Can Sphinx and foxy fixtures place nicely together? Due to the way Sphinx indexing works, foxy fixtures will often slow down the indexing process drastically. This article explains how to overcome this limitation.
<% @categories.in_groups_of(2).each do |group| %> <tr> <% group.each do |category| %> <td><%=h category.name %></td> <% end %> </tr> <% end %> What are you staring at? Move along, move along.
Many Rails plugins require that certain files like images, CSS, and JavaScript get copied to the public folder during installation. The typical way to do this is add code to install.rb, which then gets executed when you first install the plugin in your Rails project. What happens when the assets … Continue reading
I’m in the middle of developing a Radiant extension for Terralien. Radius is the tagging language for Radiant, and today I figured out how to use a route from inside a custom tag class. A typical Radius tag class might look like this: module AwesomeTags include Radiant::Taggable tag “session:logout” do … Continue reading
Have you ever wanted a WYSIWYG-style toolbar that generates Textile markup? textile_toolbar is a Rails plugin that does just that. Extracted from a recent Terralien project, it’s a great way get your users used to the power and simplicity of Textile without frightening them away with long markup guides. Check … Continue reading
I just released a new gem on GitHub that provides some common validation expectations to rspec. Instead of writing specs to verify that your models are handling validation correctly, these expectations simply check that the validation is getting declared correctly in your model. For example: describe User do it_should_validate_presence_of :first_name, … Continue reading
Raleigh’s first RubyCamp is coming to Red Hat on October 18th. This is a similar format to BarCamp in that the presentations are pitched the morning of the conference, and attendees self organize the remainder of the day. Relevance will be running their popular Refactotum workshop in the morning. The … Continue reading
I’m at the Ruby Hoedown in Huntsville this weekend. Being around so many brilliant geeks encouraged me to release a gem I’ve had sitting in the hopper for several weeks. finder_filter encapsulates a pattern I find myself using quite frequently in Rails. Namely, looking up an instance variable before an … Continue reading
I just ran into a problem configuring a Rails app to deliver email through Google’s SMTP servers. ActionMailer doesn’t support TLS/SSL which is required by Google. Fortunately, the action_mailer_optional_tls plugin provides this functionality. I wanted to host my SMTP settings in an external YAML file so I wouldn’t end up … Continue reading
railspdf is a plugin that adds templating support for the pdf-writer gem to Rails. The project was last updated in January of 2007, but worked fine up until the 2.1.0 release of Rails which broke several things. I’ve forked the project on GitHub and tweaked it to run under 2.1.0. … Continue reading