Blog posts

Within a large project that uses a lot of partials to load in page components, there are a lot of potential points of failure. Add in a developer new to the project, or a front-end developer pressed into service working directly on your views, and the chances of someone editing a partial without realising it’s used in several more places than they’d noticed are fairly high. And if the partial hits an error, the exception will roll all the way up the chain and the end-user will see your 500 page. ...

What Highrise has meant to Rails (Loud Thinking) Interesting to hear where some of the innovations in rails are coming from and how they’re being used. (tags: 37signals rubyonrails) ActiveScaffold :: Welcome The successor to ajaxscaffold, for generating admin UIs, which we’re using fairly heavily in GOOD. Not yet sure what the differences are. (tags: activescaffold ajaxscaffold cms rubyonrails)

I’ve been casually following updates over at NetSquared (“remixing the web for social change”) for a while but hadn’t really focussed on their Innovation Award, which is seeking projects that use the web to make a social impact. The 20 top projects selected by their readers will be invited to a conference in San Jose at the end of May, and a lucky few will receive funding from the NetSquared Technology Innovation Fund. ...

In the process of catching up with some neglected tasks, I’ve pushed out new releases of both of my PEAR packages. Services_Technorati receives a version number bump, and little else. The alpha release was never meant to last quite this long given that it’s merely a port of a very stable package, and it’s finally marked beta. My hope is that the beta release will pick up a few more users to put it through its paces. ...

the { buckblogs :here }: Faking cursors in ActiveRecord A neat trick for when you need to perform an ActiveRecord operation on a very large dataset and don’t want to use too much RAM (tags: activerecord cursors)

O’Reilly Radar > Google Launches MyMaps There’s been a flurry of announcements in the mapping space again this week. Looks like mapping mashups are no longer solely the domain of developers and ’local search’ is becoming a little more semantic. Maybe next google could announce they’re parsing m (tags: georss google kml maps) RubyForge: ruby-geonames: Project Info Ruby support for the Geonames Web Services. At some point I must try this out. (tags: geography geonames) phpsh – an interactive shell for php ...

It seems that anyone involved in helping musicians with their web presence has to learn to tolerate MySpace. I don’t think I know anyone who actually enjoys the process of using MySpace, but a strong presence there is a must have for almost every musician these days. I’ve long wished for a decent API that would help me integrate MySpace with websites I run for musicians—after all, it isn’t very DRY to post the same content in several places when it could be automated—but as time has gone on it’s become clear that an API would be entirely anathema to MySpace’s approach to the web. ...

Duncan Beevers » History » Simile Timeline Rails Helper part 1 Rails helpers for building timelines with the simile library (tags: rubyonrails simile timeline visualisation) Control.Modal : Unobtrusive CSS Modal Windows and Lightboxes for Prototype Looks like a fairly nice lightbox implementation, but the server’s been unresponsive so I’ve not been able to confirm my suspicion that it might be quite lightweight (tags: javascript lightbox modal rubyonrails) Stars compose new ways to use music | Pop | Guardian Unlimited Music ...

InfoQ: Ruby on Rails case study: ChangingThePresent.org Good case study/review of a large rails project (tags: brucetate management performance rubyonrails scaling) Mac Rumors: New iTunes Features: My Alerts and Complete My Album Really interesting that Apple are trying to provide incentives for people to buy full albums. Is this a focus on the album as an art form, a result of pressure from labels, or simply an attempt to maximise profits? (tags: albums digitalmusic distribution itunes)

I just got caught out by an upgrade to Ruby 1.8.6 and an app which I can’t as yet upgrade to Rails 1.2.3. Ruby 1.8.6 (and 1.9) make the Time#to_date and Time#to_datetime methods private so any code which depends on those methods being public will break. The fix is very easy. I just copied the code from the relevant rails changeset and placed it in my environment.rb file: class Time %w(to_date to_datetime).each do |method| public method if private_instance_methods.include?(method) end end Of course, the ideal is to upgrade to 1.2.3, but that’s not on the cards just yet for this particular project. In the meantime, having to add five lines isn’t too much trouble. ...