Git’s distributed nature does not rely on central servers to host and broadcast your code. There’s more options available to you if for some reason your main server goes down, or perhaps when GitHub goes down.

After months of research, planning and development, we’re proud to announce the Rails Machine Managed Hosting plans, starting at $275/month. You can now get direct access to the same team of engineers and developers who have brought you reliable hosting for your Rails applications since 2006.

This has been a long time coming, and I'm very happy to finally be able to announce the first ever Golden Gate Ruby Conference, here in San Francisco on April 17 and 18. There's so much interest in Ruby here in SF, and tons of Ruby mojo too, so it's about time we had our own conference! We'll be bringing in some great speakers from all over so locals who don't get to travel to conferences can get exposed to stuff they can't usually see. And we'll also have some of our high-powered local talent showing off their stuff too.

Those of you following me on twitter already know that I’m learning Cucumber.

Traditionally I don’t test my views or controllers all that much. I know, I know, it’s heresy. But I’ve just never gotten much value from writing Rails functional tests nor integration tests.

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: