Mandarin Soda

Fixed a sorta obvious bug and added a new feature to acts_as_chimp today. You can now specify a list of merge tags in your acts_as_chimp model declaration like so:

acts_as_chimp :mailing_list_id => 'your_list_id', :mail_merge => {"EMAIL" => :email, "FNAME" => :first_name, "LNAME" => :last_name }


The plugin will read the method values corresponding to the symbols above when posting to MailChimp.

As an aside, the kind folks at MailChimp recently added acts_as_chimp to
their plugin page.

If you care to see (or not see as the case may be) acts_as_chimp in action, feel free to checkout
sprout.mn

Been playing around with accessing Braintree transactions from ActiveResource, using the Query API in particular. Thanks to the folks over at QuarkRuby, getting started was quite easy, so I figured I might as well post what I have for the uninitiated.

pastie

To get started using the API, use commands like the following:


t = Braintree.find(:all, :params => {:username => 'btdemo', :password => 'btdemo123', :last_name => 'Lin'})



t.each do |transaction|
transaction.gimme_my_money
end


Pretty straightforward stuff if you want to incorporate this into your Rails app, either for integration test verification or some admin pages.

Arguments about multiple Ruby VMs
Discussions about Twitter’s demise
Clueless clients
Every self-important blog posting I’ve read this month
Everything I said in April and May

If you’re using ActiveMerchant and want to setup recurring billing support for Braintree, you should be able to just modify the post parameters being sent across to include your recurring plan name in the following method in the Braintree gateway:

Braintree pastie

If you want to know more about ActiveMerchant, check out the Peepcode PDF. Should prove helpful.

Excellent news from RailsConf regarging GemStone’s new Ruby VM. Although, with all this work, I do sorta wonder why can’t we just push Smalltalk more into the mainstream? Or is it already secretly mainstream?

If you do anything web design or development related or just have some free time on your hands and feel like contributing to an interesting independent publisher, I highly recommend checking out Luke Wroblewski’s book on web form design. While somewhere in my subconscious I’ve definitely been annoyed by filling out forms, I hadn’t really realized how pervasive, disruptive and generally poorly designed most web forms are until I started digging into this book. The sidebar stories in the book are really interesting as well.

If you don’t already know about it, check my blogroll for Harper’s weekly updates. They’re just too damn good (and often depressing). From this past week:

House Republicans began using a new slogan, “the change you deserve,” which turned out to be the slogan of the antidepressant Effexor.11

Gap recently redesigned their sites to support a single basket across all brands. Looks like every site is using a hidden iframe to register events that observe Prototype posts to the cart DOM element in the upper right. Probably some funky session stuff going on as well. Here’s my favorite feature:

“Including the ability to purchase”. Hilarious. Nobodies perfect I guess.

Juno
Pitchfork recommendations
CSS frameworks
Javascript libraries
Insisting on always “rolling your own” (there’s a balance).
Tagging
A lot of Rails Plugins
Most social networks
Being a programmer
Being a manager of programmers
Being consistent
Being right
Having a strong opinion to blog about

What else?