Category Archives: Technology

pubsubhubbub Support

Just added support for pubsubhubbub with a WordPress Plugin.  Interested to see if my posts will appear in Google Reader any faster.  Probably not, but it can’t get much slower.  Which hubs are you using?

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SQL Logging to script/console

When running a Rails console session, a true time saver is directing the ActiveRecord logs to STDOUT instead of the log file.  This is easily accomplished adding the following to your ~/.irbrc file: if rails_env = ENV[’RAILS_ENV’] # Called after … Continue reading

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Error Handling with XML and Authlogic

I was helping a friend integrate an API into the application. He is running Rails 2.3.4 with Authlogic. His authentication check method was the following: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 def require_user unless current_user session[:return_to] = request.request_uri … Continue reading

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Hex Color Picker

One thing missing from the color picker in OS X is the ability to see the hex code for a color.  An absolute must for web development.  Luckily, there is a handy extension to add a pane to the color … Continue reading

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Capistrano – Deploying a Branch

When deploying from Capistrano, I like to have the following in my ‘deploy.rb’ file: set :scm, "git" set :repository, "git@www.example.com:project.git" set :git_shallow_clone, 1 set :deploy_via, :remote_cache This allows speeds deployments by keeping a versions checked out on the server in … Continue reading

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Capistrano – Email on Deployment

It’s a good practice to send a notification to certain people when a new version is deployed. This process can easily be automated in Capistrano. Add the following file to the ‘lib’ directory with the filename ‘cap_mailer.rb’: 1 2 3 … Continue reading

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Capistrano – Install Gems Remotely

Capistrano does not have out-of-the-box support for installing gems on your servers. You may not need this if you are packing them, but some of us would like to run the equivalent of ‘rake gems:install’. To do this in capistrano, … Continue reading

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Capistrano – Adding Help to Deployments

If you don’t do something everyday, you tend to forget how to do it. The same is with the deployments. To help this, you can easily add a help section to Capistrano in your ‘config/deploy.rb’ file. Here is a sample: … Continue reading

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Capistrano – Multiple Environments

Capistrano is designed to deploy your Rails application (yes it can handle others, but more work is required) to production.  However, most applications need to be deployed to more than one environment.  For example, we deploy to a staging environment … Continue reading

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Google Wave Invite Users Still Waiting

It looks like people who were invited to Google Wave by other users (the ones that received the original invite from Google) are still waiting to get their invite.  If Google sent out 100,000 invites and each user could invite … Continue reading

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