February 2007
10 posts
3 tags
The new era of thoughtbot, inc.
We are excited to announce that as of February 26th, thoughtbot, inc. is no longer a “full service IT consulting company”. We are now exclusively a software and web application development company.
For some time now, we have been pursuing (and finding!) business growth on the development front—and the technical support side of things has made up less and less of our business, but continues to...
2 tags
Our ActiveRecord book ...and YOU!
Well, it has started to show up on the Apress website, so I believe that means there is no use in hiding it any longer. Jon and I (along with our co-author, Kevin Marshall) are currently hard at work on book for Apress, entitled Pro ActiveRecord for Ruby: Databases with Ruby and Rails.
The book will focus solely on ActiveRecord, both inside and outside of Rails, and seeks to be a complete...
Rails Patch: Change the name of the :id parameter...
A relatively little known fact about the rails routing helpers is that they use the ActiveRecord#to_param method for the id value. This means you can have the to_param method of a user object return the username, and access that resource as /users/georgebushlol. The problem is that you still have controller methods that look like this:
def show
@user = User.find_by_username(:id)
end
...
Once bitten twice shy
As somewhat of an obsessive perfectionist in certain technical regards, I found one of the conclusions of Mike Davidson’s Lessons From The Roundabout SEO Test to be interesting.
After doing a borderline legitimate (and certainly interesting!) analysis of why he’s the number 5 “Mike” on google, Davidson concludes:
The findings do support my initial suspicions about web standards as they...
Mocking a network resource with camping
Names have been changed to protect the innocent
One of our projects involves interacting with an internal credit card processing server. We wrote a small middle-layer library that will be talking to the server, and which will be shared among other applications that do credit card processing for this client. Basically, we post XML to the server (which contains the CC info), and get back XML...
3 tags
A Convenient Squirrel Addition
This is probably something that should have been done sooner, but I didn’t get around to it and it wasn’t immediately important to us. Since it now is, I changed Squirrel’s call to ActiveRecord::Base#find to include all parameters passed in, even the extra hash variables find normally uses. While this isn’t terribly amazing on its own (although it does mean you can use :limit even though it...
1 tag
Making A Radio Station With Ruby
As far as I know, everyone at thoughtbot likes everyone else. I can tell because everyone mocks everyone else mercilessly. Figuring that there’s no more effective way to mock people than over their musical tastes, I thought an office radio station would be a great little service to have running. I just wanted a way for all of us to play our music and have everyone listening to the same thing at...
Yay!
Something Simple and Very Attractive
I came across a blog entry recently regarding Moo MiniCards™ and immediately fell in love with the idea of having 100 of my very own super-tiny little printed cards with my own pictures on them:
I love the fact that the cards are printed with a 32:74 ratio.
I love the fact that I can migrate my photos from my Flickr account into the Moo site and size and crop them.
I will buy a pack of...
1 tag
ActiveResource and Testing
ActiveResource is a pretty amazing implementation of REST, made in Ruby, for Rails. By the Rails core. Invented by DHH. It’s got good credentials. Sadly, it did not make it into Rails 1.2, so there is tons of buzz about it, but very little in the way of actual resources and active discussion. The only thorough treatment of ActiveResource out there I can find is by a Rails core member, and...