Need to run a task frequently in the background? Starling and Workling is a killer combination for doing just that. See how in this episode.  More

This branch is open for all to contribute to directly.  More

While the next release of Rails appears to be coming up, there’s still plenty of small, useful features from previous releases that aren’t widely used.  More

This will be the first of several posts I'll create about the new time zone features in the upcoming Rails 2.1 release. In this post, I'll give an overview of the new features, by walking through the setup of...  More

When creating a patch for ActiveRecord you need to run the tests with different databases. (I learned this the hard way when I submitted a patch that worked perfectly in mysql and broke in every other database...  More

You can use profiling to determine where the performance bottlenecks are in specific Rails actions. Watch this episode for details.  More

SpiderTest is an automated integration-testing script that iterates over every page in your application. It performs a few valuable tasks for you:  More

we’re all gearing up for an ultra-portable internet where your data is not locked up in silos, but as free and careless as ringo starr. until that day comes along, coders will continue to scrape...  More

In the comment thread of a previous post on this site, Chris Taggart made an interesting criticism of my Facebooker Facebook API. It seems that, on a high level review of the code, he found it to be well-craft...  More

The story so far: If you’ve been reading along, you’ll have learned how to add maps, markers, and listeners, and it’s all been too easy: a few lines in a controller, a bit of modular reusable javascript,...  More

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Now let’s look at adding markers, special google navigation controls, onload functionality and then let’s refactor and add a little Rails DRYness.  More

As promised, here’s the first in a little series of mappa.rb usage tutorials for Ruby on Rails.  More

Here is a quick tutorial showing how to display markers on a Google map with the YM4R/GM plugin. We will also see how to use the Traffic functionnality of the YM4R gem, which connects to the Yahoo! Map Traffic...  More

Most online businesses need to receive payment. If you’re developing with Ruby, the standard for credit card authorization and capture is ActiveMerchant. ...  More

There is a lot of confusion over the myriad of services that PayPal offers for accepting PayPal payments. In reality there are two ways of accepting PayPal payments.  More

As of this writing, the rfacebook plugin does not seem to provide a way to handle uninstalls (easily). In this example, to handle uninstalls in your rails app we will use the post-remove URL of...  More

It’s a rails plugin, invoked via rake tasks. After installing the plugin and modifying a few lines in a config file, you can have your application backing up both its database and static files to Amazon S3...  More

ActiveMerchant is a very nice little Ruby library that permits connecting to payment processing gateways to charge money against credit cards. To understand how this works, you need to know that there are two...  More

Acunote, our pet rails application, often need to copy a bunch of ActiveRecord (AR) objects. As any other project management tools, our application works with tasks organized into iterations (sprints)....  More