When rendering a number, you want to pretty up the string coming from #to_s:

• Render 0.0 as 0
• Sometimes require a minimum number of digits after the decimal separator
• Change the decimal separator from . to , in some European countries
• Render a dash if the given amount is nil

The attached helper that does just that. Some usage examples with their resulting strings:

I encountered a bug in RSpec 1.x where stubbed class methods ("static methods") would not be unstubbed before the next example, causing it to fail. This behavior can come and go as you edit your specs, since this can change the order in which RSpec evaluates your .rb files.

I was not able to find a fix for this behavior. Calling #rspec_reset und #unstub!(:method) on the class after the example did not help. I know for sure that stubbing static methods has not been a problem in many other projects. I encountered the bug while working o...

This snippet makes links that refer to an anchor (like "<a href="#something">...</a>") scroll softly to it.\
In this example we only do it for links that also own a data-animate attribute.

$('a[href^="#"][data-animate]').live('click', function() {
  var hash = $(this).attr('href');
  var offset = $(hash).offset();
  if (offset) {
    $('html, body').animate({ scrollTop: offset.top }, 'slow');
    location.hash = hash;
    return false;
  }
});

Note that this could basically work for any element whos...

If you would like to enrich your website with semantic markup like contact data, places or events you should have a look at schema.org. "Search engines including Bing, Google and Yahoo! rely on this markup to improve the display of search results, making it easier for people to find the right web pages."

The following example from the schema.org documentation shows you how to describe a movie with semantic markup:

<div itemscope itemtype ="http://schema.org/Movie">
  <h1 itemp...

XPath matchers can be combined with CSS-selector matchers. This is really useful if not, for example, the content of an element should be matched but the element itself like in the following example. Here a form is used to display data as default value in its input elements. This can be the case in web applications in which data should be edited easily without additional clicks.

Update: Staticmatic will not be further developed. They suggest to switch to middleman.

If you need to make a static web page and find yourself missing all your Rails comforts, take a look at StaticMatic.

This works like an extremely stripped down version of Rails, giving you

• HAML
• SASS
• helpers
• partials

When done, everything is simply compiled to s...

This card shows you how to center a float horizontally in CSS. Also: find out what techniques are available for your use case and browser requirements in the card linked below.

Note: We have card with all CSS centering options. You probably want to head over there and get an overview over what techniques are available for your use case and browser requirements.

If you cannot use display: inline-block, centering a float ...

Install FreeBSD

• Download a suitable image from this site
• Select File > New… to and follow the instructions, choose the .iso file you downloaded as image file
• Start the new virtual machine and follow the instructions
  • formatting is a little complicated, so let freebsd.org help you

Install VMware Tools

Choose Virtual Machine > Install VMware Tools from the VMware menu, then as root:

^
# install required packages
pkg_add...

Internet Explorer 5+ is aware of conditional comments that let you target HTML for selected versions of IE. For example the HTML below would ask users of IE 6 and IE 7 to install Firefox:

<!--[if lt IE 8]>
  <a href='http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/'>Get a real browser</a>
<![endif]-->

You might wonder how to express such a conditional comment in your favorite templating language, Haml. You might even have converted a template back to ERB just for this ...

If you want to play music or sounds from a browser, your choice is to use either Flash or the new <audio> tag in HTML5. Each method has issues, but depending on your requirements you might not care about all of them.

Flash

• Works in all desktop browsers, even Internet Explorer. Does not work on iPads or iPhones.
• Requires you to embed a Flash component into your page which will later play the audio for you.
• Can play MP3s or Wave files. Cannot play OGG Vorbis audio.
• Cannot reliably seek to a given position when playing VBR-enco...

Sass now comes with user-defined functions, keyword arguments, list manipulation. Haml and Sass are now two separate gems.

You most likely have a form element inside another form element. Don't do that. Ever.

Firefox and Chrome will discard the first form nested inside another form (but for some reason keep others). Internet Explorer will possibly act like nothing is wrong -- but break (send the outer form) when you submit.

If your application behaves normal at first but removes forms from the DOM when you Ajax around, this could be the cause. Remember this note when you think your browsers are broken once again and check for such things thoroughly bef...

Partials always define a local variable with the same name as themselves. E.g. when you are in _recent_users.html.erb, a local variable recent_users will be defined and overshadow any helper method that is also called recent_users().

If you would like to use a helper method recent_users() in a partial _recent_users.html.erb you can say this in the partial template:

<% recent_users = self.recent_users() %>
<% recent_users.each do |user| %>
  ...
<% end %>

If you want to convert a README.rdoc file to HTML, say this from a shell:

rdoc README.rdoc

You will find the generated HTML in doc/index.html.

If you do this while working on one of our gems, please .gitignore everything in doc and don't commit the generated HTML.

ActiveRecord gives you the :include option to load records and their associations in a fixed number of queries. This is called preloading or eager loading associations. By preloading associations you can prevent the n+1 query problem that slows down a many index view.

You might have noticed that using :include randomly seems to do one of the following:

1. Execute one query per involved table with a condit...

It is common in Rails 3.0 applications that you want to provide default views for a group of controllers. Let’s say you have a bunch of controllers inside the Admin namespace and you would like each action to fallback to a default template. So if you are rendering the index action for Admin::PostsController and “app/views/admin/posts/index.html.*” is not available, it should then render “app/views/admin/defaults/index.html”.

Since Rails 3.0, we have a new abstraction called resolvers that holds the logic to find a template.

I prefer using Opera's "User mode" to toggle an outlining of HTML elements quickly. This helps greatly when you want to see the actual dimensions of elements, e.g. for floating elements inside containers, instead of opening up the Dragonfly inspector every time.

Navigate to View → Style → "Manage Modes..." and tick the checkboxes like in the attached image. Then, switch to the User Mode by pressing the shortcut (Shift+G for the 9.2-compatible layout or for the default layout with enabled "single-key shortcuts") and select "Outline" from...

Within an event handler, there are multiple methods to cancel event propagation, each with different semantics.

• event.preventDefault()

  Only prevents the default browser behavior for the click, i.e. going to a different url or submitting a form.

  When invoked on a touchstart event, this also prevents mouse events like click to be triggered.

• event.stopPropagation()

  Prevents the event from bubbling up the DOM.

• `event.st...

Back when Steak was first released, Capybara didn’t have any of the nice RSpec helpers it does now. A lot has changed since. Besides the helpers, it got its own RSpec acceptance testing DSL recently, essentially eating Steak’s functionality and turning it into a complete acceptance testing solution (on top of RSpec).

The information in this card is only relevant for Rails 2.3-era apps.

This note gives a quick introduction into caching methods (page caching, action caching and fragment caching) in rails and describes some specific problems and solutions.

The descriptions below are valid for Rails 2 and 3. Recently, caching with timestamp- or content-based keys has become more popular which saves you the pain of invalidating stale caches.

How to enable/disable caching

To enable or disable caching in rails you ca...

Liquid Canvas is a JavaScript library which allows you to draw inside an HTML canvas element with an easy yet powerful description language.

It can be used to add graphics to your web page without ever touching an image creation tool such as The Gimp, Inkscape or Photoshop.

Check out the Demo and the basic example and then download version 0.3.

Specify these gem versions in your Gemfile:

gem 'cucumber', '~> 1.3.0'
gem 'cucumber-rails', '= 0.3.2' # max version for Rails 2
gem 'capybara', '< 2' # capybara 2+ requires Rails 3
gem 'mime-types', '< 2' # dependeny of capybara
gem 'nokogiri', '< 1.6' # dependency of capybara
gem 'rubyzip', '< 1' # dependency of selenium-webdriver, rubyzip 1+ requires Ruby 1.9
gem 'cucumber_factory'
gem 'database_cleaner', '< 1'
gem 'cucumber_spinner', '~> 0.2.5'
gem 'launchy', '~> 2.1.2'

With these versions set, `...