When uploading images, adding more than one process to a version can cause MiniMagick to run multiple commands. In order to have all processing done in one mogrify system call, you'll need to define only one process that combines all options you'd like to pass in.

When you are using the #selector_for helper in Cucumber steps, as e.g. Spreewald does, the following snippet will save you typing. It recognizes a prose BEM-style selector and maps it to the corresponding BEM class.

For a variation on this idea, see An auto-mapper for ARIA labels and BEM classes in Cucumber selectors.

Examples

"the main menu" -> '.main-menu'
"the item box's header" -> '.item-box--header'

Here are some examples of steps (using Spreewald, too):

T...

The CSS property z-index is not as global as you might think. Actually, it is scoped to a so-called "stacking context". z-indexes only have meaning within their stacking context, while stacking contexts are treated as a single unit in their parent stacking context. This means indices like 99999 should never actually be needed.

Creating a new stacking context

In order to create a stacking context with the least possible side effects, use the isolation property on an...

If you get this error (probably because you want to load some modules):

# modprobe xt_comment
FATAL: Could not load /lib/modules/3.2.0-40-generic/modules.dep: No such file or directory

The reason could be that apt-get autoremove already removed /lib/modules/.../modules.dep even if you still using this kernel version:

# uname -r
3.2.0-40-generic
# ls -l /lib/modules/
total 24
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Oct 22 17:05 3.2.0-68-generic
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Jan  7 16:38 3.2.0-69-generic
drwxr-...

Jonas Nicklas, the author of Carrierwave and Capybara, has released Refile, a gem for handling file uploads in Rails. It handles direct uploads (also direct uploads to Amazon S3) better than Carrierwave.

The story and reasoning behind some of the decisions in Refile, and how it's different from Carrierwave, by the author himself, is a good read before deciding which way you'll go.

Big Caveat: Refile only stores the original image and r...

ImageMagick takes a string with several options when cropping an image. See the command line options for how to provide the expected image geometry for details.

Note that ImageMagick tends to preserve the original aspect ratio of the source image automatically.

Examples:

• crop 200x200 means Maximum values of height and width given, aspect ratio preserved.
• crop 200x200! means Width and height emphatically given, original aspect ratio ignored.

Capybara-screenshot can automatically save screenshots and the HTML for failed Capybara tests in Cucumber, RSpec or Minitest.

Requires Capybara-Webkit, Selenium or poltergeist for making screenshots. Screenshots are saved into $APPLICATION_ROOT/tmp/capybara.

Manually saving a page

Additionally you can trigger the same behavior manually from the test using Capybara::Session#save_and_open_page and [...

Responsive Lightbox JavaScript that just works.

You can use it for single images or a gallery. Animations are optional.

When accepting GIF images, you will also accept animated GIFs. Resizing them can be a time-consuming task and will block a Rails worker until the image is processed.

Save yourself that trouble, and simply tell ImageMagick to drop any frames but the first one.

Add the following to your uploader class:

process :remove_animation

private

def remove_animation
  if content_type == 'image/gif'
    manipulate! { |image| image.collapse! }
  end
end

You may also define that process for specific versions only (e.g. only for thum...

A set of javascript tools for working with files.

It offers different kinds of things:

• A cross-browser JS API to work with File objects.
• Image helper methods, like rotating images, or generating thumbnails in the browser (because you don't want your browser to scale tons of 20MB-JPEGs just for an upload preview)
• Webcam access
• Uploads

When HTML5 support is unavailable, it uses Flash polyfills.

Check out the documentation and demos at their GitHub page.

To install via bower, simply add the `...

The benefit of the Rails asset pipeline is that it compiles your stylesheets and javascripts to a single file, respectively. However, the consequences are startling if you don't understand them. Among others, the raw asset pipeline requires you to have all your asset libraries in the same folder, which quickly becomes confusing as your set of assets grows. To overcome this, we have two different solutions.

Custom solution

We are using a custom workaround to keep library files apart in their own directories. To avoid b...

The Rails asset pipeline improves delivery of application assets (javascripts, stylesheets, images, fonts). Here are some basic facts about its inner workings.

No magic

Manifests are the handle on your assets:

app/assets/stylesheets/application.css # use via: stylesheet_link_tag 'application'

The asset pipeline only considers files you explicitly require within your manifest files. The most common directives used in manifests are require some/file and require_tree some/directory. Paths may be **relative to the current director...

To fix this:

• Right-click on the frame
• Select Frame...
• Open Background
• Set As to "Color"
• Set the background color to "No fill"

The Angular ngSrc directive serves to properly set an image src via Angular. As anything in Angular, it updates the image as soon as the contained Angular expression changes. However, when the ng-src attribute is empty, Angular will not empty the src attribute. To overcome this, use the trick below.

<img ng-src="{{ element.image || '//:0' }}" />

Background

The ngSrc directive explicitly returns when the attribute value is falsy. As a workaround, set a "blank" image src when the image is empty. As [somebody ...

Raphaël is a small JavaScript library that should simplify your work with vector graphics on the web. If you want to create your own specific chart or image crop and rotate widget, for example, you can achieve it simply and easily with this library.

A great two-part article about various hacks you can use to create great-looking screen designers when you're not a designer.

Part 1 contains:

• Light comes from the sky
• Black and white first
• Double your whitespace

Part 2 contains:

• Learn the methods of overlaying text on images
• Make text pop— and un-pop
• Only use good fonts
• Steal like an artist

The asset pipeline changes the paths of CSS files during precompilation. This opens a world of pain when CSS files reference images (like jQuery UI) or fonts (like webfont kits from Font Squirrel), since all those url(images/icon.png) will now point to a broken path.

In the past we have been using the vendor/asset-libs folder ...

Modern browsers natively suppport file pickers that allow the user to choose multiple files at once. To activate this feature, set the multiple attribute:

<input type="file" name="images[]" multiple />

Or in a Rails view:

<%= file_field_tag "images[]", multiple: true %>

This works in IE10+.

Make sure that the field name ends in [] so your server-side code will parse the incoming files into an array. Obviously this naming convention is not compatible with default Rails nested attribute setters, so you'll need to write a form ...

To avoid n+1 queries, you want to eager-load associated records if you know you need to access them later on.

The Rails docs say:

Eager loading is supported with polymorphic associations.

This is true, but has some caveats.

Example

Consider the following models:

class Image < ActiveRecord::Base; end

class Video < ActiveRecord::Base; end

class PageVersion < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :primary_medium, polymorphic: true # may be Image or Video
end

class Page < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to ...

By default git diff highlights whole lines as changes.

To diff on a word-by-word basis you can say:

git diff --color-words

To diff on a character-by-character basis you can say:

git diff --color-words=.

It's like Paperclip or CarrierWave, but without any automagic integration.

What PDFKit is

• PDFKit converts a web page to a PDF document. It uses a Webkit engine under the hood.
• For you as a web developer this means you can keep using the technology you are familar with and don't need to learn LaTeX. All you need is a pretty print-stylesheet.

How to use it from your Rails application

• You can have PDFKit render a website by simply calling PDFKit.new('http://google.com').to_file('google.pdf'). You can then send the...

Inspiring collection of color tones.

Safari on iOS accepts an apple-touch-icon favicon that is used for stuff like desktop bookmarks. Always define a solid background color for them.

If you use PNGs with a transparent background, Safari will use just set a black background on your pretty icon. This is almost never what you want.
You can fix that by applying a white background via ImageMagick like this:

convert a...