Business > Conferences

Web 2.0 Expo: TV and Radio with an API

National Public Radio (NPR) is changing what it means to be a news organization. While traditional news organizations want to keep their content close, NPR has taken the approach of making content widely available via an API -- an approach they call "brand and release." Continue

Business > Conferences

Development > Other Development Tools

Web 2.0 Expo: Web Developer Tools

Ben Galbraith and Dio Almaer of Ajaxian and the developer tools group at Mozilla gave a wide-ranging talk on web developer tools. Continue

Business > Conferences

User Interface > Community

Web 2.0 Expo: Social Media

The conference sessions at Web 2.0 Expo had a major emphasis on social media. I only attended a couple of these talks, about which I have brief comments below; at the end of the article, I have links to several others. Continue

Business > Conferences

Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco Spring 2009

Last week's Web 2.0 Expo seemed like a successful event, with a good-sized crowd despite the economic malaise – due in part, no doubt, to unusually aggressive discounting and promotion. With multiple tracks across four days (one day of workshops and three of conference sessions) there was much more to see than any one person could possibly attend. Continue

Ruby on Rails > Rails Framework > Routing

Enhancing Conditional Routing in Rails

Rails' routing infrastructure supports the concept of conditional routes: preconditions that must be satisfied before a particular route will trigger. Rails 2.1 supports one built-in condition, HTTP method checking, which is of some use but rather limited. What I needed was to be able to limit certain routes to only trigger when a particular host-name was used to access the application. I show one implementation in this article. Continue

Business > Conferences

Startup Camp and Foo Camp

I feel lucky to have been able to attend last week's Startup Camp and Foo Camp. These are unusual, invitation-only events, with extraordinary collections of people. Getting an invitation requires some mix of accomplishment, connections, and luck. Continue

Development > Techniques

Ruby on Rails > How To... > Configuration

Setting up Rails on Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4)

This guide walks you through setup instructions for preparing a Mac OS X 10.4 (aka Tiger) development machine to be used for general Ruby on Rails coding. This baseline setup is what we use for our LearningRails online course. Continue

Development > Techniques

Ruby on Rails > How To... > Configuration

Setting up Rails on Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5)

This guide walks you through setup instructions for preparing a Mac OS X 10.5 (aka Leopard) development machine to be used for general Ruby on Rails coding. This baseline setup is what we use for our LearningRails online course. Continue

Ruby on Rails

Podcasts and Screencasts on Ruby on Rails

There's a variety of screencasts and podcasts available for Ruby on Rails developers. Here's a quick rundown of the major ones, and how they differ. Continue

Ruby on Rails > How To... > Performance Tuning

Business

Servers

The Rebuilding and Scaling of YellowPages.com

John Straw, chief software architect at YellowPages.com, gave an excellent talk at RailsConf about YellowPages' conversion to Rails. John's talk covered the scaling issues, but the talk was just as much about the process of successfully doing a big rewrite of a critical application at a large company. Continue

Ruby on Rails

New Crop of Rails 2.0 Books

In 2007, more than a dozen Ruby on Rails books debuted — only to be almost instantly made out-of-date by the release of Rails 2 toward the end of the year. There are now some great Rails 2.0 books out, making life a lot easier for new and experienced Ruby on Rails programmers. Continue

Ruby on Rails > Views > Markup > Textile

Easy Text Formatting with Textile

HTML is rather verbose as a markup language, and having to include closing tags is messy and error-prone. We're all pretty much stuck with delivering HTML code from our web sites, but that doesn't mean we have to write in it. There are various markup approaches that are superior to HTML when it comes to content creation, and which can be used as source code from which to create HTML. Two that are widely used are ... Continue

Business > Conferences

Web 2.0 Expo Highlights and Factoids

Last week's Web 2.0 Expo had an overwhelming amount of content. Like any large conference, the quality was uneven, but there were some great talks and a lot of good ones. Here's some highlights and random factoids about AIM, Ning, WordPress, and MySpace. Continue

Ruby on Rails

Business > Conferences

Tim Bray: Ruby is the Leading Language for Web Applications

In his keynote talk at the recent Silicon Valley Ruby Conference, Sun's Tim Bray asserted that "PHP and Ruby are the languages of choice for new web apps." Coming from most people, this wouldn't be a remarkable comment, but given that Tim is Sun's director of web technologies, it is worthy of note. Continue

Development > Techniques

Ruby on Rails > How To... > Configuration

Setting up Rails on Windows XP

This guide walks you through setup instructions for preparing a Windows XP development machine to be used for general Ruby on Rails coding. This baseline setup is what we use for our LearningRails online course. Continue

Servers

Remote Linux Admin for Windows Users

A lot of the remote server administration information on the web assumes that you're on either a Mac or a Linux box. This assumption can add challenges for Windows users, but there are tools available to make Windows do most everything a Linux system does. Continue

Business > Conferences

BarCamp Miami 2008

BarCamp Miami was held February 28th, 2008, concurrent with the Future of Web Apps Miami conference (and shared the nice Carnival Performing Arts Center venue). Up until this point, I hadn't been to a BarCamp, though I have participated in other unconferences before. Continue

Development > Techniques

Ruby on Rails > How To... > Configuration

Setting up Rails on Windows Vista

This guide walks you through setup instructions for preparing a Windows Vista development machine to be used for general Ruby on Rails coding. This baseline setup is what we use for our LearningRails online course. Continue

Business > Business Strategy

Seed Conference: The Creative Business Life

The one-day Seed Conference was for the most part, a series of personal essays by three unusually creative folks: Jason Fried of 37signals, Jim Coudal of Coudal Partners, and Carlos Segura of Segura Inc, t26, and a variety of other ventures. The conference was about design, web applications, and business, but its real focus was on creating a life and a business that you enjoy by following your creative inspirations. Continue

Business > Conferences

Servers > Rails Hosting > Scaling

Future of Web Apps Miami 2008

Carsonified's Future of Web Apps, Miami, was held February 29th, 2008 at the Miami Carnival Performing Arts Center. FOWA brings together a who's who of Web 2.0 technorati to tackle general themes of interest revolving around where the Web is going. Getting inside thoughts from many of those who have made Web 2.0 successful is interesting, but even better is the discussion that goes on outside of the talks in the hall-ways. Continue

Ruby on Rails > Views > Widgets

User Interface > JavaScript > Widget Libraries

Using Yahoo's User Interface Library Treeview in Rails

Our BuildingWebApps.com site organizes much of its information by assigning one or more categories from a domain specific taxonomy to each article, link, or other piece of content. A site visitor can browse the information in several ways, but one quick approach is via a category browser widget that appears on most content pages. The hierarchical tree view is implemented by embedding Yahoo's Open Source User Interface Library Treeview (aka YUI treeview, or just treeview here) into our RHTML. Continue

Business > Conferences

Ruby on Rails > How To... > Performance Tuning

Selling Friends: Scaling a High-Traffic Rails Application

At the recent Silicon Valley Ruby Conference, Friends for Sale developer Alex Le outlined the approach they've taken to scaling up to deliver an impressive 300 million page views per month for their Rails-based Facebook application. Continue

Ruby on Rails > Rails Framework > Routing

Exception Handling and Old URLs

Whenever I deploy a Rails site, I install the exception notification plugin so I get an email if a user provokes a bug I hadn't found. It's a piece of cake to install ... Continue

Ruby on Rails > How To... > Sending and Receiving email

Validating Email Addresses with Ruby

In any application in which a user enters an email address, there is the very real possibility that the user will make a typo and your application will end up with an invalid address. You can have them enter it twice, but this seems clunky. And you can, of course, send an email with an activation link, which ... Continue

Servers > Common Services > SSH

Using SSH Keys to Speed Login

With a basic SSH setup, you have to enter your password every time you log in to the server, which is not unreasonable from a security perspective. But if just use a password, you'll end up typing that it over and over again, even for a single deployment. Fortunately, there is a mechanism to avoid this ... Continue

Ruby on Rails

Understanding Ruby on Rails

If you're new to Ruby on Rails, you may be struggling to understand just what Rails is, what it can do for you, and what you need to learn to use it effectively. In this article, we'll explain just that. Continue

Ruby on Rails

Business > Conferences

Silicon Valley Ruby Conference

Last week's Silicon Valley Ruby Conference was perhaps the year's largest local gathering of Ruby enthusiasts, with 130 attendees. Here we present notes from a few of the presentations, on topics including Pivotal's Desert framework, IronRuby, Rubinius and Merb, and IBM's use of Rails. Continue

Servers > Rails Application Servers

Ruby on Rails > How To... > Security

Using SSL in Rails Applications

If your web application manages any private information, you should be using SSL (https://) for pages where that information is entered or displayed. Fortunately, implementing SSL isn't too hard, once you know what you need to do. Continue

Ruby on Rails > How To... > Performance Tuning

Can Rails Scale? Absolutely!

There's a persistent chatter about scalability in discussions of Rails, especially among people who aren't actually using it. When we talk with people considering Rails for new sites, concerns about scalability often come up. In reality, while Rails is not the world's speediest framework, the supposed scalability issues are very unlikely to be a legitimate reason not to use Rails. Continue

User Interface > Usability and Interaction Design

Jared Spool's Web App Summit

Last week's Web App Summit, produced by Jared Spool's User Interface Engineering, had more than the usual quotient of quality talks. The presentations were almost entirely focused on user experience, with technology and business receiving only tangential attention, but there were enough user experience insights to make it a worthwhile couple of days. Continue

Ruby on Rails > Testing > Fixtures

File Upload Form Testing Fixtures

Recently, I needed to write my first set of functional tests for a form that is used to upload image assets into our Content Management System. I wanted to find something as easy as fixtures for testing this part of our program. Continue

Ruby on Rails

2007: The Ruby on Rails Year in Review

Ruby on Rails had a very good year in 2007, continuing to gain traction as one of the leading web development frameworks and making progress on many fronts. Continue

Ruby on Rails > Views > Scaffolds

Better Rails Scaffolding

One of the things that created a lot of early attention for Rails was the scaffolding, which makes it possible to create an instant admin interface for your database tables. While the built-in scaffolding was interesting two years ago, it clearly has received no attention from the core team, which ... Continue