Articles

Uploadify and Rails 2.3

A few weeks back we (Steve and I) added multiple asset upload to Harmony using Uploadify. If you are thinking that sounds easy, you would be sorely mistaken. Uploadify uses flash to send the files to Rails. This isn’t a big deal except that we are using cookie sessions on Harmony and flash wasn’t sending the session information with the files, so to Rails the files appeared as unauthenticated.

Getting Started With MongoMapper and Rails

Warning: This is currently out of date as it was based on an older version of MongoMapper.

I have had a few requests for tips on getting started with MongoDB and Rails so I thought I would drop some quick knowledge. It is actually really easy to get going, but Rails always does everything for you so when something comes along that doesn’t, you sometimes feel lost.

MongoMapper Indy.rb Presentation

Last Wednesday I was invited to present on MongoDB and MongoMapper at the Indianapolis ruby group. I promised them I would post the slides so they could get to the links and such.

Slides

The slides are very similar to my Grand Rapids presentation on MongoDB. but the actual talk was different.

Patterns Are Not Scary: Method Missing Proxy

Method missing proxy? Ooooh! Sounds scary, right? I got news for you Walter Cronkite, it’s not. Lets start with the definition of proxy, according to Wikipedia.

Definition

A proxy, in its most general form, is a class functioning as an interface to something else.

More MongoMapper Awesomeness

September was a month of craziness and for the first month in quite a while I did not post here. I promise it hurt me as much as it hurt you. In an effort to get back in the rhythm, I am going to start with an easy article. MongoMapper has been getting a lot of love lately and I thought I would mention some of the awesomeness.

Lookin' on Up...To the East Side

I am currently reading the Well-Grounded Rubyist by David Black. It is a great book and reading it reminds me of things I was confused on when I started in Ruby. One of those things was the path Ruby uses to figure out which method to call when inheritance and mixins are in play.

As I read it last night, I thought I should post about it, so here it goes. Let’s start with a simple class.

You're An Idiot For Not Using Heroku

It is true. You are. Go try it now. That is an order. I can wait for you to come back and finish reading this post. I could end the post now, but I suppose I’ll go on and tell you a bit about my experience with Heroku yesterday.

Know When to Fold 'Em

I have a lot of projects. Each time I feel pain or inspiration, I’ll whip together a new library and release it as a gem. It is fun and I love it. It is even more fun when people come along and use those projects to do cool stuff. This in turn, inspires me to write more code and release more projects. It is a vicious cycle.

Config So Simple Your Mama Could Use It

Tonight, Kastner asked me if I had anything to do some simple configuration for something he was working on. I’ve got a simple module and yaml file that I’ve been using so I gist’d it. It then occurred to me that I might as well share it here too.

The Yaml

Below is an example of the yaml file. Basically, I setup some defaults and then customize each environment as needed.

Twizzle Your Deplizzles

Steve and I have a Twitter account that we send all our commits to. It is all handled by Github and both of us find it really handy. Rain or shine, we get commit updates on our phone which is great for staying in the loop.

For a little while now, I’ve been wanting to add deploy notices to this twitter account and tonight I finally got around to it. It was pretty easy, but I’ll post the code here to save others time. I went the no dependencies route (even though I created the Twitter gem).

RicRoberts | Rails Fire

RicRoberts

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Ruby on Rails developer and founder of swirrl.com