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The new version of Cobus Bester’s personal site FRESH01 sports...

Everything I Learned About Open Source Development I Learned From Indie Hip Hop Video Now Online

We’ve just released the video for Everything I Learned About Open Source Development I Learned From Indie Hip Hop from Aloha on Rails, in which Corey Donohoe talks about the striking similarities between open source hacking and indie hip hop. This was one of the most celebrated talks of the conference, we hope you enjoy it!

Coming very soon: The Rails Upgrade Handbook

I’ve been enjoying you guys’ feedback on my Rails 3 posts. I’ve gotten feedback both good and bad, and it’s been really helpful in the big project I’ve been working on, which I’m really glad to finally be able to talk about it a little bit. Most of the content I’ve posted about Rails 3 has been excerpted from my new eBook: The Rails 3 Upgrade Handbook.

The cover

Time.onrails.org is closing!

I just send an email to thousands of users to notify them that time.onrails.org is closing down. I don’t think many of these users are active but just in case I wanted everyone to be able to get their data out of the system if so they wished.

I will turn down the service on March 17th at 9pm.

Unit Testing JavaScript using Qunit . See live result and test code.

If you are in a hurry then take a look at these two links and you are done.

MongoTips: All Mongo, All The Time

So last night I realized that I really love MongoDB. I love it so much that I want everyone to be using it whenever it makes sense (which is quite often). I thought about what I could do to help get the word out more and starting a new site made the most sense (instead of flooding RailsTips with Mongo stuff).

MongoTips is a new blog dedicated to MongoDB news and information. I’ll be posting things there that we have learned building Harmony and anything I can find from the community.

Congratulations Are in Order!

Carl LercheNew Rails Core

Great Lakes Ruby Bash

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April 17th of this year, a lot of good people I know are throwing a conference for the Great Lakes region at Michigan State University (Go Irish!). They currently have a call for proposals open until February 28th.

I’m already on the docket and I have something awesome planned, so whether you want to talk or just attend, I would highly recommend keeping this conference on your radar.

Great Lakes Ruby Bash

The Great Lakes Ruby Bash is now accepting talk proposals. The conference will be held on Michigan State University’s campus in East Lansing, Michigan on Saturday, April 17th.

We’re looking for passionate speakers to give 25 and 40 minute presentations about their experiences with Ruby and related technologies. Our goal is to engage attendees and inspire them to create great software, empower users, and continue learning with others.

Smooth Devoperations: Deploying Rails 3 with Moonshine

Here at Rails Machine, we have written, on occasion, about

Benjamin Curtis | Rails Fire

Benjamin Curtis

Facebook Rails Integration with OAuth2

This is simply awesome.  Facebook launches a new API using OAuth2, making it much easier to integrate with Facebook from your Rails app, and Michael Bleigh quickly churns out a new oauth2 gem.

Testing an OAuth Provider in your Rails App

Recently I received a request from another B2B SaaS vendor to integrate with Catch the Best, so their users could pull their data from Catch the Best into this app. This is a classic use-case for OAuth, so I dove in to learning how to make my Rails app an OAuth provider. Well, thanks to the OAuth gem and the OAuth Rails plugin, it only took an hour or two to do.

Why Won’t FB.Connect.logoutAndRedirect work?

I was banging my head against a Facebook Connect problem with one of my clients’ Rails apps recently, and I thought I’d share a useful tidbit I gleaned from the experience, in case it can spare someone else the headache I had.

Hiring!

Well, I’ve put this off for as long as I could, but I think now is the time to make my first hire. I’m busy enough with client work and with my own projects that I need some help. So, if you or someone you know is looking for a part-time Rails job in Kirkland, WA, apply now! :)

Interested in Building a Shopify App?

In case you haven’t seen it yet, Shopify has a brilliant developer platform that makes it easy for developers to create Shopify add-ons that can be marketed to Shopify store owners. And now, for even more awesomeness, there’s the Shopify App Rails Kit that makes it incredibly easy to build an app to run on the Shopify platform.

3 years of freelancing fun

I realized a couple of days ago that it was January of 2007 when I dove into the crazy world of freelancing full-time. It has been quite an adventure. In that time I’ve worked on a number of fun projects with an amazing assortment of awesome clients, launched two different products (Catch the Best in 2007 and Rails Kits in 2008), and learned a whole lot about how to (and how not to) run a business. It’s been a blast.

Holiday Projects

For some reason I find myself starting new projects on holidays. Perhaps it’s mental decompression, or just an excuse to have some fun. Either way, today’s holiday project was a little smaller than usual—I’m already done!

It’s a tiny Sinatra app for allowing people to anonymously submit tickets to your Unfuddle account. You could use this for letting clients submit work requests, beta testers to submit bugs, or whatever.

Quick Tip: MongoMapper::DocumentNotFound

If you’d like to get a 404 response when you encounter a MongoMapper::DocumentNotFound error, which is the default response for ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound, simply toss this in your initializer where you set up your Mongo connection (I use config/initializers/mongo.rb):

ActionController::Base.rescue_responses[‘MongoMapper::DocumentNotFound’] = :not_found

Want to go to RubyConf?

If you’d like to go to RubyConf next week, but you don’t have a ticket, you’re in luck! Sadly, I can’t go, so I have a ticket available for sale for $250. Drop me a line at ben at this domain if you’re interested.

Update: Sold!

An EngineYard Cloud Gotcha

I’m still loving the EngineYard Cloud for my client deployments. I encountered one snag today, though, when cloning an environment for staging: Custom chef recipes do not get cloned along with the rest of the environment.

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