related Blogs for September

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 21:40:00 +0100

Another set of Ruby blogs…

Caius Theory – Blog from Caius Durling, Ruby developer and Brightbox employee (who I met at last month’s NWRUG).
HiveLogic – Dan Benjamin’s blog. Not 100% Ruby, but some really great stuff crops up now and then (notably his instructions for compiling Ruby on Mac OS X, etc.).
Mendable – Some interesting posts from a seemingly anonymous UK-based Rails developer! Who are you!?
Jason Seifer – Personal blog of the RailsEnvy podcaster.
Ruby Learning – A blog focused on learning about Ruby, by Satish Talim.

Please also check out June’s, July’s and August’s previous installments.

Blink #1 - The first in a series of Link-Blogging posts

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 21:10:00 +0100

In the course of my daily work, I come across loads of useful or interesting links, but often I don’t have time for a full-length blog post about them. (In many cases, others have already written things up better than I could have anyway).

Some of the stuff I encounter I might tweet, or email to friends and colleagues, but many get lost and forgotten along the way. So, I’ve decided to produce a series of link-blogging posts… hence the name blink: a cunning portmanteau of blog and link. :)

Without further ado, here’s my first bunch of (possibly) interesting links:

Render alternate IE6 layouts in only CSS
How to shush git’s patronising push warning
Yehuda Katz on How to Build Sinatra on Rails 3
Bartender – a RailsRumble entry by some NWRUG guys
CouchDBX – a quick way to get CouchDB up and running on your Mac
Getting Vodafone Mobile Connect working on Snow Leopard
Sketches – edit Ruby in your favourite editor, but get it reloaded in IRB.
Pedant – an annoying Ruby library.
Rush – a replacement for the unix shell (bash, zsh, etc) which uses pure Ruby syntax

Snow Leopard Ruby Development Environment Checklist / Gotchas

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 16:22:00 +0100

I’m probably a bit late to the party with this article, but I’m a bit of a chicken so I thought I’d wait for the dust to settle a bit before installing Snow Leopard on the MacBook Pro I use for Ruby development.

Matt Aimonetti suggested on the official Rails blog that upgrading your Ruby development environment from Leopard will work fine, albeit with a fair bit of fiddling afterwards. Given that the upgrade isn’t completely seamless for Rubyists (and being the OCD sufferer that I am), I opted for a clean re-install of everything.

I’m not going to give a full set of instructions here, as that’s already been done elsewhere by people like Dan Benjamin and Mike Gunderloy. Here’s my checklist of tasks to get your Ruby environment up and running as quickly as possible.

Checklist

Install Xcode from the Snow Leopard Disc.
Install Textmate, or your text editor of choice. This is useful for editing environment files during the install process.
Install MySQL using a pre-built 64-bit package (you probably want version 5.0 or 5.1).
Install Swoon’s 64-bit SnowLeopard MySQL pref pane
Compile Ruby, Gems and Rails.
Download and install Macports version 1.8.0.
Install any ports you need, such as ImageMagick, FreeImage

Install the MySQL gem with

sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64" gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config

Install any other gems you need (capistrano, passenger, mongrel, image_science, rmagick, RedCloth etc.)
Compile Git.
Sort out your github keys.
Install the Snow Leopard Passenger pref pane.

Gotchas

Most things went pretty smoothly for me. The only real problem I had was that Snow Leopard doesn’t come with Java 1.4.2, which SecureTrading (Swirrl’s payment processor) requires for access to its API. Here’s how I installed this version of Java:

mkdir ~/src
cd ~/src
curl -O http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/isdal/snow_leopard_workaround/java.1.4.2-leopard.tar.gz
tar -xvzf java.1.4.2-leopard.tar.gz
sudo mv 1.4.2 /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.4.2-leopard
cd /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/
sudo ln -s 1.4.2-leopard 1.4.2

5 Ruby-related Blogs for August

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 20:32:00 +0100

Here’s your monthly dose of Ruby Blogs:

Lindsay Holmwood – Web developer, sys-admin and conference speaker (who I recenty met at Rails Underground).
has_many :bugs, :through => :rails – A blog by London-based Rails core member, Pratik Naik.
Will’s web miscellany – Thoughts from Will Jessop: EngineYard employee and organiser of the North West (England) Ruby Group.
A view from afar – Ashley Moran’s personal blog (Ruby developer, Paleo eater and all-round nice-guy).
Tekin – a blog by talented British Rails freelancer, Tekin Suleyman.

See June and July’s posts for previous installments.