Ruby on Rails 18

Tags: Archive, Design, Features, Gems, Troubleshooting, Web Services

Tracking your AWS costs

Write yourself a daily, weekly, or monthly report with your AWS costs broken down more granularly than AWS’ monthly invoice. Read more »

Minimum Viable Test Suite

Ensure your test suite doesn’t have any important holes in coverage by enforcing a simple rule. Read more »

Loading Buttons

Converting action buttons into loading buttons is a common way for AJAX applications indicate that it’s waiting on the server to verify an action and respond. Read more »

Progress Bars

How to create a progress bar using Ruby on Rails, AJAX, and Twitter Bootstrap. Read more »

f.label and errors.full_messages

Why you should never use the explicit “content” parameter of label_tag or the form builder’s label method. Read more »

Time Zones and datetime_select

A simple fix for using datetime_select and time_zone_select together. Read more »

views/mailers directory

Avoid cluttering up app/views by moving mailer directories underneath a single parent. Read more »

Mailing Lists

Mailing lists remain an effective way for groups to communicate. We’ll explore how to implement them in your Rails application to improve its overall user-experience. Read more »

Mailing Lists - Email Digests

Instead of emailing users on every action, combine all notifications over a certain period of time into a single email. Read more »

Mailing Lists - Unsubscribe

This article builds on top of the Mailing Lists functionality. If you’re sending emails then you should always allow recipients to opt-out, and many countries have written the practice into law. Read more »

Mailing Lists - Web Archives

Allow users to view all of the mailing list's communications through a web interface. Read more »

Beware ActiveRecord callbacks

ActiveRecord is a fantastically well-made ORM that makes working with databases a breeze, but one feature in the callback structure is incredibly bug-prone. Read more »

Infinite Scrolling with AJAX

Ruby on Rails and jQuery team up to allow your visitors to scroll through all your content without initially loading them all. Read more »

Finding Your Most Active Users

Google Analytics is normally used to track a website’s visitors and pageviews, but it can also track specific users, which can be invaluable information as you develop your customer base. Who is the most active? What are they using? Whose usage is fading? Read more »

Ajax Toggle Buttons

How to create toggle buttons using Ruby on Rails, ajax, and unobtrusive javascript. Straight-forward and boring, just how I like it. Read more »

Browsing Files & Directories in S3

Amazon’s S3 makes storing files easy but viewing directories isn’t intuitive. Let me explain how you can emulate a file structure using Plain-Old-Ruby-Objects. Read more »