Since we are migrating from our homegrown mixins.sass and helpers.sass to Compass, here is a list of all the mixins provided by Compass.

Responsive elements makes it possible for any element to adapt and respond to the area they occupy.

This is different from media queries which always refer to the screen width, not the element's width.

dusen 0.4.8 and edge_rider 0.2.3 no longer depend on Rails (they still depend on ActiveRecord). That means you can use them e.g. with Sinatra.

Did you know you can color your line-throughs or underline, or make them wavy like spell-checkers do?

Awesome slide deck about taking liberties with design requirements in order to keep the CSS simple.

With Rails 4, Concerns have become the “official” solution to the big-models problem. However, there’s a fair amount of controversy about this topic in the community. Not everyone is convinced that Concerns are the “right“ solution to the problem of AR models becoming too big.

In this talk we will see what Rails Concerns are and how can we use them to keep our models fit. More interestingly, we’ll discuss the trade-offs of this technique, the different views in the community and a couple of alternatives.

Long list of fonts suitable for coding. With screenshots.

We’ve been working on one of our first Angular projects with a Rails backend. It’s been a great experience. I wanted to share a few things we learned that we hope are helpful to others building Angular on Rails apps.

Do not use .rvmrc files to specify Ruby version and gemset configuration any longer, it's deprecated and not considered by other Ruby version managers such as rbenv.

If you want to migrate an existing .rvmrc you can use rvm rvmrc to .ruby-version.
Put gemset specification into .ruby-gemset.

Creating the .ruby-version file on your own, just make a file containing e.g.

1.8.7

Attention: Don't clutter other developers rvms with several unecessary ruby patch levels

When you use the rvm command

rvm --ruby-version use 1....

For all late night coders:

The program "redshift" changes your monitors' white balance according to your position on the planet and your local time. This is supposed to put less strain on your eyeballs than staring at a "daylight white" screen all day and night.
The program is in the Ubuntu repositories, so a simple "sudo apt-get install gtk-redshift" transfers it onto your hard drive.

I find the effect rather pleasing and so I have set the following alias on my computer:

alias rdshft='gtk-redshift -l 48.3714407:10.8982552 -t 6500:4200 &'...

After running bundler / gem install I could not load nokogiri lately. It died with cannot load such file -- nokogiri/nokogiri.
This is not a problem of the gem but is due to a broken native extensions installation routine.

When installing nokogiri manually and with verbose output by using gem install -V nokogiri -v 1.5.6, you can see the problem scrolling by when the native extension is built:

/usr/bin//install -c -m 0755 nokogiri.so /home/thomas/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p247/gems/nokogiri-1.5.6/lib/home/thomas/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.0.0-p...

We sometimes send calender data or tasks using iCalendar (ICS) via eMail as specified in RFC 5545.

Recently, a customer noticed that Outlook automatically moved eMails containing such ICS data to deleted items folder and shows the events as tentative on calendar.
This problem is reported on TechNet, for example.

It ...

Preface: Normally, you would not need this in integrations tests (probably that's why it is so hard to achieve), because it is no actual "integration testing". If you use this step, know what you are doing.

Destroying a record with Capybara is not as easy as calling visit user_path(user, method: :delete), because RackTest's visit can only perform GET requests.

With this step you can destroy a records using either Selenium or RackTest. Ex...

bundle open BUNDLED_GEM will open the BUNDLED_GEM's source code in your default editor.

The translation method translate and its alias t have bang brothers: translate! and t!. They will raise I18n::MissingTranslationData on a missing translation instead of printing a string like translation missing: de.custom.failure.

To turn on raising globally, you need to replace the default exception handler. The attached initializer makes I18n just raise any exception (in a development or test environment).

Bundler 1.4.0 (still beta) can install gems in parallel, making a run of bundle install much faster.

Consul 0.10.0 now allows multiple power mappings for nested resources.

When using nested resources you probably want two power
checks and method mappings: One for the parent resource, another for the child resource.

Say you have the following routes:

resources :clients do
  resources :notes
end

And the following power definitions:

class Power
  ...

  power :clients do
    Client.active if si...

When two elements with display: inline-block are sitting next to each other, whitespace between becomes a space character.

Solutions, in decreasing order of awesomeness:

1. Don't have whitespace between two elements! See Whitespace Removal in Haml if you're using Haml.
2. Don't use inline-block. Use floating elements instead (don't forget to clear them!).
3. Try to compensate for the space with a negative margin. Unfortunately you will never be able to negate ...

A list of FontAwesome icons in the form of copyable Unicode characters or HTML entities.

You might prefer to use FontAwesome by simply typing out these characters instead of using CSS classes. Of course you need to then give the containing element as style:

font-family: FontAwesome

In order to keep the controllers directory tidy, we recently started to namespace controllers. With the :controller option you can tell Rails which controller to use for a path or resource. For nested resources, Rails will determine the view path from this option, too.

That means the following code in routes.rb …

resources :users do
  resource :profile, controller: 'users/profiles' #[1]
end

… makes Rails expect the following directory structure:

app/
  controllers/
    users/
      profiles_controller.rb
    users_control...

When you're writing migrations that do more than changing tables (like, modify many records) you may want some output. In Rails > 3.1 you have two methods at hand: announce and say_with_time.

In the migration:

class AddUserToken < ActiveRecord::Migration

  class User < ActiveRecod::Base; end

  def up
    add_column :users, :token, :string
    
    announce "now generating tokens"
    User.find_in_batches do |users|
      say_with_time "For users ##{users.first.id} to ##{users.last.id}" do
        users.each do |user|
        ...

CSS3 comes with new unit rem. It works like em but it is always relative to the <html> element instead of the parent element.

rem units are supported by all browsers and IE9+.

An opinion how to implement BEM. I don't agree with all of Nico's choices, but I applaud his approach to compile a simple and short list of rules.