atom thoughts

Dr Nic just ported over all of TextMate’s Rails snippets as RadRails templates. These should definitely add a boost to your productivity as you can type most commands for Rails development in just a few keystrokes. I have been meaning to spend more time getting Eclipses templates incremented into my dev process and this is just the boost I needed.

Get your templates and read Dr. Nic’s announcement on his blog.

I just released another version of the Gift Hat. You can read all about it on the Gift Hat blog. Stop by and check it out.

This should free up some time for me to start blogging a bit more. I have a bit of a backlog of topics I want to discuss. You should start seeing some more posts starting next week.

I just ran across an interesting feature of gmail. You can append a + sign and random text to the end of your existing gmail email address and gmail will send it to your existing gmail account. For example, if your gmail acount was fakeemail@gmail.com, then you could send email to fakeemail+nospam@gmail.com and you will still receive it. You can then setup a gmail filter to move these emails into the trash, or tag them with a label, etc.

I have been using this a lot lately when signing up with various accounts. I also setup a separate notification email address that I use to send automated notifications with a monitoring script when any of my sites are down (more details on this monitoring script to follow in a future post).

After seeing one too many sites named with a trailing r, similar to Flickr, my friend Brian and I decided to start cataloguing them on a website. The site is called rdiculous.com to poke a little fun at this bizarre web2.0 website naming trend. It is incredible how many there are and we have just started to scratch the surface.

Stop on by and check it out at rdiculous.com. We are posting more of them nearly every day, so if you know of any that we missed please drop us a line.

Just ran across this very useful AJAXified api reference while trolling through the RoR mailing list:

http://www.gotapi.com/

It has support for a ton of different languages including:
Ruby, RubyOnRails, Javascript, HTML, CSS, XML, Actionscript, Java, PHP, Perl, C, C++, and more…

I am pretty impressed with the interface from my brief experimentation. Very snappy. Check it out.

Here is a nice RUnit cheat sheet courtesy of nubyonrails.

I am all about the cheat sheets, such as this handy prototype cheat sheet

I recently ran into some difficulties while fetching random html pages and images using ruby so I thought others may benefit from my experience.

Ruby has two (and probably many more) great libraries for fetching http data:

• Net::Http
• OpenURI

OpenURI has a much nicer API and takes care of things like http redirects for you. However, if you try to fetch data over HTTPS, you will see a message like Certificate Verify Failed.

To get around this limitation I’ve written this simple method for fetching data that will enable ssl when necessary and follow all redirects:

def self.get_data(url, limit = 10)
  raise "Too Many Redirects" if limit == 0
  uri = URI.parse url
  server = Net::HTTP.new uri.host, uri.port
  server.use_ssl = uri.scheme == 'https'
  server.verify_mode = OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_NONE
  response = server.get uri.request_uri

  case response
    when Net::HTTPSuccess then response['host'] = uri.host; response['path'] = uri.path; response
    when Net::HTTPRedirection then self.get_data(response['location'], limit - 1)
    else
      response.error!
  end
end

Also, you will notice that I add the host and path into the response since in my case I use that information for building the full path to the images.

Enjoy!

I moved the main GiftHat discussion over to the shiny new Gift Hat Blog. So, if you’d like to stay up to date, please stop by.

I just snuck out another GiftHat.com release which includes two great new features:

• You can publish your wishlist right on your website or blog. See My Wishlist on the right as an example.
• I added a new feature to make it easy to select an image for your gift. Just type in a website for your gift and I will fetch all the images from that page and let you select one to go with your gift:

  

Also, pretty soon I will be adding a blog to the Gift Hat so I can move the majority of these types of announcements over there.

I am going to try to keep this blog more focused on web development using RubyOnRails and javascript, but I will include lots of examples from my projects. If you would like to know how I did any of the features in the GiftHat.com, just drop me a note and I will add it to my list of topics to discuss here.

NOTE: This blog is no longer running Typo

In this article I am going to discuss the steps necessary to add the excellent CodeRay syntax
highlighting library to your Typo blog installation. The newest version of Typo ships with
support for the syntax gem, but I have found that the
CodeRay gem does a much better job and supports a lot more languages including:

• ruby
• C
• Delphi
• HTML
• RHTML
• Nitro-XHTML

Install CodeRay

There are a couple different ways you can install CodeRay:

• By gem
• In the typo/vendor directory.

For my case, I chose to install CodeRay using the vendor directory since the gem way
is not ideal for a shared hosting environment.

To install CodeRay into your typo/vendor directory:

# Either download the CodeRay source into your typo/vendor/coderay directory or setup
an svn:externals for CodeRay. To setup the svn:externals, type this from the root
of your typo install:

svn propedit svn:externals vendor

and add this line into the externals for the vendor directory:

coderay svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/coderay/trunk/coderay/trunk/lib

and then update your CodeRay src with this command:

svn up vendor

Create the CodeRay text filter

Now we will create a custom Typo text filter for sending code through CodeRay.

NOTE: This requires either Typo 4 or greater, or an earlier unreleased Typo that supports
text filters.

If you want to skip the explanation, here is a patch file
that you can apply from the root of your typo installation:

patch < typo.coderay.diff

This diff contains the following four changes:

• A modification to the typo environment
• A CodeRay text filter
• A CodeRay css stylesheet
• A modification to the add the CodeRay stylesheet to the typo theme

A modification to the typo environment

In order to have typo load the CodeRay code into our rails environment, we needed to add
the vendor/coderay path into the config load paths. The patch will do this for you.

A CodeRay text filter

The CodeRay text filter is very similar to the Code text filter. It is impressive how
little code it takes to add this CodeRay functionality into typo. All of the work for this
text filter is done in this method:

def self.macrofilter(controller,content,attrib,params,text='')
  lang = attrib['lang'] || 'ruby'
  tokens = CodeRay.scan(text, lang)
  result = tokens.div(:line_numbers => :table)
  '<notextile>#{result}</notextile>'
end

A CodeRay css stylesheet

After applying the patch, the CodeRay css file will be located here:

public/stylesheets/coderay.css

A modification to the add the CodeRay stylesheet to the typo theme

The patch above will apply the CodeRay css to the default azure theme. You can manually
add it to any theme by just adding this line to the top of your theme within the tags:

<%= stylesheet_link_tag "/stylesheets/coderay", :media => ‘all’ %>

Using the CodeRay text filter

To use the CodeRay text filter in your code, surround any code you wish to display in
typo:coderay tags and optionally specify the language to format (the default is ruby).
Here is a simple example (Note: remove the space between typo and coderay, I only added it so it would not be grabbed by the coderay text filter):

  <typo: coderay lang="html">
    <div id="somediv">The div that I am</div>
  </typo: coderay>