Collected posts from the various blogs I’ve contributed to since 2002.
has_many :through: New on Edge: dynamic finders with hash attributes for creation “Tag.find_or_create_by_name(:name => name, :creator => current_user)” – much nicer than the previous behaviour (tags: associations rubyonrails) Kingston Technology Company - Flash Memory - DataTraveler Combining a card reader and a flash drive. Tempting. (tags: cardreader flashdrive hardware)
I’m travelling at the moment, so posting has slowed down after three weeks of daily updates. Nevertheless I’ve just about managed to keep up with my newsreader and was pleased to see that some attention has been going into the JSON support in ActiveResource. Previously parsing JSON that couldn’t be easily handled by the YAML parser was a bit of a pain. Now it’s simply a case of calling: ActiveSupport::JSON.decode(json_string) And the JSON param_parser I referenced in my “Versatile RESTful APIs Beyond XML” article no longer needs extra help. It’s simply: ...
acts_as_twittertasticable!! Tongue-twisting new plugin to set up rails models to talk to twitter (tags: plugins rubyonrails twitter)
Relevance: The J Plugin: Existing Rails Apps on JRuby The Relevance guys have released a new plugin to help get rails apps running transparently on either ruby or jruby (tags: jruby ruby rubyonrails) Twitter: Use it Productively - lifehack.org Some speculation on how twitter could evolve (tags: productivity twitter) High Earth Orbit » Blog Archive » Geo Twittering Overview of geographical mashups of twitter (tags: geo twitter)
An article I wrote has just been published over at InfoQ. It’s called Versatile RESTful APIs Beyond XML and shows how easy it can be to extend Rails’ RESTful behaviour to input and output resources not only as XML but also as JSON and Microformatted HTML. The article builds on some posts on this blog, such as Intercepting Microformats In Rails Input, but offers a bit more context. The timing of the article fits nicely with a post on the microformats-rest list about Rails, REST and microformats, so hopefully we’ll see more discussion of these concepts over the coming weeks. ...
InfoQ: Versatile RESTful APIs Beyond XML An article I wrote. Probably only of interest to the technically inclined. (tags: articles byme rubyonrails)
WaSP Street Team “WaSP Street Team: getting the message out everywhere, together.” (tags: wasp webstandards) knowee - ESW Wiki “knowee is a distributed, web-based contact organizer. It would be largely bootstrapped via the XFN and hCard microformats, but uses SPARQL (or maybe just a simple RDF lib) for application functionality and RDF for information integration.” (tags: hcard microformats rdf semanticweb sparql) Improve your forms using HTML5! - Opera Developer Community Example of what the WhatWG Web Forms 2 bring to the table. The examples are a little confusing because so many attribute values aren’t enclosed in quotes ...
E-Commerce Version 3 (For Drupal 4.7 and 5) | drupal.org New version now available. Looks like some changes to the email handling which may require me to update my ecommerce modules (tags: drupal ecommerce) ufJSParser Intended to be a “A generic cross browser microformat parser in JavaScript”. From the developer of Operator (tags: javascript microformats parsing) Revolution On Rails: [PLUGIN RELEASE] Enhanced Rails Migrations v1.1.0 Managing migrations in a large development team (tags: migrations plugins rubyonrails) Blog - Democracy: A Name Change ...
There’s quite a bit of overlap between GeoKit and acts_as_geocodable/graticule, as the latter pair were based on GeoKit. But it provides at least one feature (IP-based location lookup) that they don’t, so I decided to give it a whirl. Since my main geographically related projects are both now based on plugins that I’m pretty happy with and which suit them well, I decided to resuscitate an old sample piece. A few months back I wrote about scraping the Grand Rapids bus routes site and put up a toy application utilising the resource features in then-edge Rails. I’ve been meaning to return to that project to test out some features in ActiveResource, but in the meantime it seemed like it might be useful to be able to search for the nearest bus stop. ...
Observations on film art: Movies still matter “In other words, traditional media like the cinema aren’t dying out. No art form that has been devised across the history of humanity has disappeared. Movies didn’t kill theater, and TV didn’t kill movies.” (tags: film) The house that Herman built “For the past five years, artist Jackie Sumell has been helping Herman Wallace, who has been in solitary confinement at the Louisiana State Penitentiary for the last 34 years, design his dream house, a house that will probably never be built.” ...