Pushrod
Old dogs, new tricks
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latest 15 posts
- ebay_shopping is now a gem (and now at github)
- Classic Car Events in Facebook
- the ebay shopping api and the new ebay affiliate scheme
- Doh
- Ebay items on Autopendium
- Rails 2.0 gotcha: count_from_query plugin
- Solving the live-search/slow mongrel process problem
- Ditch link_to_remote the unobtrusive way
- Facebook, hyperactive APIs and lightweight libraries
- Blatant plug for new ‘Modern Toss’ book
- When is a record really updated_at in Ruby on Rails (and the under-overlooked Observer class)?
- The how and why of my streamlined Rails Facebook library
- Rails, Ruby, Facebook and tests — my own itch scratched
Tuesday May 13th, 2008
ebay_shopping is now a gem (and now at github)
From Pushrod, 5 months ago,
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OK. I’ve jumped on the Git bandwagon, and to celebrate have made the ebay_shopping plugin (a ruby on rails library for eBay’s shopping API) into a gem, hosted at Github. It’ll take a few days before the rubyforge project is approved and loaded up, but you can still download it from github, or with a [...]
Saturday April 12th, 2008
Classic Car Events in Facebook
From Pushrod, 6 months ago,
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I’ve written elsewhere about how I used my own lightweight library to add Facebook functionality to Autopendium :Stuff About Old Cars, the classic car community website I run.
The library has made it fairly easy to keep up with Facebook’s many changes, and the Facebook app has been a good marketing tool for the site. But [...]
Friday April 4th, 2008
the ebay shopping api and the new ebay affiliate scheme
From Pushrod, 6 months ago,
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As you may have heard, started from April 1, eBay is phasing out its old affiliate schemes in favour of it’s own home-grown one.
I won’t go here into discussing the pros and cons of the change (for Autopendium, the classic car website I run, on balance it’s probably good, if only from an admin point [...]
Friday February 15th, 2008
Doh
From Pushrod, 7 months ago,
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Quick note to save someone a couple of hours of doing what I did, when I got an exception of “uninitialized constant Gem::CommandManager” when trying to freeze a gem for my rails project. Googling for the error led me to believe I’d got a problem with rubygems, so I tried everything in that area — [...]
Sunday January 13th, 2008
Ebay items on Autopendium
From Pushrod, 9 months ago,
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After the lightweight Facebook library I wrote to scratch my own itch, a couple of days ago I started to look at adding ebay items to Autopendium :: Stuff About Old Cars, the classic car website I run. Users were already shown books from Amazon, appropraite to the content being shown on the page, and [...]
Sunday December 30th, 2007
Rails 2.0 gotcha: count_from_query plugin
From Pushrod, 9 months ago,
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I’ve got a fairly comprehensive test suite for Autopendium :: Stuff About Old Cars, the classic car community site I run, which makes upgrades of the framework fairly stress-free.
By stress-free, however, I don’t mean trouble-free — there are going to be failing tests, and there are going to be problems. However, I’m fairly confident that [...]
Tuesday December 18th, 2007
Solving the live-search/slow mongrel process problem
From Pushrod, 9 months ago,
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I’ve been using the excellent nginx ever since I put Autopendium :: Stuff about old cars, the classic car community website I run, into production.
Now there’s another reason for using it, a sensible balancer that delivers requests only to those mongrels that aren’t busy. However, as Ezra Zygmuntowicz (whose post first put me on to [...]
Wednesday December 12th, 2007
Ditch link_to_remote the unobtrusive way
From Pushrod, 10 months ago,
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So, Rails 2.0 is out, but the somewhat dubious link_to_remote and other javascript helpers are still there, and haven’t been removed into a plugin, as I think was suggested at one point.
I think that’s a bit of a shame, as it encourages some fairly nasty practices, from filling your code with a series of links [...]
Wednesday November 21st, 2007
Facebook, hyperactive APIs and lightweight libraries
From Pushrod, 10 months ago,
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Probably the single biggest annoyances with writing (and running) a Facebook app is the remorseless changing of the API, to the extent that you begin to wonder sometimes whether it’s worth it.
For those who’ve not yet made the plunge, we’re not talking about minor tweaks, or once-in-a blue-moon essential maintainence that’s introduced over several months.
Oh [...]
Saturday November 10th, 2007
Blatant plug for new ‘Modern Toss’ book
From Pushrod, 11 months ago,
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An old mate of mine, Mick Bunnage, is one half of the team behind Modern Toss. That would probably be enough for me to give their new book, Work, a plug.
However, it’s also bladder-loosening funny, and definitely NSFW (as much due to the seditious message as the language, though that’s pretty fruity, and all the [...]
Friday November 9th, 2007
When is a record really updated_at in Ruby on Rails (and the under-overlooked Observer class)?
From Pushrod, 11 months ago,
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Here’s one. When is an item ‘updated’? Well, if you’re using Ruby on Rails, and its automatic timestamps (in particular, updated_at) it’s whenever you save that object. Which is great. One less thing to think about.
However, in the real world, it’s a little more complicated. Take someone’s house. Sure, it changes when the owner changes [...]
Wednesday August 15th, 2007
The how and why of my streamlined Rails Facebook library
From Pushrod, 1 year ago,
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As I wrote in my previous post (Rails, Ruby, Facebook and tests — my own itch scratched), I needed a Facebook library for Autopendium :: Stuff about old cars, the classic car community site we built on Ruby on Rails, but couldn’t get to grips with the existing library as there were no tests and [...]
Tuesday August 14th, 2007
Rails, Ruby, Facebook and tests — my own itch scratched
From Pushrod, 1 year ago,
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So I wanted to add a Facebook interface to Autopendium :: Stuff about old cars, the classic car community website that I’ve recently launched (that’s written using Ruby on Rails)
First thought, there must be a Ruby library for Facebook of some sort, probably even a Rails plugin — and there is. But almost from the [...]