Test that a select option is selected with Cucumber

Checks whether a form dropdown has a preselected value in HTML using Cucumber step definitions for Capybara or Webrat.

Useful collection of Sass mixins

Sass mixins for cross-browser styling reduce code and enable CSS3PIE support in Internet Explorer 8 and earlier.

Enable SSL for Pivotal Tracker

You should never transmit sensitive data without encryption. Being logged in somewhere constitutes transmitting sensitive data.

For Pivotal Tracker:

  • Make sure you set "Always Use HTTPS" under "My Profile".
  • As you can not rely on every member of a project to have this enabled, you should also tick "Use HTTPS" on the settings page of each project.

Trigger an event with Javascript

Synthetic DOM events are awkward across browsers, especially for clicks and custom events. jQuery, Prototype, and Element.fire() offer simpler ways to simulate them.

kangax's protolicious - GitHub

Added utility methods for the Prototype Javascript framework.

Cross-browser height and line-height

Odd line-height values render inconsistently across major browsers; using even values and a Sass mixin helps keep block element sizing stable.

Retrieve the total number of records when paginating with will_paginate

will_paginate pagination can hide the full result size; total_entries returns the pre-pagination record count, but may require a slow second query.

Keep Pidgin up to date

If your pidgin IM fails to connect to ICQ, you may need to update it. The ubuntu default sources are usually outdated.

Just follow the instructions 1-4 and 1-3 on the page linked below.

Making SSL connection work

If you can not connect using SSL, open up the account settings and enable "clientLogin". Also, your Server should be set to slogin.icq.com.

Making AJAX Applications Crawlable

This document describes an agreement between web servers and search engine crawlers that allows for dynamically created content to be visible to crawlers. Google currently supports this agreement. The hope is that other search engines will also adopt this proposal.

Problems with Rails 3 Remote Links and Forms Using jQuery .live() in IE

There is a problem with AJAX response handling for Rails 3 remote links and forms in Internet Explorer. This problem affects applications still using jQuery 1.4.2.

Git: Stash unstaged changes

Stash only unstaged changes in Git with git stash -k; use -u to include new files, and keep the working tree clean before git stash pop.

Bookmarklet to generate a commit message with Pivotal Tracker story ID and title

Generate commit messages from selected Pivotal Tracker stories with ID and title for traceable git history.

scribd's flash_heed at master - GitHub

Fixes all Flash elements on a page so that they heed DOM stacking order

Change the id of an ActiveRecord record

Changing an ActiveRecord record’s primary key is usually unsafe, but a direct update_all can replace one id with another when it is unavoidable.

Migrate or revert only some migrations

Selective Rails migrations can be moved up, down, redone, or targeted by version instead of processing the full sequence.

Aliases for routes

The following initializer provides an :alias => "my_route_name" option to restful routes in your route.rb. This simply makes the same route also available under a different ..._path / ..._url helpers.

For example,

map.resources :notes, :alias => :snippets

Gives you

notes_path, notes_url, new_note_path... #as always
snippets_path, snippets_url, new_snippet_path... #from the alias

Put this into an initializer:

Git: "Interactive reverts"

Reverting only selected changes from one or more commits can be done interactively by staging parts of the diff and discarding the rest.

Git diff a file with another revision (or branch)

Compare one file against another commit or branch to inspect changes without reviewing the entire repository.

Install a specific version of a gem

Pinning a gem version avoids accidental upgrades and keeps installs reproducible. gem install supports exact version selection with --version or -v.

Prevent Bundler from downloading the internet

As a user of Bundler you have spent significant time looking at this message:

Fetching source index for http://rubygems.org/

To make Bundler skip this index update and only use installed gems, you can use the --local option:

bundle install --local

Unfortunately this does not work with bundle update.

It is said that Bundler 1.1 will use a feature of Rubygems.org that allows partial index updates. Hopefully the wh...

Generate a Unicode nonbreaking space in Ruby

Regular spaces and non-breaking spaces look alike; a small Ruby helper can return the Unicode nonbreaking space instead of using HTML entities or raw character codes.

Defining and using sub-classes with modularity

Nested classes in modular traits can lose their original namespace, breaking references from class methods and other code. Using class self::Bar preserves the enclosing class name.

Install gems for all bundled projects

Batch-installs Ruby gems for every project in a directory, speeding up setup on a new system; native extensions still fail without required system dependencies.

Select a random table row with ActiveRecord

Randomly selecting a database row with ActiveRecord is possible, but ORDER BY RAND() scales poorly and can overload large tables.