Random Articles

• Parsing Arbitrary XML Namespaces in Ruby with Hpricot (This post inspired by a Ruby.MN conversation) I’ve burned through at least 3 different XML parsing libraries in building Cullect. I started the built-in REXML (pro: built-in, con: heavy and slow) then moved to FeedTools (pro: easily parses the most common feed formats, con: no longer in active development). I have a lot of love for
• Introducing the HijackingWP Script One of my biggest problems with podcasting is the production process. Even without editing the audio, the process is far too manual to repeat without inherent discouragement (65 podcasts in year 1 and 20 in year 2 should speak to that). In an effort to publish more and make podcasting as effortless as writing this post,
• Tail-ing Remote Rails Production.log Locally If you’re a Ruby on Rails developer wanting to keep an eye on what’s happening with your production apps, you already know Capistrano will do it for you: cap shell tail -f web/shared/log/production.log1 Thanks to John Nunemaker’s comment at anodyne.ca 1. Your path may vary.
• Learning the Rails I’m taking a week off of active programming to focus on better understanding 3 aspects of Rails development I’ve been wistfully ignoring: Migrations, Testing, and Deployment. There’s a tiny, fun little project I’m using as the venue for these subjects. One week from today (May 1) is what I’m giving myself on this effort. Any longer
• Ruby on Rails Snippet for Changing Relative Paths to Absolute If you have a bunch of text containing relative path hyperlinks, and you’d like to change to them to absolute paths, you might find this snippet helpful. content = "some text with a <a href='/path/to/relative_link/'>relative link</a>" link = "http://somedomain.com/" content.gsub(/=('|")\//, '=\1*/').gsub(/\*\//, link.match(/(http|https):\/\/[\w.]+\//)[0]) The asterisk ‘*’ is a hackey placeholder for the actual link swapped in with the second gsub.