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Monthly Archives: January 2011

attr_bucket, A Gem for Your Lolrus Model

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Good evening, Internet! I hope you had a wonderful and productive workday. Now, with those pleasantries out of the way, I’d like to point you in the direction of a little gem called attr_bucket that I am regretful for having written even as I type this blog post suggesting you go try it. That is because this gem, while tiny and unassuming, has tremendous potential for evil.

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Jan 27, 2011

How Writing Libraries Restored my Faith in Open Source

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37signals recently announced that they intend to drop support for OpenID authentication in their products. Good move. Even as a geek — someone who understands the reasoning behind OpenID — I’ve always found the actual implementations of OpenID to be needlessly cumbersome. But that’s not what this post is about. This post is about how a parenthetical in a comment by DHH on a HN post about the news helped me realize something huge about my experiences in the open source community.
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Jan 25, 2011

MetaWhere and MetaSearch 1.0.0 released!

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This has been a long time coming. Both MetaSearch and MetaWhere entered development as Rails 3-only gems early last year. Developing them was a great learning process, as I got to dive deeper into the innards of Rails and ARel than I ever expected, and track ARel through a complete rewrite and maintainer change, as well. The only updates you’ll notice from the last released gems are the docs (MetaSearch/MetaWhere), which should now be up to date (site docs to follow soon). It feels good to finally hit 1.0!

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Jan 17, 2011

Current MetaWhere/MetaSearch Gems are RCs

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Things have largely quieted down on the MetaSearch/MetaWhere front. The currently released gems are working well for me on a few large-ish projects, and I haven’t seen any serious bug reports in quite some time. I’m happy with the existing APIs, and while I’d certainly like to do a bit of refactoring, that’s nothing that should result in a breaking change. All this being said, I’m considering the latest releases of MW/MS as release candidates, and will be pushing out 1.0.0 of both relatively soon, barring any serious issues. Please get your bug reports in now!

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Jan 13, 2011

Mobile Devices and Rails: Maintaining your Sanity

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The “mobile web” may look more like the web we know and love as devices get more powerful, but there will always be a place for a bit of customization in the name of improved UX on mobile browsers. CSS media queries go a long way toward accomplishing this, but you may find yourself wanting to do more. Ask around or do some searches, and you’ll find the usual answer to supporting mobile devices in Rails involves adding a MIME alias for text/html named “iphone” or “mobile” with register_alias, then forcing a mobile request’s format to this MIME for use with respond_to. This can work, but it’s a huge pain in the neck, and I believe there’s a better way. Read on.
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Filed under Blog
Jan 5, 2011