Prototype

Ruby

Rails

Any gem

Gem to provide nice looking urls ("/blog/the-greatest-bug-i-never-fixed"). If you don't need anything too special (like i18n for the urls) it works as a drop-in-replacement. It basically overwrites #to_param to return the slug, and .find to search by the slug.

Make sure, everywhere you build paths, you use model_path(:id => model) instead of model_path(:id => model.id). You also need to adapt all code using something like .find_by_id. The regular .find is fine.

See the github README for installation instructions.

Don't forget ...

This project is (or will be) a best effort semi-static verifier for your Ruby on Rails projects. Delivered as a Ruby gem it provides a shell command task "railscheck" that you can run against your Rails projects to test for a number of typical bugs, potential problems and inconsistencies.

Web 2.0 sites have lots of tiny javascript/css files, which causes one extra round trip per file to the server and back! This is bad! Bundle-fu throws it all up into a big package and sends it out all at once.

The rubyforge gems model may not be perfect, but damnit people, when there’s a gem update I know that it has actually been tested somewhat and it’s not just whatever random point HEAD happens to be at, at that point in time, by some random Joe who just bought TextMate.

This gem allows you to access the content of

If you’re working on some cool ruby console-based application or just want to add a little style to your script here is a nice gem for you. It’s called Rainbow and it extends ruby String class adding methods to wrap the string with ANSI escape codes.

Metric_fu is a set of rake tasks that make it easy to generate metrics reports. It uses Saikuro, Flog, Flay, Rcov, Reek, Roodi, Subversion, Git, and Rails built-in stats task to create a series of reports. It's designed to integrate easily with CruiseControl.rb by placing files in the Custom Build Artifacts folder.

I just released a gem to find image dimensions and type information fast.

Amidst my 400 unread Boing Boing links are probably ten or fifteen that are probably real gems. But I’ll never know and Boing Boing sure as hell isn’t going to help me out.

WTF GitHub??

If we want mobile applications to stay around as a sustainable business, we need to be more honest about the strengths and weaknesses of a touchscreen UI, rather than salivating about an imaginary realm of unnamed possibilities.

Though we ended up switching to what I consider to be a technically superior product based on simplicity, we arrived there because of poor community interaction on the part of the Bundler developers.

Unfortunately vanilla Ruby modules lack support for many idioms popular in modern Ruby. Most importantly, we have become accustomed to composing our classes with meta-programming macros such as has_many, validates_presence_of or after_save. And modules weren't built with macros in mind.

I love Cucumber, but I hate writing step definitions. They are ugly, awkward to write and very, very boring: Most step defintions merely create objects for a scenario to chew on.

Pretty print your Ruby objects with style -- in full color and with proper indentation

When I realized what had gone wrong, the light almost blinded me.

But then there are those posts where the author pastes 10 pages of confused code with no context whatsoever and then demands to know why they're getting funny errors. I find this sort of behaviour offensive to all the people who are basically dealing out free support. I'd rather spend my time helping people who actually give a damn.

Where there was once a consistent API to manipulate and hook into the lifecycle of a persistent object, plugins must now perform very careful checks whether an object supports more advanced traits like transactions, observers or dirty attribute tracking.