After switching from Wordpress to the Jekyll static site generator, I put together a short presentation on Jekyll to share with the Phoenix Ruby community. The slides cover some of the basics of what Jekyll is, the features it provides and a few gotchas we found along the way.
Arizona’s first Ruby conference is happening soon. There’s a great group of speakers as well as lightning talks and hacking. If you’re interested in Ruby, this is a conference you won’t want to miss!
I have to believe that the developers behind Internet Explorer have good intentions. It might ruin my world view and trust in people if that turned out to not be the case. However, there are instances where they go too far.
In this case, Internet Explorer tries to be “helpful” by automatically setting the link text when you set the href attribute of an anchor tag. I present the details of when this will happen and how you can get around it.
When developing for the web, if there is one browser that will not look correct, it is almost guaranteed to be a version of IE.
This was the case when I recently encountered elements that appeared to have a fixed position when they were not styled in that way. The problem was only visible on IE7 and, as I discovered, was a known bug in IE since version 6.
This article describes two different solutions to this problem.
Honeypot captchas are a simple, unobtrusive way to try to combat automated form spam. I packaged some work I did a few years ago using this technique in Ruby on Rails forms and created a gem.
Sometimes, Rails queries can get long and complicated. Using named bind variables is an easy way to give some context to the query and, when you need to supply the same value to multiple query conditions, can shorten the query parameters.
Cucumber has a relatively new feature that allows you to tag individual scenarios as “should pass” versus “work-in-progress”. Rake tasks are provided that run the two groups of tagged scenarios separately.
The Ruby on Rails built-in inflections don’t handle singularizing words like “business” or “address” correctly. Here’s a quick way to make sure it’s handled in your Rails project.
Describes a fatal error in Rack v1.0.0 that may need to be patched until a new version is released. If you’re seeing a “invalid byte sequence in US-ASCII” error, then read on!
I encountered a problem after extracting some common functionality into a Rails plugin that contained two named scopes. It was not returning the correct results and it took me a while to figure it out. With the help of Chris Chandler we determined the cause and a solution so that the named scopes work correctly from within a Rails plugin.
I'm a pragmatist, an idea generator and a doer of deeds that need doing. I may have an unhealthy obsession with pirates and coffee. I also enjoy making work for other people. Get to know me and you'll see what I mean.
