Archive for the 'Programming' category

Introducing Swanky Mango: Swap On Twitter

It’s far from complete, but launched a Twitter swap site tonight. The basic idea is to have creative folks offer their skills or services and swap skills with others to get things done without the taint of cash. We’ll see how it goes…..
Link to other Twitter mashups.

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 [...]

Recurring billing with Braintree and ActiveMerchant

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 [...]

Trouble with acts_as_taggable_on_steroids

The tag_counts instance method appears broken. I don’t have time to submit a patch right now, so I figured I’d write a quick post for others running into this issue. What I’m seeing is that if you try to access the tag_counts instance method (ie: @post.tag_counts), you’ll see a good times SQL exception much [...]

Rails Plugin for MailChimp

A plugin that beats the monkey metaphors to death:
script/plugin install git://github.com/matthewjcarlson/acts_as_chimp .
Let me know if it does or doesn’t work. It’s less a library then an implementation of a use case I’ve encountered a few times recently. As such, while plugins are falling out of favor a bit, I felt like a [...]

Rails and MailChimp

acts_as_chimp plugin underway this evening….finished product will be here shortly.
update: an early version of the plugin has been added to a github repository. Please see this post.

Is Your Site Green?

Interesting post from the High Performace Web Sites Blogs. Perhaps not surprisingly, efficient page serving is good for your users and our environment.

Sun not feeling Groovy?

What language will feel the love next?