Blog posts

Somewhere between Ruby on Rails versions 2.3.0 (RC1) and 2.3.2 (final) a change was made to the arguments required for one of the methods the theme_support plugin requires. I must confess I hadn’t spotted it, but github user knapo kindly sent me a message with a patch. That patch is now applied in the main repository, as are a few tweaks to the ActionMailer integration to better handle multipart emails. You can get the new version from github. ...

Big themes this week have mostly revolved around twitter, facebook, and openness. Some have focussed on facebook redesigning to embrace a more twitter-like “web of flow” approach, and others on the fact that they’re jumping on various open web bandwagons. It’s been interesting to see some tie in with the government transparency thinking going around, as particularly noted by Chris Messina on FactoryCity. Meanwhile there are quite a few nice new tools emerging, and I really must try heroku one of these days. ...

The Cost of Accessibility? Comments by Drew McLellan on the recently released Atlas IDE for the Cappuccino web framework, and the need for accessibility to be taken into account in any new approach to web app development. Accessibility & Degradation in Cappuccino A response to Drew’s piece. I’m not entirely convinced, but that may be because I still feel like any attempt to bring desktop-style-GUIs to the web is missing the point. ...

I seem to be spending a lot of time with wordpress at the moment. It’s become so ubiquitous that it often makes far more sense to set it up and integrate with an existing app than to set up some other blogging system and re-train users. As a result I’ve been writing a few wordpress plugins. Most of them are too specialised to be worth sharing, but one seemed worth opening up… ...

It’s always a little embarassing to realise that two or more consecutive blog postings are nothing more than a collection of links, but that’s the way it is at the moment. Busy-ness, illness and distractedness have all kept me from the blog this week. There aren’t any clear themes in this week’s links either. Chatter around OAuth has continued apace, as have musings about fuzziness, location, time, and the web (represented well by Matt Jones’ piece), but mostly this is the (to be) usual random assortment that have spent more than a few seconds open in my newsreader or web browser ...

Initial Release Of Moneta: Unified Key/Value Store API A new library from Yehuda Katz that seeks to provide a unified interface for key/value stores, meaning you can treat memcached and any other similar caching or database system as a ruby hash. Twitter OAuth Spotted in the Wild Excellent news. Hopefully soon we can get away from the ridiculous situation where every new twitter app wants to know my password. Or in other words, those of us who care about security can actually start using new twitter apps again. ...

Kevin Kelly, of Wired Magazine and Long Now Foundation fame, has a lengthy piece on his blog exploring the Amish adoption of technology. It wasn’t until we watched the documentary Devil’s Playground a few years back that I was really aware of the Amish approach to selectively adopting new technologies only once they’ve explored their likely social impact and how they fit with their core values. I’m not sure I could convince myself to slow down that much, but it’s a fascinating idea: ...

While there haven’t been any visible changes to my Heathrow Tower project in the past couple of weeks beyond my throwing in a few greetings in other languages to break things up a bit. Having put some of the statistical plans on hold as the snow last week prevented any data gathered from being anywhere close to representative, I’ve gradually been building up the database behind the scenes so I can start to do some of the more intricate things I’d like to do. ...

Selected links that seem to deserve a bit more traction and longevity than a simple mention on twitter. Big themes this week were the release of Rails 2.3 RC 1 (which I explored through my work on the theme_support plugin and Clay Shirky’s series of talks in London. theme_support aside, I’ve mostly been focussed on some to-be-revealed developments to Generous and release an early version of the new Street Action site (DNS will hopefully propagate on that soon). ...

In my ongoing efforts to bring my fork of theme_support in line with Rails 2.3 I’ve covered the core views and email, but when I left off earlier today layouts still weren’t working. The key problem with overriding layouts is that the process of identifying them relies on some class methods on ActionController::Base (provided in the ActionController::Layout module). Roughly put we have: ActionController::Base#render calls ActionController::Base#pick_layout ActionController::Base#pick_layout checks to see if there’s a specific layout requested and calls ActionController::Base#active_layout ActionController::Base#active_layout checks whether there’s a candidate layout for this controller or action and makes sure the layout exists by calling ActionController::Base.find_layout ActionController::Base.find_layout (class method) is called which checks the view_paths to find the appropriate layout in there The issue is that as a class method ActionController::Base.active_layout has no knowledge of the specific controller instance, or the request object it contains, and so it can’t access our logic to determine the current theme. ...