Let’s say you have a Rails app and you’d like any URLs in any plain text string to be automatically hyperlinked. Well, then you’ll need this:
.gsub(/((http|https)://[a-z0-9]+([-.]{1}[a-z0-9]+)*.[a-z]{2,5}(([0-9]{1,5})?/.*)?)/, '<a href='1'>1</a>')

For example:
I blog at http://garrickvanburen.com

Through:
"I blog at http://garrickvanburen.com".description.gsub(/((http|https)://[a-z0-9]+([-.]{1}[a-z0-9]+)*.[a-z]{2,5}(([0-9]{1,5})?/.*)?)/, '<a href='1'>1</a>')

Results in:
I blog at http://garrickvanburen.com

Jon Steinhorst once told me a movies are rewritten from script to shoot, and again from shoot to editing. I spent a good chunk of this week re-writing a Ruby on Rails app to go from development to production.

Works fine in development. Not at all in production.

The issue was a combination of frozen gems and cookies.

First off, while TextDrive recommends depending on your vendor directory for any Ruby gems unique to your project, I found success with Geoffrey Grosenbach‘s Freeze Other Gems Rake task that sends them to /lib

Secondly, I wasn’t able to reliably set and retrieve cookies. Turns out I needed to access the cookie with a string, not a symbol.

All the resources I found say this should work in the controller
cookies[:the_timezone]

But it doesn’t, this does:
cookies['the_timezone']

Then in the view (specifically a select menu) I need to use this:
time_zone_options_for_select(cookies['the_timezone'].value,TZInfo::Timezone.us_zones,TZInfo::Timezone)

Still working through deploying a Rails app (if you’ve been following along, I got Subversion plugged in yesterday). Today was setting up the deployment by running:
rake remote:setup

The process kept erroring out saying:
No File or Directory - /tmp/501/SSHKeychain.socket

Turns out I had a bunch of cruft in ~/.MacOSX/properties.plist. After cutting out the offending xml and restarting. Everything worked as expected.

I spent tonight cranking through some Ruby on Rails has_many :through association oddities and after pounding my head against the keyboard, I decided to shift gears and figure out Ruby On Rails Routes.

By default, the Rails expects ID to be passed in URL strings. But that’s really lame, and passing words is much cooler so, how do you do that?

Turns out, it’s so simple no one talks about it (vs. so hard no one’s figured it out).

Take the following example:
http://mydomain/friend/show/1

What’s ‘show’? Who’s friend 1? Don’t they have a name?
Sure they do. Let’s say their name is ‘Wooster’

Here’s how to make turn the above url string into:
http://mydomain/friend/wooster

1. Get the name of the database column storing your friends’ names (let’s say it’s ‘name’).
2. In config/routes.rb add, somewhere above the default route:
   map.connect 'friend/:name', :controller => 'friends', :action => 'show'
3. Now, in friends_controller, find def show and change it to:
   @friend = Friend.find_by_name(params[:name])
4. Lastly, all the id-based urls pointing to our good friend Wooster need to be updated to reflect the name-based change. Like the one your Friends list.rhtml file.
   'show', :name => friend.name