John Plummer . com

Optional Parameters in View Partials

John — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 12:37:20 +0000

It’s generally good practise to pass variables to view partials using locals rather than littering your code with @variables. This allows better reuse of the partial. To make the locals optional, provide default values if they are nil or undefined. I have seen many recommendations to do this with a test for defined? According to [...]

Rails 3.1 on Heroku, TLDR Version

John — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 15:44:28 +0000

Create the app If not installed, install PostgreSQL rails new app_name -T -d=postgresql cd app_name/ rvm --create --rvmrc 1.9.2@app_name rvm rvmrc trust Edit .Gemfile bundle install createuser -P -S -R -d app_name (no to ‘Superuser’ and ‘Create roles’, yes to ‘Create databases’) rake db:create Create procfile in app root. foreman start and check http://0.0.0.0:5000/ Push [...]

Does Email Obfuscation Work?

John — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 21:01:10 +0000

It seems to be common wisdom that if you put your email address on the web in plain text you will get spammed (more). There are various ways to try and hide an email address from various crawlers whist still displaying it to visitors, most involving javascript and relying on the crawlers not having [...]

Installing Postgresql and pgAdmin

John — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 13:10:39 +0000

The default database for Heroku is PostgreSQL and, while you could use SQLite for development and Postgres for production, there are some inconsistencies between the two. Ideally you would use the same version of the database server but currently Heroku uses version 9 for dedicated databases and 8.3 for shared databases and seem to [...]

Setting up Rails on a Clean Install of Mac OS X Lion

John — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 10:03:33 +0000

I realise that OSX does not have a registry to clog up but I have just reinstalled Lion on my Macbook Air; probably a hang up from Windows. This is a checklist for installing Homebrew >> Rails. Install XCode 4.1 (There are issues with the 4.2 compiler and certain rubies and gems) Install Homebrew https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/wiki/installation [...]

Changing Three Finger Swipe to Back in Lion

John — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 11:43:54 +0000

Lion introduces some new gestures which unfortunately breaks some gestures I am used to such as a three finger swipe to move back in Chrome. Easily fixed by opening System Preferences > Trackpad > More Gestures and changing swipe between full screen apps to use four fingers and swipe between pages to use three.

Rails default scripts and jquery-rails

John — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 20:49:00 +0000

I recently had an issue in a (3.0.7) rails app where link_to some_path, :method => :post was calling the action associated with GET, this was caused by not having a link to jquery_ujs.js (I’m using jquery so don’t want rails.js) in my html output. Googling turns up a number of suggestions to add jquery_ujs.js and [...]

Rails Autoload and Ruby Require

John — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 12:51:19 +0000

Rails methods of locating and loading files is mostly based on convention but is built on top of Ruby’s methods. Ruby The basic way to tell a ruby to load a file is to require it, e.g. require some_file will load some_file.rb if the file has not already been loaded. load some_file.rb will load the [...]

Launching irb from vim

John — Thu, 19 May 2011 18:30:48 +0000

You can run irb from vim with the command !irb. Running !irb -r % should run the current file in irb then leave irb open. Unfortunately ruby 1.9.2 removed the current directory from the load path which causes this to fail. You could construct a path but it is easier to add the current directory [...]

Recovering from ‘the application finder can’t be opened’

John — Thu, 19 May 2011 16:06:30 +0000

Every now and again I get an error when opening finder: ‘the application finder can’t be opened’ Whilst I am sure a restart would fix it, I normally don’t want to restart as I am in the middle of something. The solution is to run the following in terminal: /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/MacOS/Finder & (don’t forget the &) [...]