Ruby

Today I needed remote access to a gem I've been tinkering with for a while, so I pushed it to Gemcutter. It's called jstdutil, and it provides a small Ruby wrapper over JsTestDriver that adds colored output, a short, snappy `jstestdriver` command and autotest.

Full article Jstdutil - A Ruby wrapper over JsTestDriver.

I still get the occasional comment/request for help for Juicer on the original announcement. Due to spam problems I've now closed comments for the post and opened a Google group instead. Welcome to juicer-dev.

Full article Juicer Google group.

Gitorious is an open source Rails application for managing your projects: Git repositories, wikis, timeline and more. Not identical to, but not completely unlike GitHub. Being open source means you can set up your own Gitorious, even in private mode and host all your company's projects. In this article I'll show you how to get it running.

Full article Setting up Gitorious on your own server.

RVM (Ruby Version Manager) is a hot tool which makes switching between Rubys (1.8.6, 1.8.7, 1.9.1, JRuby, you name it) as simple as `rvm use 1.9.1`. However, on Ubuntu, you may hit trouble when using the openssl package for any non-system provided Ruby version.

Full article Ruby version manager, Ubuntu and openssl.

A couple of weeks ago I received a pull request from Mike Demers for Twibot. However, in contrast to the occasional bug fix I receive, this branch included several new features.

Full article Twibot gets a bunch of new features.

It's been quiet around here for a while. It's been quiet around Juicer, too. Both of those are going to change. After being given a push, Juicer is now finally up for some updates.

Full article Upcoming updates to Juicer.

I recently launched a website that among other things displays "tweets" (status messages on Twitter) from a predefined set of Twitter users. In this article I'll show you how you can create a stateful Twibot bot with a custom handler to put tweets in your database using ActiveRecord from a Rails application.

Full article Collecting tweets with Twibot and ActiveRecord.

Over the past few days I've been adding some bits and pieces that has really pimped by development environment into a slightly more productive one, and certainly a more enjoyable one.

Full article Pimp my development environment!.

Twibot 0.1.1 hit the RubyForge gem server today. Inside is a microframework for writing Twitter bots in Ruby, using a DSL heavily inspired by Sinatra.

Full article Twibot: A microframework for Twitter bots in Ruby.

For best performance, CSS and JavaScript should be served up using as few requests and bytes as possible. Juicer is a new command line tool that helps by resolving dependencies, merging and minifying files. It can even check your syntax, add cache busters to and cycle asset hosts on URLs in CSS files and more.

Full article Juicer - a CSS and JavaScript packaging tool.

A simple but useful implemenation of the chain of responsibility pattern in Ruby.

Full article Chain of responsibility in Ruby.

Liquid is a "safe, customer facing template language for flexible web apps". It's limited capabilities makes it the perfect email templating tool when you'd like designers and content producers to be able to edit and create email templates.

Full article Liquid email templates in Rails.

I've finally gotten around to checking out mod_rails. As it turns out, it was every bit as simple and impressing as I had suspected. Here's how I set up a multi-staging environment using mod_rails and Capistrano.

Full article Multi-staging environment for Rails using Capistrano and mod_rails.