Archive for the 'Rails' category

Lightweight Ruby Web Services

The recent Oreilly book Enterprise Rails has a few chapters on SOA and the entire time I was reading those chapters I kept thinking to myself that Rails is sorta overkill for most services implementations, unless you plan on bundling APIs and applications together. I was going to write something about translating the services [...]

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 [...]

Monitoring Radiant CMS and Phusion Passenger on Slicehost

In my previous post, I wrote about quickly setting an Ubuntu Hardy slice up with Radiant and the latest Phusion tools (mod_rails and Ruby Enterprise) and alluded to some setting up logging and monitoring as next steps. As monitoring and logging are fascinating subjects, I figured I’d follow up with a few sentences about [...]

Installing Radiant CMS and Phusion Passenger + Ruby Enterprise on Slicehost

I don’t really bother writing anything about Slicehost installs anymore, as Pickled Onion over at the slicehost articles site writes excellent, up-to-date articles on the most relevant deployment and configuration topics. However, I just did a Radiant install, complete with Phusion Passenger (mod_rails) and Ruby Enterprise on Ubuntu Hardy and found a nice shortcut [...]

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 [...]

Favorite New Gap.com Feature

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 [...]

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 [...]