Links for 10-21-10
by Trevor Turk
As you’ll probably notice, I’ve started using Cucumber. So far I’m really enjoying it.
Facelette: On TechCrunch in Three Hours and $0
More people need to do stupid shit. I mean that from the bottom of my heart. Don’t do it to make money. Don’t even do it to learn hip new technology X. Do it for the sake of doing something stupid. We’re in the most ridiculous industry on earth. You can whip something up in a few hours and before you know it, people around the world will be using it. That is insane. An architect or a fireman or a lawyer or anyone else can’t say that for their profession or their hobby.
Converting Rails apps from MySQL to PostgreSQL
My roving Google bots turn up various notes on folks moving from MySQL to PostgreSQL.
Selector-Free Cucumber Scenarios
This problem is not unlike an already-solved one; we’ve all moved away from hardcoding URLs like “/users/new” into our views and Cucumber scenarios and replacing them with new_user_path and the signup page, respectively. So why not apply the same formula that paths.rb uses for removing URLs from scenarios to our situation with selectors?
This post is inspired by “You’re cuking it wrong” by Jonas Nicklas, and Elisabeth Hendrickson’s talk on writing clear acceptance tests during GoGaRuCo 2010. Here are some quick lessons in real-world Cucumber story writing.
A step description should never contain regexen, CSS or XPath selectors, any kind of code or data structure. It should be easily understood just by reading the description.
Railscasts – Beginning with Cucumber
Cucumber is a high-level testing framework. In this episode we will create a new Rails application from scratch using behavior driven development.
Railscasts – Debugging with ruby-debug
This episode will show you how to debug a rails app using ruby-debug: set a breakpoint, inspect variables, change the code and more.
Ensure that GitHub is always near your fingertips. Install gemedit or a similar utility. Next time you go to google for an answer, stop, break open the code and learn.
How to add your own custom functions to jQuery
I came across even smaller code snippet on how to add your own custom functions, in other words how to create plugins for jQuery
This article is a technical summary of the curves, ratios and dimensions in the Flash version of Canabalt.
I needed some simple progress bars in a html table to indicate the progress of string translations in the new internationalizeable checkout process of Shopify and found an elegant CSS solution.
Extending Rails 3 with Railties
Unfortunately, while the system for extending and expanding Rails has been completely overhauled, the documentation hasn’t been updated yet.
OmniAuth is a flexible authentication system utilizing Rack middleware
How to use Rails 3.0′s new notification system to inject custom log events
With Rails 3.0 released a few weeks ago I’ve migrated a few apps and I’m constantly finding useful new improvements. One such improvement is the ability to log anything in the same way that Rails internally logs ActiveRecord and ActionView.
Developing a RubyGem using Bundler
Did you know that you can use Bundler for not only gem dependency management but also for writing our own gems? It’s really easy to do this and Bundler provides a couple of things to help you along this path.
Quick and simple geocoding without external librairies
When you want to implement geocoding for one of your Ruby on Rails models, the first thing you may do is to include the good old geokit gem. But do you know that if you just want to retrieve and store lat/lng in your records, geokit or another external library is unnecessary?
A dirt simple library for parsing human readable dates
Security Lessons Learned From The Diaspora Launch
The team is manifestly out of their depth with regards to web application security, and it is almost certainly impossible for them to gather the required expertise and still hit their timetable for public release in a month.
bMap jQuery google maps Plugin
The bMap jQuery plugin allows you to quickly and easily add mapping to your website. It has been designed from the beginning to handle lots of markers, lots of layers, and custom marker icons.
A gentle introduction to CouchDB for relational practitioners at Xaprb
With all that in mind, why would you want to use CouchDB instead of a relational database? For most things I’m involved with, I want a relational database. But I got asked recently to help with a database that’ll store records about people. Although nobody has implemented anything yet, it’s a terrible match for a relational database, and an excellent fit for a document-oriented one.
If you’re using Uploadify, the nifty jQuery file upload plugin — which we’ll forgive for providing all its examples in PHP (*shudder*) — there’s a good chance you followed the general pattern outlined by John Nunemaker over at RailsTips. His article describes in detail how to get Flash to play nicely with Rails sessions using Rack middleware. Unfortunately, Rails 3 requires a few minor changes to this setup.
HTML5 Video is a new way to embed video in a web page using the video tag.
The Tech Behind the New Twitter.com
The Twitter.com redesign presented an opportunity to make bold changes to the underlying technology of the website. With this in mind, we began implementing a new architecture almost entirely in JavaScript.
100 Free High Quality WordPress Themes: 2010 Edition
Today, we present a fresh collection of useful WordPress themes.
