Archive for the 'Programming' category

Accessing FedEx Web Services From Ruby/Rails

I recently played around with adding FedEx shipping services to the active_shipping plugin and found a bit of confusion online in regards to how to hit FedEx depending upon the style of service being exposed. Somewhat confusingly, FedEx has non-SOAP services as well as SOAP services that you can hit restfully in an HTTPS [...]

Netflix API Authentication with the Ruby Oauth Gem

For any folks out there struggling to get the Ruby OAuth gem working with Netflix authentication, here’s a quick run down on how to get started.
The 0.2.7 version of Ruby OAuth isn’t totally compatible with the Netflix authentication APIs. However, thanks to the grooviness that it is GitHub, Rob Ares graciously forked the OAuth [...]

DataMapper Adapter for Netflix

I’ve apparently caught the DM Adapter bug, as I’ve decided to write one to access Netflix while I finish up my MailChimp adapter.
I’ll be posting as I go along, as I’ve been learning quite a bit about the inner workings of DataMapper while going through this process.
Cheers.

Writing a DataMapper Adapter to Access MailChimp Web Services From Merb

As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve started looking into writing DataMapper Adapters, using my MailChimp wrapper as an example. Thus far, I’ve been pretty impressed with the Adapter layer built into DataMapper and the possibilities this abstraction layer provides. A quick search over at GitHub will show you all the interesting [...]

DataMapper Adapter for MailChimp

Inspired by this post by The Merbist, I’ve decided to begin writing a Datamapper Adapter for MailChimp as a follow up to my post about creating a Merb web service. Look here for updates. Just an empty shell at the moment, but I’ll remedy that shortly.

Zeep SMS Gem Configuration for Rails

For whatever reason, I can rarely remember the myriad syntax for managing gem dependencies in Rails. I’ve visited this page quite a bit during various projects.
When trying to install the zeep messaging gem recently, sure enough I struggled a bit with getting the syntax correct.
Anyway, without further ado, here is [...]

Writing a Simple MailChimp Web Service Using Merb

A while back, I was asked to build some code to help keep a businesses mailing list synchronized between SalesForce.com and their campaign management tool, which I suggested should be MailChimp and not the tool they were currently using, but I digress. The project never materialized, but I figured I would build it anyway [...]

Web Site Optimization News

Some interesting resources and news in the world of web site optimization recently. Good stuff for those who care about this sort of thing. I look forward to clogging up my works print queue with Velocity presentations on Monday even though printing is a bit evil.

Acts_as_Chimp Updates

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:
[sourcecode language='ruby']
acts_as_chimp :mailing_list_id => ‘your_list_id’, :mail_merge => {”EMAIL” => :email, “FNAME” => :first_name, “LNAME” => :last_name }
[/sourcecode]
The plugin will read the method values corresponding to the [...]

Braintree and ActiveResource

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 [...]