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Tonight I’d like to talk about a project I’ve been working on in my spare time for the last few months. I’m super excited to see it coming together, and it’s nearly ready to go live. The application is called RateMyCourses - put simply, it’s a way for University students to explore, rate, and comment on courses they’ve done to...
When I’m working on a site, or analysing somebody else’s, I often wish that jQuery was loaded into that page - it’s an unbeatable tool for really digging into the site’s source to debug something or work out how something has been done. To help out with this, I’ve put together a quick bookmarket, similar to the more fun one...
Here at 3Months, we have a couple of monolithic projects that have been around for yonks - because of this, they don’t have bundler set up, and many of them have incomplete or out-of-date gem requirements. Yesterday I needed to get one of these projects set up locally for the first time, so I was kindly lent the output of...
I’m sure this has been done before, but after noticing 1-day’s ‘Look Busy’ feature, I just had to write a bookmarklet to load this up on any site! If you just want to try it out, here’s the link Look Busy Bookmarklet - either right-click on the link and ‘Copy URL’ and paste into a new bookmark, or drag to...
Recently I’ve rolled out a virtual machine host box to run headless VMs (headless means that there is no display, keyboard etc plugged into it), as these make great test and experiment machines for trying new things out. As part of this rollout, I mashed a couple of blogs and some documentation together and came up with this script: #!/bin/sh...
ActionMailer Interceptors are a great way to test the full stack of your mailing in Rails from the generation from data through to receiving the email in your client. They are similar to ActiveRecord’s before_x-type callbacks, and let you change something about the message being sent right before it’s actually dispatched. The most common purpose I use these for is...
Recently, I have been working on a web application that is quite media rich, and is expected to run into quite a bit of traffic. I’ve been working on building an API for a front end system, using JSON to handle passing this data back and forth. Obviously with this amount of traffic, and the size of some of the...
An inherent part of developing web applications is managing your datastores - typically, a relational database such as MySQL or PostgreSQL. Today, I’m going to quickly cover off how to backup and restore for both of these databases. What you’ll need Either PostgreSQL or MySQL Access to a database (preferably one with data in it) Why this is useful to...
I’ve just completed a Blog Broadcaster for this blog. It had a couple of interesting technical things, and I needed to test it properly, so here’s this post! I recently migrated this blog from Tumblr, and while Tumblr was pretty awesome and easy to use, it didn’t have great support for blocks of code and preformatted comment, and, like Radiant...
I was recently called upon to make a horrible select input for a Ruby on Rails project - essentially, there was this model, let’s call it a Snafu, and one Snafu could share an attachment to any number of models. This select was difficult because I couldn’t just have a selection of record ID’s - I would have to use...