The ability to update and close Trac tickets associated with a given repo whenever a commit is made to that repo is pretty handy. No more committing, going to the Trac site, updating. I found several guides on setting this up floating around, this one being the most informative.

Rails’ script/console makes it easy to fetch, view and edit your database records. But can you edit those records as quickly as you edit code in your text editor? Riiight, like editing our database records in an editor is gonna happen? It already has.

A Rails FormBuilder with semantically rich and accessible markup.

I did want to drop a quick picture here of their trial usage dialog that pops up as it’s a thing of beauty in a piece of software that usually is seen as highly unimportant, yet is the first thing you encounter when taking commercial software for a spin.

In this article we’ve listed 7 fresh and simple tools for cross-browser compatibility testing, tools that actually make this stuff pretty easy. Not only that, but every single one of these tools can be used for free.

Reads Active Record's validations and makes them available to live client side javascript

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.

I just finished reviewing Rails 2.3 Nested Object Forms. While a very nice and “magical” feature, I’ve got to admit that I’m really not that crazy about how it works.

There are a bunch of basic functional elements to building out a popular Rails app that I've never really seen explained in one place, but we had to learn the hard way while building Posterous.

theman is a super simple "framework" that uses god/rufus-scheduler to create long running workers that do things at certain times.

A couple of Railsconfs ago, Courtenay and I did indeed discuss

JSMin is a filter which removes comments and unnecessary whitespace from JavaScript files. It typically reduces filesize by half, resulting in faster downloads. It also encourages a more expressive programming style because it eliminates the download cost of clean, literate self-documentation.

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.

If you know Ruby and you want to write applications for Mac OS X or the iPhone, you’re in a great place to start! This concise and content-packed 80-minute screencast will teach you what you need to know to start programming in Objective-C.

ObjectiveResource is an Objective-C port of Ruby on Rails' ActiveResource. It provides a way to serialize objects to and from Rails' standard RESTful web-services (via XML or JSON) and handles much of the complexity involved with invoking web-services of any language from the iPhone.

Squirrel is an enhancement for ActiveRecord’s find method that allows programmers to query the database using a more Rubyish syntax.

Learn everything you need to know about Scaling your Rails app through 13 informative Screencasts produced by Gregg Pollack with the support of New Relic.

Noel Rappin discusses ways to keep up with edge Rails.

Pocket Informant for the iPhone doesn't just simply let you view your daily events but lets you really work with them. So many calendar or task applications are either too hard to use or too simple to be useful. Pocket Informant takes eight years of mobile experience and brings a fresh perspective to the iPhone user.

Until some future version of HTML gives us new native controls to use in a browser, at Google, we’ve been playing and experimenting with controls we call “custom buttons” in our apps (among other custom controls).

i keep looking for ways to help people 'get' REST. not URLs or HTTP Methods; but REST itself - in a nutshell. so here's a new angle i've started playing with: "REST Upside Down."

Once you start introducing partial updates, you open yourself for caching problems. doing partial updates means all cached copies of the original resource are now invalid.