In part 2 we coded our PDF generator as a background job. But the PDF is still being stored on the local file system. Let’s store it in S3 instead and give our users a URL so they can download it. First let’s add the AWS SDK gem to our … Continue reading
In part 1 we learned why backgrounding is important. Now let’s dive into some code. First things first. Add wicked_pdf and delayed_job to your Gemfile: Now we can generate a PDF from inside our Rails app with this simple command: You’ll notice that the more complex the HTML, the longer … Continue reading
What do you get when you combine the slick PDF generation capabilities of wicked_pdf with the elegance and efficiency of delayed_job? A high performance way to convert HTML pages into beautiful PDF documents. I’ve been leveraging wicked_pdf to generate high school transcripts from my SaaS app, Teascript, since 2009. Prior … Continue reading
Thanks to everyone who turned out for my API talk at the Triangle Ruby Brigade. I wasn’t expecting such a large crowd and the resulting Q&A was really good. It was interesting hearing how other developers are using APIs in their projects, and what problems they are encountering and solving. … Continue reading
If you’ll be in or near Raleigh the evening of March 12th, consider dropping by the Triangle Ruby Brigade. I’ll be presenting on how to build HTTP-based APIs in Rails, including: Creating an API controller Wiring up versioned routes for your API Protecting your API with authentication Choosing a transport … Continue reading
mobile-fu is a handy little Rails plugin that automatically detects when mobile devices are accessing your web application and adjusts the request format accordingly. For example: mobile-fu even loads any mobile stylesheets you’ve created, including device-specific stylesheets for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, etc. There is also a way to set the … Continue reading
A recent project required the latest YouTube videos from a specific user to be listed inside a Radiant page. There wasn’t an existing extension that did this so I built my own. youtube_tags is based on the excellent twitter_tags extension. It enables inclusion of YouTube videos within Radiant pages using … Continue reading
I built the original Spreedly extension for Radiant a couple of years ago. It’s a nice little package that makes it really easy to integrate Spreedly’s subscription payment system with your Radiant site. You can choose which pages to require a subscription to view, manage subscribers from the admin backend, … Continue reading
One of the Rails apps I’ve been working on formats times as HH:MM in the view. No seconds are displayed. This is a pretty common way to format things. When doing timestamp comparisons in SQL, however, the seconds are taken into account. This is bad since it can cause discrepancies … Continue reading
November 30, 2009: Rails 2.3.5 has just been released. I upgrade my production Rails apps and rock on. February 17 of this year: RubyGems 1.3.6 is released and my apps begin suffering from deprecation warnings. They’re all over the place: when I run a test, when I launch script/console… when … Continue reading