Well, another RailsConf event has come and gone, and I wasn’t there, damn it! Too bad, Austin is the only civilized city in Texas, and it’s pretty close to my location, but no luck. The usual restraints – time and money. Once again, I’m so glad I went to the first Rails conference in 2006 in Chicago on my own nickel. I think most of the people that attended RailsConf 2006 did the same. The event was held over the weekend, because none of us could justify a couple of days from our day jobs, which at the time was largely not Rails development. Probably the only people making money… Read More
Continue ReadingRandomize Web Images with JavaScript
This is documented in many other places on the Internet, but it can’t hurt to have too many tutorials. You can jazz up your web site with a bit of JavaScript to randomly insert images on your page. I’m doing this on my masthead, as one example. The first requirement is to build a list of images: Then write the code to select one at random: Finally, you need to set up the HTML to hold the image: The name=’myPic’ relates to the JS “document.myPic.src” declaration. The id=’frontphoto’ definition in the <img> tag is the CSS magic that sizes the image. And the ‘images/bg.gif’ is a placeholder image that gets… Read More
Continue ReadingDe-clutter Your Rails Views, Use Partials For JavaScript SEO
If your Marketing or SEO guy is out of control (and when are they not?), you may be finding yourself stuffing insane amounts of JavaScript into your Rails views in order to track page referrals, conversion rates and other Google or Yahoo SEO analytic data. Not good from an esthetic standpoint. The solution is to use partials to partition the JavaScript SEO stuff off into a corner. Plus, it’s easier to reuse. Say you need to add some JS optimization code that looks like this: Just create a _google_opt_file1.html.erb file under app/views/shared and then call it in your view with This kind of SEO script typically goes right before the… Read More
Continue ReadingIE 8 Compatibility View
As a UNIX / Linux bigot, I don’t use Internet Explorer much. As a web developer, I need to test as many browsers as possible. The matrix for all the possible browser / version combinations is pretty daunting already, and adding the IE 8 compatibility view to the mix doesn’t help. If your customer complains of hosed web pages, check the configuration under Tools -> Compatibility View Settings, and have him / her turn off all the check boxes at the bottom of the form. References: Microsoft Blog Microsoft IE 8 Features Wikipedia
Continue ReadingRails Time Extension Edge Case
I love the extensions that Rails has for the Ruby Time object (see ActiveSupport::CoreExtensions::Integer::Time) – you can do calculations like Time.now + 1.month, (4.months + 5.years).from_now, and other cool things. In my last post, I mentioned working with an application that uses a subscription service. One of the things I want to do is send the subscriber an e-mail when the current subscription is about to expire. (I am not comfortable with the concept of auto-renewal; customers should have the right to “opt in” on the continuation of a subscription. Just personal preference.) So I set up a cron job that tests subscription expiration dates. Here’s the one that checks… Read More
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