There are some cool new changes in Ruby On Rails 3.1 like: asset pipeline, SASS & CoffeeScript and lots of other goodies. But adding so many new features makes it challenging to learn it all and keep up. Fortunately, there are a bunch of awesome new books and resources that are popping up all over the place.
I’ve read three of the most current titles I could find on the subject: Ruby on Rails 3 Tutorial, Agile Web Development with Rails and Rails 3 In Action. All are great books, but depending on your interest you may want to choose one over the other.
Read the Reviews
Since I always forget some of the less common HTML status codes when debugging or testing, I compiled a cheat sheet for all the HTML status codes.
In most cases, non-HTML 1.1 defined codes reference their defining source RFC. It also includes some less common “standards”.
I hope you find it useful too.
See the Full List
For anyone who was a kid and can remember Saturday-morning cartoons, this may bring back memories. I was a late 60s kid and just barely remember this. My favorite cartoon because the violence was real, not that I was into violence, but it didn’t feel so kiddie. Actions have consequences, unlike the A-Team.
I also loved the 60s flavor and the great villains. Who wouldn’t want to work on awesome projects like lasers and talking to dolphins on their private beach island? This is the computer geek’s ultimate scenario.
Benton Quest wasn’t bogged down by bureaucratic bullshite while he whiled away the hours visiting castles or remote islands on his private jet.
Someone else is a fan and made this amazing recreation of the opening sequence in stop-action. I can’t tell if it’s CGI or some sort of plasticine models, but it’s damn cool.
Enjoy.
After I updated a rails project to Rails 3.1 it seemed to suddenly stop working with my POW server. WTF?
I kept getting this error on my test site:
Error starting application
Your Rack app raised an exception when Pow tried to run it. ![Rack Error message]()
Message when using POW and RVM with Rails 3.1
I am an RVM user and I knew it was something to do with that fantastical tool. It turned out I was right.
Even though I had activated Ruby 1.9.2 via RVM, it turns out POW needs to do the same thing. This is where .rvmrc files come in.
I basically generated an .rvmrc file for the project containing: rvm 1.9.2 and it worked fine after that. As usual, I found links after I solved the issue. See this github issue for more info on the solution.
Image Credit: Courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection
I’ve had my iPad now for almost a year and I guess I’ve had plenty of time to determine my favorite iPad apps.
I also have a toddler and I find that I need to share time on my iDevices just to save my iSanity, so here are some of my favorite toddler applications.
I intended to categorize them into things like Educational, Story or Games, but it seems like each of them crosses over so much that I just decided to put them into one list with annotation.
See The List
I like to take a break from web design topics occasionally to plug productivity software that I love.
Do any of these sound familiar?
- A monitor covered in sticky notes with passwords written on them?
- Spending hours digging around in drawers.
- Submitting the “Forgot my Password” and resetting them weekly?
If so, you are exactly like me. But one of my New Year’s resolutions was to manage my time better.
So for ath, I chose to stop wasting time and get a password manager that just worked.
My choice: 1Password. (Surprise, surprise!)
Read the Full Review
I’ve written about the dangers of free WordPress themes before, but here is a great article on the topic demonstrating the risk of searching for “free WordPress themes” in Google.
The results? Nine of the top ten results contain backlinks to a host of sites, some legitimate, some less so. All encoded so they are obfuscated, or masked, from your average WordPress neophyte. To say that it’s an honest way to provide free themes via sponsored links is probably legitimate, but then to encode and warn users, incorrectly, that removing the links will break the theme is not.
Verdict: If you are looking for free themes, go to the source. Otherwise, there are some really good options for paid themes. I’ve written about the Thesis WordPress theme many times before, but I still recommend it for anyone who wants an easy-to-customize WordPress theme.
The choice is yours, but be careful out there.
I see a lot of repeated questions on the best way to hide Page Titles in Thesis, so I guess it must be a pretty common issue.
While there are a bunch of ways to do it which either require hacking PHP code (which is prone to breaking something) or hiding it in CSS (which may impact your search rankings) I have never been fully satisfied with them. But, as usual, there is a better way–using Thesis Filters.
Read The Full Tutorial →
Image Credit: Work Less, Read
More
I guess I’ve been doing a lot of work lately on being able to [do blog
posts by email][1]. When combined with a useful [Markdown WordPress
plugin][2], it really expands your ability to get stuff written and I’m
loving it.
Never content to leave things be, I decided to add some additional
functionality to the [Postie plugin][3]: namely, customizing the Read
More link text for Thesis theme.
A nice feature of [Thesis][4] (and other theme frameworks) is the
customizability. When I was adding some [custom Thesis post image
support for Postie][1] in my other article, I decided it wouldn’t be much
more work to add a way to set the text used when you specify your
<!–More–> tag text. This allows you to make a more interesting
link than just “Read More…”.
If you are interested in doing this, then read on…
Onward To The Details →
