I am working on an open source project called Sinatra Commerce You guessed it from the name, it is a flexible modular e-commerce system built using Sinatra.

In this post I share some of my thoughts on why I started it and why I didn’t choose to use Rails/Spree.

I have finally read up on responsive web design from the excellent short book by Ethan Marcotte, Responsive Web Design

Here are some thoughts on the book and the whole responsive design movement.

I am currently in the Middle East and needless to say it is very hot here. The temperature hovers from 37 to 45+ Celsius. So as you can imagine the AC’s are on all day and you tend to want to drink a lot of water.

Just a quick note to say that we have launched www.glimmeringlights.com

Glimmering Lights is a joint business endeavour to bring the beauty of hand made high quality lighting from around the world to the UK market.

I needed to make a Rake task in Rails to take a command line argument alongside the Rails environment.

It is not that obvious, so I thought I would post a simple example.

For an inventory application I am currently developing, I needed a way to generate a barcode for products that were input into the system.

Fortunately Tore Darell has developed a super simple barcode library named Barby

I am still in the process of making my simple blog engine opensource. I just need to sort out some fundamental issues. One of these issues is how to address the storage of external assets, mainly images.

For a recent project I had to setup a remote Git repository that was going to be used by multiple contributors. I had a few issues with permissions that I had to work thorough, so I thought I would make a note of them in case anyone else has similar issues.

Recently I wanted to use RSpec to test if a javascript request to my controller was being redirect to the correct place. I was using page.redirect like so:

As I stated in my previous post I have just launched the redesign/redevelopment of my site.

Along with this change I am also using a new Virtual Machine Host called Linode I am sure you know of them from Rails Rumble

It has been along time since I have posted anything to this blog. Life has been hectic lately.

In my spare time I have been working on the new design for this site (using grid960 , which I highly recommend) and rolling my own simple blog system (using Rails 2) which I deployed today.

I have used a number of plugins to attach files to applications with Rails. These include file_upload (remember that) , acts_as_attachment and attachment_fu.

I came across a plugin called Paperclip a few months ago.

I know it has been a very very long time since I last posted. Quite a few things have been happening in my life the past 4 months. But I will not bore you with the details :)

I have been working on a few sites lately. The latest project which has just been made live is Arabibay.com

As I mentioned earlier, when working with attachment_fu and image science the width and height of thumbnails were not being set correctly. So here is a method that I use to make sure that the data is set.

As I mentioned in my previous post I am going to outline my experiences with attachment_fu. I will try to extend the brilliant tutorial that first introduced me to attachment_fu and to ImageScience.

I was very excited when I read this excellent blog post by Mike Clark, detailing how to use attachment_fu. Even more interesting was that I did not have to use RMagick anymore. I could not quite get it working correctly for me, not to mention the reported memory leaks and CPU cycles it takes up.

I wanted to make an autocomplete text field on a edit form that listed all of the tags that are already entered in the system. It is quite simple, but I thought I would share it to save some time for someone. Of course we are using acts_as_taggable

For a project at work, I needed to integrate our website with another web application. The web application in question also had their own built in user management system. For seamless integration we wanted our users to only have to log in once.

I recently (well about a month ago!) read a very good post that informs you how to add your delicious links to your rails app.

As I stated earlier, I just bought a new laptop and installed Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) on it. All was working apart from the wireless connection. The Laptop comes with a Atheros wireless card. Ubuntu also comes installed with madwifi drivers for the card. So in theory things should just work, right ?

So I bought a 17 inch Zoostorm laptop from PCNextday . It got 5 stars out of 5 from Computer Shopper and it worked out about £200 cheaper the a 17″ Dell laptop.

I wanted to get my dual monitor setup working at work. I have the latest veresion of Ubuntu (6.06 LTS – the Dapper Drake).

I have just got home from two very exciting days at the rubyconf conference in London. Here are a few observations and just a few things I have learnt.

I am really excited that I am going to RailsConf in London! Its going to be my first tech conference :)

In my last post I said that I was using acts_as_ferret. However I was finding it difficult to create an index for a certain section of the site. I think this was due to me having null fields some of the database fields. I could nt change this.

I started using the acts_as_ferret plugin for ruby on rails today. I was having a problem with the site not getting indexed – After putting the acts_as_ferret in the desired models, I searched for words that I knew existed and i was not getting any responses.

I have come accross a bug if you are using acts_as_taggable and acts_as_versioned on the same model. For some reason acts_as_taggable triggers a new version to be stored in the version history. So it stores two identical versions every time. As soon as you turn off the tagging it works.

As part of my Rails project I needed to tag items in Chinese and in English. For obvious reasons I wanted to use the acts_as_taggable plugin (not the gem). I really like the way it works. It is very clean and elegant solution for tagging.

Hi again,

I found myself needing a WYSIWYG editor for the rails app I am developing. I thought FCKeditor is great. I installed it by following these instructions

Hi,

I have made a lot of progress with Ruby on Rails. I have to say that I have taken a real liking to this framework. I have to applaud the Rails team and community.

Well my head has been in RoR for about 4 days. I have to say I have found it quite difficult to learn. I think that is because I have been relying on tutorials and wiki entries. I think if I would have read the rails book things would be alot easier (but slower ?). I have not got to grips with it fully. I am still trying my best to learn some of the inner workings.

Although you may have gathered I am looking into Python frameworks. I have just been asked at work, if we can use Ruby on Rails as a platform to develop a pilot project we are developing. (I can’t give any details, just to say that it will be a bilingual site :)

I have just been reading a very interesting forum post concerning Python Frameworks. It has a number of views from different python camps.

Hi.

I have read a very interesting post about the Pylons framework here. It is done by one of its creators. The analysis is very detailed. But the analysis confirms my initial concerns that Pylons is not really there yet, but they are going in the right direction, especially with support for Paste

I have been recently thinking about Rapid Application Development (RAD) web frameworks.