alan christopher thomas » Development

no more personal blogging… feeds for development will be moved to http://alan.christopherthom.as feeds for business will be moved to http://alanchristopherthomas.com if i have any resources i want to put up for personal stuff, i’ll probably put them on http://churchatkansascity.com and tell people in person or send links.

For those who are subscribed to my blog, it will be moving soon (within the next couple days), and so will the feed urls, so you will probably need to resubscribe if your feed reader doesn’t account for it. http://alan.christopherthom.as will be dedicated solely to development/code. http://alanchristopherthomas.com will be my personal blog. http://[not sure yet].com will be dedicated [...]

You may wish to use a database to store your Merb sessions instead of using Merb’s default implementation. This requires only a simple modification of your config/init.rb file so DataMapper will map your sessions to a table in your application’s database. First, open your config/init.rb and change the session_store to datamapper instead of cookie. # # ==== [...]

We’ve discussed how to set up Merb, DataMapper, and RSpec nicely, but what if you’d like another layer of abstraction in your views to keep things clear and consistent? Enter Haml, a Ruby templating language that aims to “take your gross, ugly templates and replace them with veritable Haiku.” Be cautious when adding another layer of [...]

Often when new technologies are born, they gain momentum, and development drives them to push the barriers of what we previously thought possible. Whenever moving into uncharted territory, we take a risk and are bound to make some steps along the way that could have been done differently, perhaps a better way. We pick up [...]

This is an old video on Web 2.0 thought that does a good job expressing some of the reasons I like to write my code up to web standards.