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My Rails Edge Wrap-up

So, over the last few days I had the opportunity to be a speaker for The Rails Edge held in Denver, CO (incidently, just down the road a bit). The Rails Edge is a unique series of Rails-related conferences held by The Pragmatic Studio that will be held regionally across the US. What makes them unique is their format– open, friendly, and focused on up-to-date Rails information. The way I wish all conferences were.

The Rails Edge starting

So, tomorrow The Rails Edge starts up.

As I get ready to hop into my car and drive the scant 30 minutes it will take to reach the venue (I’m lucky– this one is right in my neighborhood), I can’t help but be excited. I love conferences. They’re exhausting, but you can’t beat the experience of being at a location with so many people with the same passion for development.

TextMate goes spooky

Definitely the biggest surprise from today’s TextMate update was the new, spooky, and– I’m guessing–temporary– change of icons. I’ve gotten used to Google’s holiday theming, but this is probably the first time I’ve had a desktop app get festive on me.

Pretty neat, I think. I wonder what they have in store for Christmas.

Rtex moved to RubyForge

The Rtex Plugin (LaTeX view engine for Rails) has moved to it’s own RubyForge project.

The subversion repository is now at svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/rtex/trunk. I’m be making some non-backwards-compatible modifications to the way the plugin is configured during the next few days, but the current stable release will always be available at tt>svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/rtex/tags/legacy.

Ruby Central Redesign

Recently, I’ve been working with the directors at Ruby Central on a new design for their website, now running on top of Radiant.

At RubyConf, the new design was released. It’s a simple, clean design sporting their new logo (also by yours truly).

The theme goes official

I’m happy to announce that my RubyForge theme, after flying under the radar for some time now, has been adopted as the official, default theme. Many thanks to RubyCentral and the RubyForge team for their support during the design.

If you run into any problems with the theme, please contact me so that I can address them.

Onward Hoe!

This is just a quick followup to latest release notice.

I used Hoe to release the paginator files… and I have to say that’s the easiest, least painful release I’ve ever done. As Ryan said at the conference, it makes it easy enough to release more often, and that is spectacular!

Paginator Released

Writing paginators sucks, and it’s something that we get stuck with doing from time to time. Deceptively simple, they can be pretty tedious to write– and they’re definitely not the type of code that makes you go, “Wow, that’s just cool!” I mean, comeon… this isn’t rocket science, it’s just boring.

Rake Shame

If you’ve ever been working on a Rails application (or any application, for that matter) and found yourself stupidly slipping in your testing, I have just the tool for you.

Using rake and rubyosa, you can now automatically post your Code to Test Ratio as your iChat status message– meaning you can now use shame and self- humiliation to keep you motivated.

Simple Complexity

Rails is simple– or complex– depending on how you look at it. There’s a lot of complexity under the covers that makes creating applications simple. This simplicity can be a bit misleading; surely something everyone says is easy to use can’t solve complex problems or cater to rich domains, right?

While it’s true that Rails can’t simplify the problems and concerns that exist in a rich domain, it can make them easier to deal with. The fact you have a good, sturdy walking stick doesn’t make the mountain any shorter, it just makes it less exhausting.

Rails Fire

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