Ruby

If you’ve encountered Ruby primarily through Rails and know it chiefly as an elegant tool for writing web applications it’s easy to miss its longer history as a tool for systems administration. Before Rails made Ruby the language-du-jour sysadmins bore much of the responsibility for keeping it alive, with the result that it has a suite of libraries helpful for server monitoring and a range of other administrative tasks. Author André Ben Hamou is clear that his book is not an exhaustive guide to using Ruby for systems administration. Rather than try to cover every possible context he provides an introduction to the language and some of its key libraries intended to give a feel for how it might be used and why it leads to succinct and expressive solutions. A number of the more important libraries for working with network protocols and files are covered, and there’s a good introduction to rubygems and how they can be used and created. ...

In response to yesterday’s post about inlining CSS for HTML emails, I got a couple of comments suggesting alternatives to my CSS parser class. Not wanting to have to maintain code unless I have to, I decided to give them both a try and see how they worked out. TamTam First up is TamTam, suggested by batnight. I’d actually spotted TamTam and link blogged it a few weeks ago, which shows how transient attention can be. TamTam is a complete solution for inlining CSS, so I should be able to replace all my code with: ...

As anyone keeping an eye on my deli.cio.us feed may have noticed, quite a few links have appeared to information about the preparation of HTML email. It’s a nasty business, as a quick glance at the website of the email standards project will tell you. But sadly, nasty as it may be, sometimes it has to be done. Even if the email I send out is going to have CSS scattered inline, for building the templates I’d much rather be able to focus on writing the structure of the document and leave worrying about my CSS for another time, and another file. That wouldn’t get me around the nastiness of having to use tables for anything but the simplest of layouts, but it still feels right to keep the separation for as long as possible. ...

One of the many tricky decisions to be made when building content management tools is how to allow users to control the basic formatting of their input without breaking your carefully crafted layouts or injecting nasty hacks into your pages. One approach has long been to provide your own markup language. Instead of allowing users to write HTML, let them use bbcode, or markdown, or textile, which have more controlled vocabularies and rules that mean it’s much less likely that problems will occur. ...

As I’ve indicated here a few times, when announcing site launches and offering a few hints and tips, I fairly frequently find myself working with Drupal but have long had reservations about doing so. What I’ve so far avoided doing is going into much detail about why that would be, what those reservations are, and so on. But now I’m working on a review of a Drupal book and so it seems appropriate to lay those cards on the table and look at the details on them. It seems easiest to do that by comparing with the framework I do most of my development in: Ruby on Rails. ...

Right at the start of Pro Active Record the authors address a possible problem some may have with it: that there’s not enough in Active Record to warrant a full book. They point out that the basics are well covered as sections elsewhere but that this is the first book to really dig into working with legacy schema and other ‘advanced’ uses. That’s fair enough, but after reading the book I am still left with the question of why, then, they dedicate the first half to covering ActiveRecord’s most basic concepts? ...

There’s one project I work on where the client wants to be able to edit HTML files in the root folder, but I want to be able to deploy with capistrano. It’s a pain to have to log into the server and check whether those files have changed before each deployment so last night, I added the following to my deploy.rb: desc "Make sure we don't overwrite manual static file changes" task :before_deploy do captured = false run "svn status #{deploy_to}/current/public" do |ch, stream, data| if stream == :out and data.chomp.match(/^M/) captured = true end end if captured run "svn commit #{deploy_to}/current/public -m 'Storing manual changes to static HTML before deploy'" end end It’s not the most elegant, but it’ll make sure that any files the client has changed (which were already in the repository) are committed, and it makes the deployment process just that little bit easier. ...

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. ...

I’ve not used it myself, but conceptually I’ve always been very interested in WSGI (the Python Web Server Gateway Interface). WSGI defines a standard interface between web servers and frameworks, giving python web applications the same portability that Java servlets enjoy, and also makes it much easier to layer code—with a standardised interface you can easily add in extra components to process your input and output before or after your main framework has handled it. ...

Rails is great for many things, but for very small apps, it can definitely be overkill. That’s where why the lucky stiff’s Camping micro-framework comes in. Where rails gets you started with a clearly defined structure and generally presumes you’re going to want to use a database, Camping makes no such assumptions and just provides a few nice hooks for micro apps. I got started using Camping a couple of months ago. With a lot of travel coming up, I’m eager to keep up to date with special deals on flights and frequent flyer miles, and stumbled across milemaven.com which seemed a great source of that information. But it doesn’t provide feeds and I have no desire to visit the site every day, so I decided to dust off hpricot and combine it with Camping to scrape the site and deliver the contents to my news reader. ...