Ruby

April 11, 2009

RackDAV - Web Authoring for Rack

RackDAV is Handler for Rack, which allows content authoring over HTTP. RackDAV brings its own file backend, but other backends are possible by subclassing RackDAV::Resource.

December 29, 2008

Viewing RI in a web browser

I’m a big fan of the Firefox keyword search. For example I have keywords for LEO, Wikipedia and Man pages. Sometimes I want to look up API documentation in Ruby and typing ri camelize into the address bar and viewing the documentation as web page seems to be quite natural for me. So I wrote a quick and dirty cgi, which calls RI and outputs HTML.

December 28, 2008

Kontrol - a micro framework

Kontrol is a small web framework written in Ruby, which runs directly on Rack. It provides a simple pattern matching algorithm for routing and uses GitStore as data storage.

December 26, 2008

Git Store - using Git as versioned data store in Ruby

GitStore is a small Ruby library, providing an easy interface to the version control system Git. It aims to use Git as a versioned data store much like the well known PStore. Basically GitStore checks out the repository into a in-memory representation, which can be modified and finally committed. In this way your data is stored in a folder structure and can be checked out and examined, but the application may access the data in a convenient hash-like way. This library is based on Grit, the main technology behind GitHub.

September 13, 2008

Quick Guide for Passenger on Ubuntu Hardy

This is a short guide for installing Phusion Passenger on Ubuntu Hardy. This includes the installation of Ruby 1.8.6, Apache 2.2.8, MySQL 5.0.51a, Git 1.5.4 and Rails 2.1.1.

September 5, 2008

Shinmun, a small and beautiful blog engine

Shinmun is a minimalist blog engine. You just write posts as text files, render them to static files and push your blog to your server.

May 10, 2007

Google-like Search Results Helper

Representing your search results in a user-friendly way is a common task among web developers. Google’s approach is dead simple but really effective. The matching text is highlighted and shown with its context. This can be implemented in less than 20 lines of code which you can include into you helper:

April 18, 2007

DRY Up Your Url Helpers

This tutorial shows you how to simplify url generation in combination with RESTful resources by extending the url_for helper. This approach will also work with nested routes and other helpers like form_tag and link_to.

April 10, 2007

Pretty RESTful URLs in Rails

Since Release 1.2 Rails knows to generate RESTful routes. Each resource is identified by an URI, which looks like /users/123 . It would be nice to have more readable URLs, which include the name of the user: /users/matthias-georgi. This is a short tutorial on making your urls pretty while retaining the REST approach.

April 8, 2007

Building a del.ico.us and flickr sidebar in 5 minutes

You need a del.icio.us sidebar which shows recent bookmarks or one of these nice flickr badges? This is really is easy as the Typo Weblog Engine already includes an flickr and del.icio.us aggregator.

April 4, 2007

Fast Auto-completion with Rails, Scriptaculous and JSON

Inspired by the excellent Rails Recipes book , I created an improved Auto-completion helper, which uses JSON and AJAX instead of a script tag for loading the completions. What we want to achieve is a search field, which pops up immediately, showing us a list of possible completions for our search word. Look at Google Suggest to get an idea.

April 2, 2007

Rendering markaby in your helpers

Generating markup in your rails helpers is a general practice in rails and is used throughout all rails helpers. Normally you use content_tag to generate markup. But often you will encounter situations, where nested tags force you to write ugly helper code like the following helper method from the rails library: