My blog had been running on an ancient web host account for years without incident, when one day, my mongrels collapsed. However, I was extremely busy, and even a little apathetic towards the site. The holiday break gave me a chance to move it the content over to a modern install of Mephisto. If you’re actually visiting the site, you’ll notice I even barreled through a new CSS setup with Blueprint as my wingman. However, I’m still missing some things:

I'm going to change the focus of this blog. Not that it ever really had much focus before, but it was called 'Rails Tales' and my plan was to talk about developing applications with Ruby on Rails. But lately, at Entertonement (where I'm a web developer), I've been more interested on understanding our users and decreasing bounce rate. This has revealed some interesting things that I want to

I’ve maintained a blog since sometime in May of 2005. As with many blogs, posting regularity varied. Sometimes it was daily, sometimes a month or two would go by with nothing new at all.

This is something different.

The content on the old site changed over time, just like it’s author. Interests come and go, technologies that were once shiny and new have lost some of their shine. I stopped writing short posts that were mostly links to other people’s content, and starting writing longer articles. I did some interviews, and a bunch of book reviews.

Let’s say you have a Ruby class with a method you’d like to wrap—for debugging or performance timing—and, since you don’t control where the class is instantiated (think overriding a method in Rails’ ActionPack), just creating a subclass and using super isn’t going to work.

Let’s take a look at two mixin patterns; one a ubiquitous naming hack and one a bit of esoteric Ruby inheritance trickery.

First, let’s set the scene. Let’s say we have a method, Widget#render_on: