http://duckpunching.com Ruby, Rails and tech. No ducks were harmed in the making of this blog. Mon, 12 Jan 2009 01:01:56 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en For anyone who has used cron before I am sure there have been occasions where you have buggered it up and run the task too few or too many times or at the completely wrong time. I know I have. Its not the cron is terribly hard its just sometimes ... http://duckpunching.com/timely-assistance-with-cron-intervals-using-cronos Hampton Catlin the creator of make_resourceful has let his thoughts on pagination known and in summary he is not a fan. Hence there is no DRY way to add pagination to m_r without overriding the defaults methods repeatedly. I am not so anti pagination and often find it mildly useful. But ... http://duckpunching.com/pagination-for-make_resourceful For a while I have sitting on this plugin called mocked_fixtures. I wrote most of it a few months ago and added a few things here and there but just hadn't got round to releasing it. Basically it loads your fixtures files as mock model objects with the values from the ... http://duckpunching.com/mocked_fixtures-reuse-fixtures-as-mocks-without-the-database Dev mojo After reading the great posts by Geoffrey "PeepCode" Grosenbach and Manfred Stienstra about using Phusion Passenger for development I had to give it a try. My doctor she'd never heard of mod_rails but gave me antibiotics for it just in case. After little bit of setup I can say I ... http://duckpunching.com/passenger-mod_rails-for-development-now-with-debugger When I create a plugin I set up the tests or specs to be able to run stand-alone, that is not inside Rails app. But when you want to try the plugin out inside a real app, it can help to be able run the specs against vendored version of ... http://duckpunching.com/run-plugin-specstests-with-gem-or-vendored-rails Now that GitHub has a gem server it allows the process of managing your own fork or customisation of a gem ridiculously easy. No need for your own gem server or shipping around gem files, just put it up on github and nominate it as a gem in the project ... http://duckpunching.com/ar_mailer-gem-forked-and-now-on-github My date_time_text_field_helpers plugin allows you to use text input fields for dates and times instead of the Rails standard select dropdowns. The plugin was up on Google Code but since I am mostly using git now, I just had to bring it over GitHub. Updates will only be pushed to git ... http://duckpunching.com/date_time_text_field_helpers-plugin-moved-to-github If you haven't seen it yet, Google has a project in its labs for the navigation of search results with keyboard shortcuts. Its great for geeks who love the keyboard. Well a reader at LifeHacker knocked out the search plugin for Firefox. I took that and tweaked it for the Australian ... http://duckpunching.com/google-by-keyboard-firefox-search-plugin-for-australia When writing Rails plugins I like to be able to test them as a stand-alone library rather than inside a specific Rails project. I find it more productive and it avoids clashes with other plugins. It also allows you to test it against multiple rails versions. One frustration I have had ... http://duckpunching.com/using-actionview-in-standalone-tests I have been using Geoffrey Grosenbach's calendar_helper plugin and needed a few changes. I am also using git for projects now and finding the submodule a workable strategy for plugins. So I imported it into git using git-svn and created a new project on GitHub. I plan to do some ... http://duckpunching.com/calendar_helper-plugin-forked