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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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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:

class ActiveSupport::TimeZone
  # requires technoweenie’s fork of the Chronic time parsing library
  # http://github.com/technoweenie/chronic/tree/master
  def parse(str)
    Chronic.time_class = self
    Chronic.parse(str, :now => now)
  end
end
…with this in place, I can assign natural language date/time strings [...]

Two fixes to ActiveSupport::TimeWithZone

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

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

RailsEdge – Chicago

Geoff and I will be attending RailsEdge in Chicago this weekend. If you see us there be sure to ask Geoff about his jQuery for Rails plugin that he has developed and that we’ve been using for the past couple of months in a number of projects.

Integrating jQuery and Rails: use unobtrusive Javascript instead of view helpers

The jQuery Way to apply behavior to a document is to add it unobtrusively via the $(document).ready() function, ideally in an external script file… unlike the Rails Way, which is to add behavior to individual elements via inline Javascript, using the built-in view helpers.
The markup generated by these helpers is obtrusive, and often repetitive. For [...]