FCKeditor Plugin 0.5.0

Jun 042008

I created a new release for the fckeditor plugin today. It upgrades the version of the editor to the lastest 2.6 and also fixes the SanitizeHelper include issue which was causing problems with the spell check.

Other than that, little has changed. I think it is all still working ok, although I have only had time to complete a cursory check on the editor’s functionality.

The plugin is available from Ruby Forge or by doing this:

ruby script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org//var/svn/fckeditorp/trunk/fckeditor

Twitter API: User IDs

May 292008

So, next lesson from TweetLists: the user id given in the xml from the public timeline is not a unique identifier. The screen name is the only way to identify a user. I ended up with 17 different ids for one user!!! Hence, gave up fixed it and dropped the database – too much effort to fix when its only been running for 12 hours.

TweetLists

May 292008

I released TweetLists last night, well actually this morning (about 3am), the idea being to try and capture a little of the zeitgeist on Twitter by aggregating the links people are talking about. At the moment there are 3 lists, the live feed, a popular feed (the links ordered by the number of times they appeared) and one I have chosen to call Twitterati (quite proud of that!) which is the links ordered by the number of followers people have.

At the moment there is no time aspect to the Twitterati or Popular lists (not relevant on the live one) but I guess I will make them for the last 7 days?

Lesson one form this has been: don’t try and be clever with your scheduling – cron just works. I tried to use the Rufus Scheduler and it had stopped running by the time I got up again this morning.

Anyhoo, I’ve found it to be fun and interesting so far, any ideas for other lists?

Plugin of the Day – GemsOnRails

May 272008

So this plugin by Dr Nik Williams (no link available) does this:

Link or freeze RubyGems into your rails apps, instead of just plugins. This allows you to ‘vendor everything’ – pushing all dependent gems into your rails app thus ensuring your application will be guaranteed to work when deployed. Your application is no longer dependent on the gems that are/aren’t available on your target deployment environment.

I found this very useful, mainly because for some gems I want to see and maybe play with the code, usual I just copy the gem to lib. This provides a simple way of bringing in only one gem. I know there are features in 2.1 that deal with gem dependencies and do some cool stuff, but from what I know (from Ryan Bates) I don’t think they provide this particular functionality.

Its available on RubyForge. Or just by using the “sudo gem install gemsonrails” command.

Xkcd: GeoHashing and Stuff

May 262008

Just been flicking through the cartoons at xkcd.com again and came across this one which made me chuckle:

Also found the GeoHashing, Spontaneous Adventure Generator to be very interesting idea. Check it out.

Roger Waters

May 252008

So I went to see Roger Waters at the O2 last Monday and to be honest he was awesome. Played all of Dark Side of the Moon and most of the Wall. I took a fair few pictures but particularly liked this one which I thought I would share. Any guesses as to the song?

Cancer Research – Sponsorship

May 232008

Just a quick thing, on the off chance that anybody reading this has got a bit of value out of the FCKeditor plugin or from Ajax / Active Scaffold; and maybe thought of donating something (unlikely I know, its not all that!!) or saying thanks, here is the opportunity:

Sponsor my sister on something (Cancer Research) that means a lot to our family (for the why just read what my sister wrote):

Race For Life

Thanks for listening.

Fields_for and Multiple Checkboxes

May 232008

Found a bit of a gotcha when building a form recently using form_for, fields_for and the check_box helper. Because Rails adds a hidden field for each checkbox and fields_for for new objects produces ids like ‘users_invites__selected’, if you try to generate multiple new objects in the same form things can get a little confused. I found that when selecting a single checkbox things worked ok, but when selecting multiple the values would bleed across each other. I haven’t investigated this very far just switched to check_box_tag instead (no hidden field).

Actually just found this post mentioning that the checkboxes might be broken in Rails 2.0.2. Which could be the cause of the issue.

Firefox 3

May 232008

Just installed the new Firefox 3 RC1. Very cool. Seems to be very fast and stable. I had an instant and very positive reaction to it – mostly because there has been no visible slow down in the rest of the computer since I opened it (not something I could say about FF2). Well worth a play.

I like the default look and feel too, very clean. Good job guys.

SlimTimer

May 082008

So, for the past few months (although mostly in the past month, in fact mostly in a few days last month) I have been working with Richard White on one of his projects SlimTimer. We have just released a new version which includes data exports, backups and premium subscriptions. As Richard points out in his post there are in fact 2 new people to join the SlimTimer team, myself and Daniel Beardsley.

The most interesting thing about the new subscription model is that, like Radiohead’s In Rainbows, you get to decide how much your subscription should be. The system will make a recommendation of a price dependent on your usage – its up to you whether you accept that price or lower it, or even up it!!!

Has to be said PayPal made it far more complicated than it needed to be to add the subscription feature. NOT, I must add from a technical perspective, but from the shear volume of documentation and some quite convoluted navigation on their developer site. I will post how we did it soon(ish).

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