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Timelines.com Launches; RailsConf 2009

Geoff, Zach, Trevor, Bob, Brian, and I (Scott) recently launched Timelines.com. Timelines is a place for people to record and share history about any topic. We want it to be the Wikipedia of event-based information, but unlike Wikipedia we want everyone to have a voice and add their own perspectives (and photos, videos, etc) about events. We’ve got lots of plans for the site and a feature list a mile long, but we thought we’d launch it as soon as possible to start soliciting event information.

This site was built using Rails, jQuery, Postgres, Lucene, and CouchDB, and we’re hosting it on EC2 (3 instances, one each for: application, postgres, and couch). Zach has really gotten involved in the CouchDB community, and he should be putting some interesting info on using Rails and CouchDB on his blog soon.

We’re off the RailsConf this afternoon in Vegas. While we’re there, we’ll be gathering info for our RailsConf 2009 topic on Timelines.com. See you there.

Honeypot filter as a Rack middleware

Our site’s suggestion box got hammered by a spambot recently, so I created this simple Rack middleware to protect our app from any requests that include a honeypot field:

Been using this in production for a few days; seems to work well. Interested in hearing comments on this technique.

Thanks to Zach Zolton for the idea, and to Trevor Turk for adding documentation.

Phusion Passenger on Nginx

Phusion Passenger now runs on Nginx. I rarely get this excited about such a technical thing, but color me excited. Congrats to the Phusion team and Ezra/EY for making this happen. I can’t wait to re-deploy using Nginx.

I’m curious to see if Engine Yard will begin to move their current infrastructure over to Passenger now that Apache is safely out of the picture. This is certainly one of the final death knells for Mongrel (and Thin and Ebb).

This also means Sinatra and other Rack-based apps can run with Nginx. Lots of exciting stuff on the horizon for Rack, as well.

Making Rails time zone aware attributes and Chronic play well together

I came up with this monkeypatch to Time.zone.parse, so that it uses the Chronic time parsing library instead of Time.parse:

…with this in place, I can assign natural language date/time strings to model attributes, and the values will be parsed in the current Time.zone:

Two Surveys You Should Take

If you’re a Web developer of any stripe, please take A List Apart’s Survey for People Who Make Web Sites 2008, as it truly is beneficial to everyone in the industry.

Remove the web, and billions in trade disappear. Websites enable people who can’t walk to run to the store. They bring knowledge and freedom of thought to places where such things are scarce; make every person with a connection a citizen of the world; and allow every citizen to be heard.

Yet nobody bothered to conduct a serious inquiry into the working conditions of people who make websites until A List Apart launched its first survey in 2007.

If you’re a Ruby developer, head on over to Hampton Catlin’s Ruby Survey 2008.

Two fixes to ActiveSupport::TimeWithZone

Last night, I pulled in two fixes to the ActiveSupport::TimeWithZone class to the Rails 2-1-stable branch:
[Read more →]

RailsConf 2008

Geoff and I are both looking forward to RailsConf this year. Feel free to say “hello”—whether it’s to find about potential job opportunities at our startup or to thank/complain to Geoff about the new TimeZone stuff in 2.1.

I’m not sure what sessions we’ll be attending, but our first stop might be the Yehuda Katz/EY session on Using jQuery with Rails. We’ve used jQuery with Rails for over a year now, and even have a bunch of Rails-specific jQuery plugins we’d like to release at some point. The schedule on the RailsConf site has it at 9:30 PM while the iCal schedule has it at 11:30 PM. The former will most likely interfere with a planned dinner with our good friend Ben, unfortunately.

See you in Portland!

Rails 2.1 Time Zone Support: An Overview

A Portuguese translation of this article can be found here.

This will be the first of several posts I’ll create about the new time zone features in the upcoming Rails 2.1 release. In this post, I’ll give an overview of the new features, by walking through the setup of a new app.

I’ll start with a fresh Rails 2.1 app created via the rails command. [Read more →]

Time Zone Visualizations

I’ve been doing a lot of work with time zones recently; they’re notoriously difficult to wrap one’s head around, so I created a few visualizations to help me.

[Read more →]

Javascript + embedded Ruby templates with Rails, out-of-the-box

I recently tried using Dan Webb’s MinusMOR plugin, which allows you to write Javascript templates with embedded Ruby (a la .html.erb/.rhtml templates), but I was disappointed to find out it didn’t work with Edge Rails.

I found a random Pastie via Google that seemed to fix the plugin for Edge, and this worked okay, with the caveat that you couldn’t render partials that used the new .html.erb naming scheme (just .erb would work), and given this, and the fact that MinusMOR’s author wasn’t keeping this plugin up-to-date, I was hoping to find a better solution.

And I did find a better solution — if you’re using Edge Rails, you can create Javascript templates with embedded Ruby out-of-the-box, no plugins or monkeypatching necessary. You just need to name the template in the action.js.erb format. Example:
[Read more →]